The home of Palouse Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation is within a big red barn, sitting on 12 acres of rolling green hills in Moscow, Idaho.
Ryan Law, who runs the rescue, is busy.
“We get about 200 (animals) a year,” Law said. Many of those animals arrive at the rescue in the springtime.
She has porcupines, turtles, goslings, ducklings and 17 bunnies. Law also has tips for those who find these animals out in the wild.
Encountering animals
If you come upon a gosling or a duckling by itself and you’re worried it might be abandoned, watch it for a while, Law said.
If you wait for an hour and mom doesn’t come back, try to look for a duck with ducklings nearby, she said.
She says that if you see a mama duck with babies the same size, go ahead and toss the duckling right in with the others.
“ It doesn’t matter. She's like, “Oh, I don't know how many children I have. I'll take that one.’ And they're so much better off there. They're so much better off than they are with us,” said Law. “So, drop 'em off.”
Baby squirrels are often brought to animal rescues this time of year, said Law. People sometimes cut down trees before checking for squirrel nests, or the wind can blow babies out of a tree.
If you find a baby squirrel on the ground, it’s always good to observe and give mom a chance to pick up her baby, she said.
Rescue season
Over in Pullman, Washington, wildlife veterinarian Marcie Logsdon and her staff at Washington State University’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital are already taking care of baby squirrels, ducklings and baby owls.
They’re bracing for more animals to be rescued.
“ Memorial Day is usually when we get our first fawn calls, and they're another one that moms oftentimes leave alone for hours at a time,” she said. "It’s one of their survival mechanisms.”
Baby deer are still a bit clumsy and slow, Logsdon said.
“It can be very easy if you find one of these babies to not see mom and to worry that it might be abandoned, when really she's just taking her time and is going to come back to them that evening,” she said.
Sometimes, animal parents try to stay away from their babies so they don’t draw attention to them, like Cottontail rabbits, said Logsdon. Moms only visit their babies twice a day.
“It’s really easy to see those babies and think that, ‘oh my goodness, mom abandoned them,’ when really she's just waiting for a quiet, predator-free time to come back to the nest and feed,” Logsdon said.
Fledgling songbirds are another baby animal people often try to rescue, she said.
Even bigger birds like owls and hawks have a developmental stage where they aren’t that great at flying yet, Logsdon said.
” They can very easily be mistaken for being injured when really mom and dad is still around, they’re still taking care of it, they need to figure out how to fly,” she said.
However, if you see an animal bleeding, laying on their side, panting or covered in ticks and fleas, that’s when to call your local wildlife veterinarian or wildlife rehabilitator, said Logsdon.
Back at the big red barn in Moscow, Law checks on a group of ducklings huddling under a heat lamp.
“ Populations are growing and so we're pushing out places where animals could be,” she said. “We have to learn how to coexist.”
Sometimes, Law said, that means letting nature be.
