Blue Ridge Wildlife Center — Gracen K. ’22

During Wintermission I interned at Blue Ridge Wildlife Center. We were able to experience how they treat different animals, what type of food they give to animals, and how they manage everything. Even though we spent most of our time doing laundry, cleaning the place up, and doing the dishes, we left every day knowing that we did something to help out the center.
Every day we would go outside with other volunteers to do rounds, and feed all of the animals outside, most of which were hawks or squirrels. Every other day, we helped clean out the different cages. On Wednesday, I cleaned out a vulture's cage that was in the front of the walk-through animal’s section, and on Friday, I cleaned out the squirrels’ cages in the back. Throughout our time there, we saw an owl get put under for an x-ray, a hawk have surgery, and an eagle that came in for lead poisoning. Out of all of these, I really enjoyed the hawk and the eagle. 

The hawk was brought in because it ran into a window and dogs attacked it. It had multiple puncture wounds all over its stomach but mainly its throat. They first put him under sedation to get x-rays of him just to make sure it did not have any broken bones as well, and then they started the surgery. The surgery went back and forth since he was having a hard time breathing under sedation, but he pulled through. They put multiple stitches in and cleaned up all of the wounds before they woke him up. I learned that you can tell a bird is going to wake up soon based upon how tight their legs are. When they are awake their legs are pulled tight next to their body and will not move them out much, but if they are under sedation you can stretch their legs as far as they can go. That is how they can tell when to put the bird back in the cage alone. 

When the eagle came in, it could not fly and it looked very down. No one could speak loudly around him and everyone had to whisper so the eagle wouldn’t get stressed out. Out of all the birds, eagles get stressed out the easiest. They placed a mask over its beak that covered its eyes and took x-rays to make sure there were no breaks, just like the hawk. Its wings were so strong they had to place a weight on his wings to hold them down. They got a blurry picture but were able to see there was nothing broken. They then took his blood to test for lead poisoning and brought him downstairs to a quiet room. 

This was one of the most meaningful experiences for me because I was able to see how delicate the eagle was and how they treated it so calmly. No matter what they were doing to it, they comforted it and made sure it was ok. This wildlife center did so much more than I imagined, and completely blew me away with its organization. Everyone was so willing to be there and wanted to help out the community, which made me want to do more with the community as well.
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