A young woman clutches a confused-looking sharp-shinned hawk to her chest. The bird stares with wide-eyed apprehension as another human approaches with a stethoscope, the chest piece of which is size of the bird’s head.
Edmonton veterinarian Kelti Katchur touches the stethoscope to the bird’s chest and back. She reports wheezing — could be a sign of a damaged trachea. She tells the woman to prepare the bird for an X-ray and gets ready for her next patient.
Katchur is one of the roughly 11 staff and 150-odd volunteers that work at WILDNorth’s wildlife hospital in north Edmonton. If someone finds an injured wild animal in St. Albert, this is where they can take it to get help.
Healing human harms
Helping to rescue, treat, and release those animals is wildlife technician Jade Murphy, who has worked for WILDNorth for eight years. She grew up in St. Albert camping, catching frogs, and learning about the outdoors from her grandfather, the renowned forestry professor Peter Murphy.
“I love animals and I love nature,” she said.
“As humans, since we’ve impacted our environment and animals so much, I feel a moral responsibility to counteract that.”
Established in 1989 as the Wildlife Rehabilitation Society of Edmonton, WILDNorth is the main wildlife rescue and rehabilitation service in northern Alberta. The group treats and (since 2017) rescues injured wildlife from the Edmonton region.
WILDNorth typically takes in about 3,500 animals a year, up from 1,500 animals in 2017, said executive director Dale Gienow. They are getting a lot of calls about baby squirrels and rooftop geese right now, and will likely have to host hundreds of orphaned ducklings later this summer.
Murphy said about 80 per cent of their patients are birds, as injured mammals tend to stay out of sight. They are not allowed to take in coyotes, adult ungulates, or large carnivores.
About 80 per cent of the injuries seen at WILDNorth are human-related, Murphy said: window strikes, roaming pets, and poisonings, to name a few.
“These [injuries] are directly due to our presence and our infrastructure,” she said, which gives us an obligation to treat them.
On call
WILDNorth gets about 13,500 calls to its hotline a year from people concerned about injured wildlife, Gienow said. About six per cent of those calls are from St. Albert.
Staff and volunteers first talk to callers to get as much information about an injured animal as possible, Murphy said. In many cases, the best course of action is to leave the animal alone.
WILDNorth gets a lot of calls about “abandoned” baby hares, for example. Mother hares have strong scents and will intentionally stash their scentless babies in shrubs, fields, and other open areas for safety between feedings, Murphy explained. “Rescuing” these babies is more like kidnapping them, and will likely cause them to die from stress.
Others will call in about skunks that have set up shop under sheds and ask if they can remove them.
“It’s never a good idea to relocate an animal, especially not in the springtime,” Murphy said — move a skunk in spring, and you’ll likely get orphaned baby skunks stomping about days later.
WILDNorth gets calls pretty much every day during the spring about Canada geese nesting several stories off the ground, Murphy said. These nests look dangerous, but are usually safe; goslings can shrug off three-storey drops, and the height protects them from predators. It’s also against federal law to disturb a nesting migratory bird.
St. Albert residents may start seeing bedraggled-looking birds flopping on the ground later this spring. Murphy said those will likely be fledglings that have just left the nest. Leave them alone, especially if their parents are nearby shouting at you.
Rescue efforts
If hotline managers determine an animal does need help, WILDNorth’s rescue crews spring into action.
Some rescues require specialized equipment such as boats, net launchers, or laser-triggered traps, Gienow said. Some, such as those ducklings that keep hatching in the courtyard at St. Albert’s Chateau Mission Court, happen year after year.
“I might be 60 feet up in a tree with a nesting falcon. I might be down in a catch basin scooping up ducklings that have fallen in a sewer,” he said.
Gienow said one of his more memorable rescues happened a few years ago when he and his crew had to retrieve an injured pelican from an island. They had to step around the hundreds of baby gulls on the island as they did so, all whilst being attacked by screaming, swooping, and pooping adult gulls.
“It wasn’t a very pleasant day for us,” he said.
Murphy said staff diagnose an animal’s condition on arrival, which can involve feeling for broken bones, looking for bleeding, and doing blood, pupil response, and X-ray tests. They also get as much information about the animal’s circumstances from human witnesses, as they can’t ask the animal. With about 150 different species coming through the hospital’s doors in any year, proper diagnosis gets complicated — a dire white blood cell count in one animal might be perfectly normal for another.
Kachur said most of the animals she treats at WILDNorth suffer from physical trauma. This can include head injuries or broken bones from window strikes, burns from flare stacks, and wounds from cats. Treatment involves medicine, surgery, and rest, just like any other animal.
Patients spend their time recovering in dark, covered cages in the back of the hospital. (Great West Media, which prints the Gazette, recently started providing newsprint to line those cages.) Murphy said staff and volunteers keep their contact with the animals to a minimum to preserve their wild natures.
Volunteers track each patient’s status and diet on large whiteboards. (The diets include fruit, vegetables, quail, mice, and bark butter, Murphy noted.) Some patients later move to a larger rehabilitation centre in Parkland County, where they can swim in pools and flap about in flight pens. Recovery times range from a few days to a full year.
Life and death
Most patients at WILDNorth arrive with grave injuries, and some die on the way to the hospital, Gienow said. About half the animals they take in survive. Even if an animal is beyond saving, staff at the hospital can still provide them with compassionate euthanasia.
While the deaths are heartbreaking, Murphy said she tries to focus on the success stories. Staff took in a great grey owl earlier this month that had flown into a car, for example, and were able to release it in Lac Ste. Anne County a week later.
“I was able to waft him into the air and he flew off into the forest,” Murphy said.
“Makes it all worthwhile.”
Questions on injured wildlife should go to the WILDNorth wildlife hotline at 780-914-4118.
