These past few weeks at Dane County Humane Society’s Wildlife Center I have continued my training rotation with the songbirds. As of June 6, the center had 93 native songbirds in its care! Working in this area, I began to see how vital the volunteers are to keeping the center running. With only 6 paid staff, there is absolutely no way the center could exist with out the dedication and hard work of the hundreds of volunteers that come in each and every week to help. Some of these wildlife heroes have been volunteering at the center for a decade! They are also such caring, kind people who do what they do for the love of the animals who need their help. Songbirds are a particularly complicated group of wildlife to care for. Baby birds housed in makeshift nests (knitted by yet more dedicated volunteers) in incubators require hand feeding every half hour from morning to night. Like human babies, they also poop a lot and need their nests changed often. When the hatchlings grow in their feathers and begin hopping around the incubator, they are moved to indoor cages or outdoor enclosures. These fledglings are fed every hour. When the fledglings grow in all their flight feathers they are moved to larger outdoor enclosures with other adult birds until they are ready to be released.  As you can imagine, care for all these birds requires the teamwork of lots of volunteers, interns, and staff!  As a songbird intern I have also been given a leadership role in that I “oversee” the shift and make sure all the birds are getting proper care and the volunteers have everything they need. I am grateful for the opportunity to practice being a leader!  

Newly hatched songbird

Nestling Black-Capped Chickadees

Lately, I have been viewing my work at the Wildlife Center with a broad perspective; I’ve been learning to see the big picture of saving and rehabbing the animals we are able to, and not getting attached to they ones who don’t make it. But working with baby birds makes me focus on the individual animal as well.  It’s hard not to get attached to the wellbeing of little nestlings that we hand-feed all day and celebrate when they pull through. With each little bird we try to help, I am reminded of the parable of the little boy and the starfish.  Most of us have heard this familiar story, based on an essay by Loren Eiseley:

Once, a man was walking along a beach when he came across a small boy picking things up from the sand and throwing them into the ocean. As the man came closer, he saw that the beach was awash with stranded starfish and the boy was throwing them back in, one by one.  The man said, “What are you doing? Don’t you see how many starfish there are? This will never make a difference.”  The boy replied as he tossed another starfish into the water, “It made a difference to that one.”   

I also think of Aldo Leopold, painstakingly restoring his small piece of land and planting tree after tree. He was like the boy on the beach, and they both made a difference in the end.  Wildlife rehabbers definitely don’t do what they do for the money (there’s hardly any), but because they believe in the words Leopold once wrote: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”