Injured animals find help in Elburn
By BRENDA SCHORY - Shaw Suburban Media
ELBURN – A tiny cottontail, eyes closed and small as a field mouse, sucked at the tip of a syringe of baby bunny formula.
Nearby in the bird room, tiny cheeping nestlings lay in incubators kept at 90 degrees.
Baby robins, sparrows and starlings with new feathers sprouted in uneven tufts raised their wide mouths to call for food.
An ink-black shorebird, smaller than an Easter Peep, huddled in a tiny box lined with fluff.
Be it feathered, furred or scaled, orphaned or injured animals find their way to the Fox Valley Wildlife Center. Located in an old ranger’s house in the Elburn Forest Preserve, the effort to nurture and heal wildlife to be released into the wild is in its eighth year.
In 2008, the center cared for more than 1,300 animals.
Board president Andrea Krueger, who is among the 30 or so volunteers who regularly will help care for the animals, said the work is rewarding – even as it is hard and intense.
“We like to give everything another chance,” said Krueger, of St. Charles. “The majority of them come to us because of humans in some way, by dog attacks or cars hitting them. We always need more volunteers. It’s exhausting work.”
Something always needs feeding or cleaning.
There was Jeannette Morris of Maple Park, feeding a mixture of dog food smushed with boiled eggs to young robins on the cusp of fledging – better known as leaving the nest.
After feeding two tiny bunnies, staff member Amanda Mirabella and director Laura Mikkelson did what mother animals do: They rubbed the animals’ bottoms with Q-Tips to stimulate urination and defecation.
It was the same in the raccoon room where Julie Testa of St. Charles was feeding a baby raccoon a bottle.
As the raccoon, just bigger than a Beanie Baby, guzzled its bottle, the rest of the babies put up a squealing protest to hurry up their turn.
Outside, groupings of various pens enable the animals to transition to release. Raccoons learn to climb, birds learn to fly and swim, squirrels learn to crack nuts.
The center operates on a budget of just under $79,000, with a director and a staff of two.
It is a private nonprofit that operates on donations and grants, such as $7,500 from the DuPage Wildlife Foundation to buy incubators, Krueger said.
The next phase of development for the center is a new building to be used as a hospital, larger and more conducive to animal treatment and recovery, Krueger said, but that is a long-range plan.
Though the goal is to get every animal released, sometimes it does not happen.
One that did not want to leave is Lucy, a Canada goose that now lives at the center.
“When volunteers come in, if they don’t bend down and say ‘Hi Lucy,’ she’ll peck at their shoe laces or pants,” Krueger said.
Lucy is an example of how not to treat wildlife. Lucy was raised by a little girl and slept in the bed with her until she was too big, Krueger said.
“She came to us as a gosling,” Krueger said. “We tried to make her wild, but she was different ... When we tried to release her, she played in the river. And when we turned around to leave, she got out and chased us honking, ‘Don’t leave me!’”
Other permanent residents are a rock dove named Tony, rescued from cock-fighting in which he was pumped up with steroids and used as bait; an elderly blind raccoon; a coyote named Yote; and a year-old female deer they call The Yearling.
“She was raised by somebody, because she has no fear of people and never learned to forage,” Krueger said.
The Yearling is now foster mother to other fawns as they await release into the wild.
“We don’t name them, that makes it too personal,” Krueger said. “We are raising them to release them. The ones that cannot be released, we give names to and use them for education.”
