Nature Notes: Meet Dr. Dolittle
Virginia Frati, who lives up the street from me, across from the Morton Wildlife Refuge, has been looking after injured and sick mammals, birds, turtles, frogs, and even snakes for 20 years. She never turned away an animal in need. When she was a secretary for the Suffolk County Department of Public Works, she would care for birds in need, keeping them in her desk drawer so they were close at hand.
It wasn’t something that Public Works had a feeling for, so she and a fellow employee, Jim Hunter, who was part of the dredging crew, left to start their own wildlife rescue center in 2000. The county pitched in and came forward with an unused building in Munn’s Pond Park in Hampton Bays, and within a matter of months, Ginnie and Jim turned it into the Wildlife Rescue Center of the Hamptons. It has been up and running ever since.
Not to long ago, the center was renamed the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center, upon receiving a very generous gift from Leslie Alexander in honor of his late mother, who herself had been a lifelong animal lover.
Now the center is thriving, with six full-time wildlife rehabilitators. It is the only facility of its kind in Suffolk County. It is situated on a little pond that is dry as often as it is wet, Munn’s Pond, which runs into a little creek that runs under Montauk Highway into Tiana Bay, a branch of Shinnecock Bay, one of Long Island’s South Bays and part of the South Bays Estuary.
On average 1,200 to 1,400 hurt, stressed, and sick wild creatures are processed by the center each year. The large majority are healed in one way or another, often with the help of two veterinarians, Dr. Jonathan Turetsky of the Veterinary Clinic of East Hampton and Dr. Justin Molnar of the Shinnecock Animal Hospital. No wild animal in need is turned away.
The most common species to be treated at the center is the gray squirrel, especially young of the year gray squirrels. These furry little tree climbers stay close to home in a nest or hollow up in a tall tree until weaned, by which time they have almost reached adult proportions. Before that, they tend to only come down to earth when their nest tree is felled during a clearing operation or blown over in a windstorm.
Young cottontail rabbits are a close second among the mammals, especially when lawn mowing starts in mid-spring. Cottontail parents dig a shallow trench in a grassy sward in which to beget and raise their young. The lawnmower comes along and, unbeknownst to the mower operator, takes the cover off the little nest, thus springing loose the baby cottontails.
Injured hawks and owls and the occasional osprey are brought to the center, often by a network of volunteers who are quick to answer a call for help. When it comes to baby birds, however, the center advises that if you find one out of the nest on the ground and it cannot yet fly that you should observe it for a reasonable time to make sure that the parents have not abandoned it. In most cases one of the parents will come to protect its chick and help it back into a concealed place — a bush or small tree — and take care of it from then on until it fledges.
Birds often fly into windows thinking the blank space is an alleyway, especially when being pursued by a hawk or falcon. Most of the time when they hit the glass they merely stun themselves. Such birds fall to the ground and appear helpless. But if not flat on their backs, they can be retrieved and put into a dark warm box with a cover for up to an hour. During that period, they often revive, and will fly out when the cover is removed.
Before you take a stunned bird to the center or call someone to come and get it, try this.
Depending upon the extent of the injury, it takes from a few days to several months to rehabilitate an animal in need. Some have been hurt so badly that they cannot be released and are kept at the center as live-in species.
At first it was mostly small mammals and birds that were brought to the center for rehabilitation. But then the word got out and non-flying and non-running species in need such as turtles, snakes, and frogs began to appear. Ginnie says that the center has rescued a number of different kinds of snakes, mostly garter snakes, but also black racers and a ring-necked snake or two.
Once the center took in a hurt insect: a monarch butterfly with a broken wing that the former Beatle Paul McCartney brought in. It was given its own little spot, but was never able to fly again.
Recently, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has altered the wildlife rehabilitation licenses of staff so that they cannot take in injured adult deer, unless they are plan to euthanize them, which is something wildlife rehabbers never do unless there is no other recourse. They can still care for fawns that need attention, but only until the fall, when they are considered teenagers and can then only be left alone or put down.
Upstate, wildlife rehabilitators can no longer treat and release mute swans. Long Island has received a reprieve in this regard, as local state senators and assemblymen have come out for the swans, even opposing the desires of the National Audubon Society in such matters. It also comes to mind that a lot of heavy hitters with estates on Long Island have swan ponds. Politicians don’t like to offend heavy hitters.
Ginnie, who may have circumvented the rules a bit in taking care of injured and parentless birds in her desk drawer, is certainly not about to suppress her need to care for sick and distressed wildlife after all these years. Wasn’t it the Greek physician Hippocrates more than a few thousand years ago who said, “Make a habit of two things — to help, or at least to do no harm.” You might say that Ginnie is a dedicated modern-day practitioner of the Hippocratic Oath. Sometimes she lies awake at night thinking about those creatures in need. She is not about to roll over and begin euthanizing deer just to help the D.E.C. reduce the population.
Got an injured creature that needs attention? Call 728-WILD.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].