Wildlife Center of Virginia Blog

Sometime in May of 2010, I began feeding a group of small feral kittens in my yard. They waited on my porch to eat every morning, and again before dark. I tied string to various toys and threw them into the yard, pulling it back slowly, playing with them. I couldn't touch the kittens - they would run if I got close. Months went by …

Ask me a year ago what I thought of snakes, or even just mention the word “snake”, and I would recoil and tell you how much I hated them! I’m happy to say a lot has changed in a year; education, exposure, and a few different one-on-one experiences worked to change my deeply-rooted hatred of snakes.

I can still picture myself last summer, sitting in the education office of an aquarium in North Carolina, perusing the pictures and stories of education animals on the Wildlife Center of Virginia’s website. After my Education Intern experience at the Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores, I was positive that my place in this wonderful world of wildlife was in conservation education.

I became a wildlife rehabilitation extern to learn new skills about handling and caring for wildlife. I was a pre-veterinary student still trying to figure out which field of veterinary medicine was for me. I thought wildlife rehabilitation would be a nice break from the routine cat and dog appointments that I’ve been seeing for the past three years while working at small-animal veterinary clinics.