NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Wildlife Rehab

By PAULA PANT Colorado Daily Staff Writer
Sunday, October 22, 2006 8:49 PM MDT

At the tender age of five weeks old, “Cuervo” - as he later became known - was fed liquor at a fraternity party. A female partygoer stealthily snuck the newborn away and rushed him to get immediate aid.

Further down the front range, another five-week-old was floundering helpless on the ground below a tree in Arvada. The homeowner who found it could only assume its mother had either been killed or had abandoned the youngster.

The homeowner hurriedly searched for an organization that could care for the infant.

Hundreds of examples like these - all baby squirrels, raccoons, birds and other wild animals - come through the doors of Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Sanctuary each year, said Greenwoods' Outreach and Education Coordinator, Courtney Stelzer.

The injured, sick, orphaned or abandoned animals are rehabilitated at Greenwood, then released into the area in which they were found.

Sometimes, a mother fox will be hit and killed by a car, and its helpless babies will lie on top of their mothers' roadside carcass, not knowing what else to do and not old enough to survive on their own, said Stelzer.

Other times, geese will be injured but not killed by hunters, or birds will damage their wings and be unable to fly.

Greenwood takes in hundreds of these cases each year, every animal brought to the sanctuary by a well-meaning person who happens to find the creature.

Some are kept in incubators, others in cages. All are being primed for eventual release back into the wild.

The people who bring in the animals, said Stelzer, “never really get beyond our front entrance. They ask to see where we keep the animals and we just can't show them - its too stressful on them (the animals) to have people coming through all the time.”

In the wildlife world, springtime is baby season, and Greenwood held an annual springtime Baby Shower that acquainted the organization with its supporters and its surrounding community.

But “people would turn in an animal in the summer,” said Stelzer, “and we'd say, great, come by next spring.”

So this year, the group is starting its first annual Fall Festival, which will celebrate the seasons' rehabilitated releases and will educate the public about how to coexist with wildlife.

The Fall Festival, held this weekend, will feature four live bands, tours of the sanctuary, treasure hunts, arts and crafts, pumpkin carving and lots of information about what to do if you find, say, a nest of baby cottontails.

Michael Krow first stumbled upon Greenwood when driving by during the spring open house.

“I saw all the cars and wondered what was going on,” said Krow, who decided to scope out the scene.

Soon Krow fell “in love with the baby squirrels,” he said, and became a volunteer. Himself a musical performer, he's booked all the acts for the Fall Festival and found a donor (Robb's Music of Boulder) for sound equipment.

Jan Bova began volunteering for Greenwood in 1983, back when it was still housed by the Boulder Valley Humane Society. (It became an independent nonprofit in 1993.)

Bova had just moved to Boulder from Youngstown, Ohio, and wanted to find a niche where she could volunteer her time to something meaningful.

Over the course of the past 23 years, she's seen thousands of animals grow and heal.

Seeing that kind of progress every week, says Bova, is a tangible, meaningful measure of how important Greenwood - and her volunteer contribution to it - can be.