Humane Heroes
- 1. Prison Dog Programs
- 2. Eye on the Witness
- 3. Wyatt to the Rescue
- 4. Edward Gorey
- 5. Fashion Forward (Heather Chase)
- 6. New England Wildlife Center
- 7. Animal Sanctuaries
- 8. Ojai Raptor Center
- 9. Search and Rescue Dogs
- 10. The Catman of Millbrook Farm
New England Wildlife Center
Carrie Levine
Where the Wild Things Heal
In cramped quarters, the New England Wildlife Center mends
4,000 broken creatures every year.
Gregory A. Mertz, DVM, bustles into the entryway of the small wooden building that serves as New England's largest wildlife hospital, a Kenneth Cole shoebox tucked under his arm. I've been waiting for his arrival. I'm here to tour the facility and write about it for Animal Watch magazine.
"I've just got to check this rabbit in," he says, opening the shoebox to show a bunny who looks, to be honest, touch-and-go. A huge chunk of fur is missing, along with a hunk of skin. The rabbit isn't moving.
Mertz, the director of the New England Wildlife Center in Hingham, Massachusetts, is rarely off duty. The rabbit was an after-hours patient, brought to his Westwood home by a neighbor after her cat did his worst.
"He doesn't look good," Mertz acknowledges, filling out the paperwork to admit the rabbit and turning it over quickly to Matt Laing, the clinic director, for triage.
Triage is the easiest part of Laing's job right now. Harder will be finding space for the rabbit in the center's 1,800-square-foot wooden hospital. The center has bloodied bunnies, wounded herons and limping iguanas stacked to the rafters.
"We can handle, with difficulty, 2,000 animals a year in this building," says Mertz. "We are handling about 4,000."
Small in Size, Large in Scope
The New England Wildlife Center is not to be confused with your local veterinarian. It is the largest hospital in New England specializing in wildlife and is more likely to treat a blue-tongue skink or a Burmese python than a golden retriever.
But "largest" is a questionable adjective when it comes to the diminutive 20-year-old facility. Mertz and the center's other 10 full- and part-time staff members are counting the days until the New England Wildlife Center breaks ground on a planned new animal hospital that will be 24,184 square feet in size - more than 10 times the size of the current building.
The center has so far raised $5 million in cash and donations toward the building's construction, and a local businessman named Brian Curtis has donated a 12.4-acre site in the neighboring town of Weymouth. The entire project is expected to cost about $7.5 million, and Mertz hopes it will be completed sometime in 2004. To be named the Thomas E. Curtis Wildlife Hospital and Education Center (after Curtis's father), the new facility will be a state-of-the-art teaching center that will allow the organization to add staff, offer more training and treat more animals.
The center had originally planned to break ground in the summer of 2002, but delays in raising money after 9/11, and a longer-than-expected planning and permitting process, pushed the start date back to June 1, 2003.
The staff can hardly wait.
Expansion Plans
A herring gull with a blue cast around her wing sits in the six-by-six-foot operating room because there is no place else to put her. There are 80 birds housed in separate cages in the small back room. Somehow, every animal getting treatment at the center has to be fed, watered and evaluated every day. And Mertz can't turn around without getting a phone message from another worried pet owner about, say, how to treat a constipated guinea pig. Townspeople typically wander in, wildlife wrapped protectively in shoe boxes, bags or plastic Tupperwareª containers.
"We have animals stuffed in every nook and cranny," he sighs.
The renovation plans call for elementary school and adult classrooms, an auditorium and resource center, a laboratory and an up-to-date studio suitable for filming surgeries for later educational use and for broadcast on the Internet.
The number of employees will rise to 16, and they will have space to pass each other in the hallway, Mertz says. The new hospital will also run training programs for animal shelter and pet store staff, as well as animal control officers. The staff will continue to offer educational programs for local schools, and hopefully expand the program.
Local resident Gloria Watanabe credits the center's "camp" program with setting her daughter Joanna, eight years old at the time, on the road to environmentalism.
"She's became very much of a tree hugger," Watanabe says with a laugh. "The kids were each allowed to 'adopt' an animal for the length of the program - I think the python she had was six feet long. They gave a presentation at the end of the camp where they talked all about their animals and where they were from." Watanabe says that Joanna, now 15, is still an animal lover. "I'm hoping to look into volunteer opportunities at the center, to see if they have something for high-school kids," she says.
Years after Joanna's camp experience, the Watanabes found what they thought was an injured and abandoned puppy and took it to a veterinarian. "When I walked into the exam room, the vet said, 'I don't think this is a puppy.' He got on the phone and called the center," Watanabe recalls. Sure enough, the Watanabes had picked up a small coyote. The center staff set her leg and released her back into the wild.
The same thing has happened to at least one other person; the center currently has a recuperating coyote fenced outdoors on another part of the property.
There are also separate outdoor enclosures where recovering turtles, squirrels and chipmunks "transition" back into the wild. The center only keeps animals whose injuries prevent them from being able to function in nature, and it uses those animals in its educational programs. Such as an owl with cataracts...and a fox who was raised as a pet.
"Three winters ago, Foxy escaped," Mertz recalls. "We kind of figured he must have become coyote fodder. Then, six or seven weeks later, someone called and said, 'We have a fox in our yard, and it's playing with a red rubber ball. Is that normal?' We said no, and went and got him."
A Sense of Purpose
Three unusually warm New England winters lie behind a recent explosion in wildlife, Mertz theorizes, and the surge has led to an increase in human complaints about the animals. Mertz has been asked to euthanize coyotes, and to not treat certain other species. But these requests, he says, are contrary to the goals of the center. The educational programs and internship opportunities are meant to bring people closer to wildlife and give them a greater understanding of the right of wild animals to coexist in what has become one of the most developed regions in the country.
"What we're trying to do is send a subliminal message and get people to see things through the eyes of other species," he says softly. "I think of this as a nature center with a purpose."
Mertz leads me on a tour of the wildlife center's outdoor property, as he performs his daily check on peacocks, swans, squirrels, owls - even the coyote.
Currently the center is housed on a tract of park land that technically belongs to the town of Hingham. The center is asking the town to grant a long-term lease on at least three acres of the present site. This would allow interns to continue to be housed in a building on the property they now share with the center's business office, and the center would continue to offer environmental programs on the property, a former military depot known locally as Bare Cove Park.
So far, town officials have seemed open to the idea of a lease, and the town meeting - the main decision-making body - voted to support it. The town is reluctant to completely lose the wildlife center to neighboring Wey-mouth. A 99-year lease would give the center enough rights to the property to upgrade the intern housing and put more permanent structures on the land as needed.
Another Day, Another...Bumblebee?
Mertz can't decide what's the oddest thing he's ever treated. "I just couldn't say," he shrugs. "There have been so many."
Suddenly he stops walking and stoops over. Gingerly, with his forefinger, he flips a fuzzy bumblebee off its back and onto its legs. The bumblebee wavers on its path, uncertainly.
It's the newest patient in a long day.
As we head back to the center, Mertz is mulling over the workload. Recently, the center posted a sign at the main entrance, asking people to be patient. "We are currently experiencing a dramatic increase in admissions of wildlife patients," it reads. "We are planning a new center. It should take us about a year and a half to build."
Right now, the new center is still just a drawing on paper, even though it is obviously in the forefront of the staffers' thoughts. There is more money to be raised, construction details to be worked out and contractors to be hired.
But Mertz is adamant about the June 1 groundbreaking date. "I told them it's a firm deadline," he says.
Until then, there are animals to treat.
And what of the bunny from the morning? Luckily, she's on the road back to health.
Former Massachusetts journalist Carrie Levine is now based in New York City. She has reported frequently on the New England Wildlife Center.
© 2003 ASPCA
ASPCA Animal Watch - Spring 2003
Courtesy of
ASPCA
424 East 92nd St.
New York, NY 10128-6804
(212) 876-7700
www.aspca.org
Next in
How You Can Help Pets: Humane Heroes:
Animal Sanctuaries
EMAIL
SHARE
