definitions, definitions
Looking for answers about what I do and why I do it.
Two pm on a Tuesday afternoon and I’m asking myself the question what wildlife rehabilitation actually means.
Most people seem to think of it this way: people in green sterile clothes frantically giving injections to animals or putting fractures into casts, healing birds and mammals at record speed. Actually, I think it’s more like watching grass grow, if watching grass grow meant you had to groom it and remove every speck of dirt every day.
Our vets spend enough time with the animals to be stressed almost the entire day through - it is a very stressfull job, dealing with fractures, poisoning, parasites, cat and dog bites, the like. But after that is done - it’s just waiting. The rehabilitation part is very hard to pin down.
Today, I was standing in one of our outside cages with a notepad and a pen, writing down ring numbers of seagulls to compare them with our data and mark them down as released. Afterwards, we went to the beach and released three cages of juvenile seagulls back into the wild. Is that rehabilitation?
A quick google search tells me that rehabilitation is „to restore to good health or useful life, as through therapy and education“. Well, we have it all: good, healthy seagulls living what is hopefully a healthy life on the beach and shallow sea, all thanks to our therapy (and education? I am currently picturing myself lecturing the seagulls on maritime pollution).
The thing is, rehabilitation is very rarely counting scientifically ringed gulls on a clipboard while hoping that the coastal weather won’t turn bad again. It’s mostly cleaning up bird droppings, changing food, and doing one’s best to make the animals comfortable in an environment they were never designed to inhabit while they are recovering from injuries that are mostly man-made. It’s a multi-step process with every step so unique for every animal that it’s hard to sum up when people ask why I do what I do and why I care so much, or why I want to continue.
Because to me, rehabilitation is also making sure that these things don’t happen again. Rehabilitation is education, too, and mostly it’s the people that need the educating: no, there is no seagull overpopulation, some types of gulls are actually under protection; yes, there is oil on the sea even if you haven’t heard of any major spills in a while; yes, this is because of greed and business mostly; yes, we do also care about pigeons and jackdaws and all the other birds you have just now decided we have ‚enough‘ of.
Wildlife rehabilitation is also staying late on a Monday afternoon because the dishes and the feedings of the day aren’t finished, and all these need to be done in order for the animals to be healthy, even when you are cleaning what feels like the fiftieth empty cage of the day and wonder just how many of those there still are and how they all got dirty, and where the animals are that were brought in these cages.
Wildlife rehabilitation is everything, from the distant politics of funding money and government aid over every veterinarian and animal care professional down to the last volunteer cleaning a feeding tube just before their lunch break. It’s a huge, coordinated effort, all for an animal that - if all goes right - you will never see again in your life, and only hear from after eight or ten years, when it has had two more successful nests and then died on a faraway Scottish island.
I guess I ask this question because I’m trying to figure out if there is a future for me in this area, and what that would mean, and where I would fit in. I’m not a marine biologist, I’m a political scientist with an interest in nature conservation, more than just an interest, but sometimes I need to take a step back and evaluate what I am doing. I still can’t see it too clearly. I am trying, though.