Keeping Them Wild at CWC

A group of young patients in the small nonprofit hospital are participating in a special program. The director says they’re very intelligent and must be mentally stimulated or they won’t do well once released. So hospital aides present them with challenges, making them work for their food, for example. That may sound harsh until you realize that the patients are five-week-old ravens, orphaned and cared for at the California Wildlife Center in the Santa Monica Mountains in Calabasas.   The ravens are standing and hopping atop a cage next to other corvids (members of the crow family) in the animal hospital’s area for babies. Other, tinier patients are in small enclosures set on shelves and covered with towels, so that the animals can sleep or eat undisturbed. But a volunteer quietly reveals a few’three baby possums curled up together in a tissue box, a hummingbird which needs to be fed every 30 minutes, a kingbird whose damaged wings had to be pinned, and one bird so small that it has no feathers and seems to be all beak. Most are recovering well, which means they’ll leave the center and be released back into the wild.   The hospital and a series of small structures and enclosures, including an old ranger station, sit on three acres of state park land. Since it opened here in 1998, CWC has treated more than 25,000 sick, injured and orphaned animals’including coyotes, deer, raptors (like hawks), songbirds, squirrels, opossums, skunks, bobcats, bats and, once, a bear, found in cities from Santa Barbara to Inglewood.   Executive Director Cynthia Reyes estimates that about 75 percent of the animals brought in for rehabilitation are there because of human interference. Animals can be hit by cars, get tangled in fishing line or knocked out of their nests by tree trimming during the baby season (animal lovers should trim in the wintertime). Others, more deliberately, are shot by pellet or BB guns. Even well-intentioned humans can pose a threat. Orphaned animals are often ‘kidnapped’ by people who mistakenly assume they’ve been abandoned.   ’Birds learn to fly from the ground up,’ says Victoria Harris, CWC board president, offering one example. ‘There’s a four- to seven-day period when they’re on the ground and so long are there are no obvious injuries, it’s best to let the parents continue to feed them and teach them.’   ’If you find a wild animal on the ground, before you do anything, call someone,’ suggests Reyes. ‘Before you pick it up, before you take it home, before you try and help it and feed it things that eventually could kill it, call someone who can give you some advice. Because once you’ve interacted with that animal and removed it from its natural environment, who knows if you’ll ever be able to successfully get it back there.’   Dr. Duane Tom, the center’s director of animal care, serves as general practitioner, orthopedic surgeon, pediatrician, infectious disease specialist and even dentist for a host of species. In addition to overseeing the dozens of orphaned birds and mammals currently receiving supportive care, Tom has recently performed surgeries on a Cooper’s hawk with a hard-to-reach broken bone (used for spreading his wings), a raven with a right radial ulnar fracture and a possum with a fractured jaw.   Tom shows a visitor another Cooper’s hawk in recovery. Several of the raptor’s small, broad feathers were damaged and Tom attached donor feathers onto its wings in a process called imping. Toothpicks, serving as splints, were inserted into the shafts of the damaged feathers so that the donor feathers could be attached. In time, the borrowed feathers will molt and new ones will grow.   Post-surgery and recovery, animals are moved down the hill to large outdoor ‘conditioning’ enclosures ‘to build up those muscles that they need to survive in the wild,’ Reyes says. ‘If we’ve been in a hospital bed for two weeks, we don’t necessarily have the stamina to be able to run five miles. These guys are the same way, but they need to be able to do that from the minute they leave us. Once they’re out in the wild, they have to be able to run a marathon if they need to.’   Three groups of baby skunks are housed in adjacent enclosures. Each cage has what looks like a very large version of a hamster wheel, and two skunks are running circles in them. Imi, a volunteer in scrubs, quietly drops ‘surprise bags’ into each enclosure. The bags are a game of mental stimulation, or enrichment, like the program for the baby ravens. Inside are mice, mealworms and other grub. The skunks have to figure out how to get the treats out of the rolled-up paper grocery bag.   One thing that volunteers must realize is that the goal is release’CWC is not a wildlife sanctuary’and the animals need to retain a healthy fear of people. The small possum that came in with a fractured jaw required a dental bridge. ‘Possums’ teeth pretty much fill their entire jawbone, so you can’t place pins in there,’ Tom says. ‘So what we had to do is tie all his teeth together and cap them to mobilize the jaw.’   When one visitor gets up close to the possum, cooing and baby talking as if it were a puppy, Harris steps in.   ’Don’t do that,’ she says. ‘That’s the first thing we have to tell volunteers in baby care. Don’t talk to the animals. We’re predators.’ Some animals can suffer a stress reaction called capture myopathy, which can be fatal, simply from being held and petted. A fawn at CWC, suffering from the syndrome after being stuck in a fence, is monitored via video camera to severely limit human contact. It will be another week before Tom knows whether the deer is going to survive. ‘Sometimes people see a fawn or a rabbit where they think it doesn’t belong and they try to catch it to take it outside the fence and let it go,’ Tom says. All the while they run around trying to catch the animal, it’s experiencing capture myopathy, which damages the heart. Tom suggests that people let the animal find its own way out, or call someone more experienced who can expertly herd the creature in the right direction. When wild animals are fully rehabilitated, CWC staff release them within three miles of where they were originally found.   ’What people fail to realize is that wildlife isn’t necessarily in wild places anymore,’ Reyes says.   ’People think ‘There shouldn’t be a possum or a raccoon here, I live in the city. So, I’ll just take it up to the mountains and let it go,” Harris says. ‘It’s likely to die. It’s not used to foraging up here. It’s used to living in an urban environment, off of the cat food that you leave outside and the fruit that falls on the ground, and drinking out of the swimming pool.’   Even animals that may seem like nothing but a nuisance can be ecologically critical. Possums, for example, eat snails, mice and slugs. ‘They are nature’s garbage men,’ Reyes says. Bats, feared by some because of the threat of rabies, keep us from ‘swimming in insects,’ she adds.   CWC is the only facility in Los Angeles or Orange County with a license to rehabilitate fawns, one of four in Southern California that can work with coyotes, and it has a surgery center, necropsy center and rabies vector unit. But not every type of animal can be rehabilitated here. The staff rescues stranded elephant seals, sea lions and their pups, but those that require rehabilitation have to be transported to the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, more than 40 miles from Malibu Pier.   That transport time can be critical, so CWC recently set a goal to build and license a local marine rehabilitation facility on another site as part of the nonprofit’s five-year plan. Reyes says no one has yet put pen to paper, but estimates that the initial build would cost about $1 million, with probably another $1 million of investment required to build out future capacity.   Space for another series of sorely needed aviary enclosures is also part of CWC’s plan and is already staked out on the hillside, but funding has not yet been secured. On Dr. Tom’s wish list is an orthopedic saw that would allow him to handle fractures too complex for pinning. For those who cringe at the high cost of veterinary care for their domestic pets, it’s worth considering how expensive the equipment is’the saw runs about $25,000.   CWC relies heavily on private donations to cover its operating expenses, before it even begins to finance new additions. The center’s annual fundraising brunch, ‘Give a Hoot,’ is on Sunday, September 25.   Dr. Tom hopes a red-tailed hawk currently in one of the enclosures will be a special guest. The raptor was shot four times and had pins in both legs for about four weeks to fix a fractured femur and two fractured tibiae. Tom says the hawk is doing well and, with a little luck, brunch guests will have a chance to see it fly off into the wild. California Wildlife Center can be reached at (818) 222-2658 or californiawildlifecenter.org