At Wildlife Clinic, Springtime is Crunch Time

By Cynthia Drummond for BRVCA
May 12th 2024

SAUNDERSTOWN – The Wildlife Clinic of Rhode Island is the only place in the state that treats and rehabilitates wild animals and birds. Spring is always the busiest season at the clinic, which has been operating since 1993.

Executive Director, William Morrissette, has been at the clinic since Oct., 2023, replacing Kristin Fletcher, who retired.

“Our spring rush started about four weeks ago,” he explained. “We’ve had 400 babies already, so we’re averaging about 100 babies a week, and a lot of them need to be fed every two hours, never mind the medication and that type of thing, so the staff is really pushed to their limits with the babies, and this is going to go on all the way through the summer into fall.”

The Clinic

Blaine Hymel, who began working at the clinic as a volunteer in 2013 and is now the principal veterinarian, gave a tour of the clinic, pointing out the features of the facility, as well as the challenges of caring for so many diverse species.

One treatment protocol is quarantine – a separate room where birds are kept until they are diagnosed or found to be healthy. Hymel explained that these measures are becoming increasingly necessary, as viruses, like bird flu, threaten native wildlife populations.

“Right now, since 2022, avian influenza, the highly-pathogenic version, has been going around and so, at least for our highly suspect guys, to have a chance, we can keep them in here until we have tests back,” she said.

Once the samples are collected, someone drives the samples up to Tufts University in Massachusetts, where the tests are performed free of charge.

That “someone” is usually Hymel.

“I have been driving them up for the last two months, yes,” she says with a laugh. “They’re really great. They’re testing for free for HPAI [highly pathogenic avian influenza] as well as for COVID in some animals.”

The surgical facility is heavily-used and well-equipped.

“We have full autoclave, full surgery,” Hymel said. “We can do orthopedic surgery here, amputations, things like that, lacerations, and we’re pretty adaptable here. Our anesthesia unit, we can adapt for either small or large animals, so a baby squirrel or a river otter, we can set it up for both of those appropriately.”

Decisions are made on the care of each arriving patient in the intake area.

“This is where I spend most of my day,” Hymel said. “Everything that comes in will get triage, looked at by me or one of our staff.”

The clinic also has an intensive care unit and another, special unit just for rabies vector species; foxes, skunks, raccoons, woodchucks and bats.

A New Home

The little clinic that began in a garage has grown into a sizeable operation. In 2018, the facility moved from cramped quarters in a veterinary clinic to a large house, purchased by former clinic veterinarian, Chi Chan, on five acres of land.

“It started 31 years ago in a one-car garage and then went to a slightly bigger facility with Dr. [Meredith] Bird and then came to this facility,” Morrissette explained. “We were just on the first floor of this house originally, and then expanded, breaking at the seams, and then, we’ve taken over the whole home and we’ve got caging throughout the property. Again, it’s victims of our own success. The more people know about us, the more animals come in, the more space you need.”

The Funding

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management subsidizes the clinic’s veterinary services with a $100,000 annual allocation, but Morrissette said most of the funds to operate the clinic come from foundations and private donors, including businesses.

“Emergency vets are running $177,000 plus full benefits, so we’re not paying competitive wages, but this is kind of an act of love,” he said. “We have 125 volunteers, and then there are product donations that come in, people that are donating all the feed and that type of thing, so cash-wise, our budget is at about $550,000 right now, but if you look at what it costs to operate this facility, if you had to pay staff and all the volunteers, you’d be at a million dollars.”

Morrissette described fund raising for the clinic as a never-ending task.

“We don’t have a big endowment or anything like that, so just trying to provide the services,” he said. “The biggest challenge is cash flow. We need more staffing, we need more reserves so we can weather big challenges that present. Another big challenge is, this is a home. It wasn’t meant to be a commercial property, so we need much more funding for building maintenance. … We’ve been here six years. I just wrote a grant because we need a well, because our well is not producing as much water as we need.”

The clinic has 11 paid staff members and about 125 volunteers, who compensate, to a large extent, for the lack of government funding.

“It is very robust,” Morrissette said, referring to the volunteer group. “I’ve been in non - profit management for 26 years, and to have the type of volunteers that we have here, a lot of organizations will have volunteers and they kind of do odds and end things, you know, but you need the staff at the core. … The organization would not operate without these volunteers. You couldn’t operate 365 days a year. You couldn’t take every animal that presents.”

The clinic’s staff and volunteers do a bit of everything. Outside, in one of the larger enclosures, volunteers had gone to purchase sod and were laying it down, not for a lawn, but to make a river otter more comfortable.

Running a clinic that is open every day of the year takes a lot of people.

“We have about 75 in-clinic volunteers, because we’re open 365 days a year, so volunteers are here every day, feeding, watering, doing all of that.,” Morrissette said. “Then we have a transport network of volunteers, … so that if there’s an animal that’s injured or whatnot, and the person can’t get it here, it’s after hours, the transport network is going and getting the animals, getting them to the home rehabbers. We have about 25 home rehabbers.”

Morrissette also noted, however, that some animals require expensive, specialized veterinary care and medications.

“That’s our biggest challenge, is that we, like any other veterinary practice, there’s new technologies that come out and different medicines and treatments, so how do you balance improving your medical facility and building those technologies and that knowledge without having the funding to do that?”

A Few Statistics

Encounters with humans usually end badly for wild animals and birds. Hit by cars, their nests destroyed by lawnmowers or tree work, or poisoned by consuming rodents that have eaten rodenticide bait, the clinic receives victims of all of those situations, and because it is the only resource of its kind in Rhode Island, they come from all over the state.

In 2023, the clinic received 4,416 patients, but many more went directly to rehabilitators, all of whom must be licensed by the state.

One of the clinic’s patients, a barred owl, is the victim of a collision with an unknown object. The large bird of prey rests on a perch in a cage, and appears to be recovering.

“We’re treating him for some sort of collision, whether he ran into something, not quite sure, but he is healing nicely, I will say,” Hymel said. “His wounds are coming along very nicely.”

In the “rabies vector unit,” fox kits rest behind a curtain. In another enclosure, a litter of baby raccoons huddle together, soothed by a stuffed panda that emits the sound of a heartbeat.

Hymel explained that this unit must comply with an additional layer of regulations, because certain animal species can carry rabies.

“They are required by law to be double barricaded, so both those doors are locked,” she explained. “We have certain staff and volunteers that can work with them, and in Rhode Island, you have to undergo training for three years before being able to get your rabies vector species licensing, as well as the rabies shots too, which are quite pricey.”

Downstairs, at the feeding station, rehabilitators care for litters of animal babies.

, of West Warwick, is hand-feeding baby eastern gray squirrels, her specialty.

“I do every species, but I do lots and lots of squirrels,” she said, as the hungry baby continued to feed. “This year, we had a lot more help than usual, so I topped out at around 30 squirrels, but one year, I did 150, all by myself.”

It will be a couple more weeks before the squirrels are weaned, and then they will be transferred to a pre-release cage, where they will learn how to eat wild foods, like nuts. They’ll be released when they’re 14 weeks old.

Hymel walks over, carrying a box containing baby red squirrels.

“We got three baby red squirrels in today too, who are super cute and going home with one of our rehabbers tonight,” she said.

There is also a litter of baby opossums, whose mother was killed.

“These just came in,” Hymel said. “We believe Mom was hit by a car. … The babies were there, and so we weren’t able to save mom, but these will go home with one of our rehabbers as well.”

Hymel pointed out an aquarium housing a painted turtle whose shell was severely crushed. Hymel mended the turtle’s shell with metal tape and superglue and covered the repairs with a coating of protective beeswax, which will be removed before the turtle is released. 

Releasing animals and birds back into the wild is always the desired outcome, for both the patient and the rehabbers, and an effort is made to release the animal at or close to the place where it was found.

“There’s something about raising these animals, or recovering them from something serious that they wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild on their own - us intervening and helping them, and then seeing them actually go back and be free is just remarkable,” Hymel said. “I love the releasing aspect, and I love kind of what we do, just being able to give everything a chance.”