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Rescuing wildlife, from here to the Gulf
Published: Monday, July 12, 2010 at 4:03 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, July 12, 2010 at 4:03 a.m.
Serious guardians of wildlife, people like ex-preschool teacher Doris Duncan, would prefer never to touch, cage, feed or meddle in a wild animal's affairs.
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Wildlife Rescue Executive Director Doris Duncan examines a baby raccoon for disease after it was received by the center near the county dump on Meecham Road.
JOHN BURGESS/ PDBut when a pelican is hopelessly coated with oil, or someone discovers a pair of starving and orphaned young bobcats, or a juvenile pygmy owl stands in the middle of a country road, Duncan can't simply let nature take its course.
At the bustling Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue that she manages on a county-owned hilltop ranch across Meachan Road from the county landfill, Duncan, 49, said many injured, sick or orphaned wildlife in this area would be euthanized if the center didn't exist.
"So this is a good place," she said. She's back at the center after her second stint at one of the nation's worse natural disasters, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
As a technician trained by the Fairfield-based International Bird Rescue Research Center, Duncan was assigned to a wildlife operation in Venice, La. She donned a protective suit and scrubbed the oil from nearly 300 pelicans and other seabirds.
"I felt so sorry for those birds," she said. "Some of them had to wait so long before we could clean them."
But all the oiled birds that came in during the month she was there did get their turn in the basin. Once they were thoroughly shampooed they went into crates for transfer to safer waters.
"You almost wish you could just open the pens and let them fly," Duncan said. But nobody in Louisiana wanted to see the rescued and cleaned birds return to the oil, so they were flown to Texas and released there.
As heartbreaking as the spill and its impacts on wildlife and the environment are, Duncan found it helped to focus on the rescue efforts and the innovative training and techniques that make possible such an efficient, large-scale effort to save oiled birds.
"I felt actually a lot of hope," she said.
Being hopeful is part of her natural state. Rather than fixate on the great numbers of birds and mammals killed or maimed on the roads or in other encounters with humans, she focuses on the more than 600 distressed animals successfully treated at the wildlife center so far this year.
The center's five employees and more than 90 active volunteers have taken in an otter, several bobcats and coyotes and lots of birds, raccoons, possums, rabbits, foxes, squirrels, skunks and bats.
"They will all go back to the wild, every one of them," said Duncan.
It's rare that Wildlife Rescue admits an animal that is too disabled or socialized to be released, but is has happened. The center's largest residents are Kyla and Kuma, the orphaned mountain lion siblings that were badly injured by poachers when they were cubs.
The pair occupy the largest of the spacious enclosures that Duncan and her staff and volunteers erected on the 131-acre property with help from local contractors, service members from the Coast Guard and National Guard, building supply firms and other community benefactors.
The rescue-and-rehabilitation operation gets by on about $210,000 a year and creates or improves facilities when the necessary money or donated materials and labor are available. Right now, Duncan is on watch for help finishing a new bobcat enclosure.
"It's like all of these angels have come here" to pitch in with the mission, she said. The unfinished bobcat area "is just waiting for the right angel to come."
The center doesn't charge for rescuing animals. It raises operating funds through memberships and donations, and it brings in about $70,000 in annual income with a side business.
The Wildlife Exclusion Service helps people, for a fee, to evict unwanted houseguests such as raccoons living down in the crawl space or squirrels that have made a home between the ceiling and roof.
"We're getting a lot of foxes under decks this year," Duncan said.
"The money we make from that goes right to our nonprofit work," she said. The eviction service makes creative use of a secret weapon: mountain lion poop from Kyla and Kuma. A bit strategically placed at a home often can persuade raccoons or other unwanted wildlife guests to move on.
"Eighty percent of the time, it works," Duncan said.
She loves her work and she's grateful to the person who led her to it. Her daughter, Danielle Mattos, announced at age 8 that she wanted to volunteer with animals and become a wildlife specialist.
Mattos began working with Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue 13 years ago, and her mother decided then to check it out, too. Mattos is now 21 and chief of animal care at the center Duncan directs.
"It doesn't even feel like a job," Duncan said.
For these mother and daughter wildlife rescuers, the work is second-nature.
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