I just have to share this, hope you don’t mind, one of the least common perks I get from working at a wildlife rehabilitation center. Our goal is to keep them wild and get them back out to nature, so opportunities for bonding are few and far between. Only when an animal is deemed appropriate for education after it is decided it cannot be released, do you ever have a chance to get to know a wild animal on a different level.

Currently, we have a non-releasable raccoon that we are training to help place and a brown pelican that did not heal from a broken wing sufficiently enough to be released. This bird is my focus 🙂 He is a diva, would you believe it? He is not friendly where you can walk up and hug him, but he has started sitting on a high perch at one end of the flight and begs for food whenever you go inside. He is capable of getting down to eat on his own and certainly does so, but today I walked in and he looked down at me, stretched his head toward me and emitted a common vocalization for brown pelis – a kind of prehistoric hissing. What do you want, I asked him? He called out to me again. OK, fine, I answered back. I took a single fish from his bowl and held it high up to him between my fingers, and he stretched his neck a little further, then gently took it from me with the very tip of his massively hooked beak. Three more times we did this until I had to take care of another animal.

What amazes me the most is how dainty and gentle they can be. Believe me, this is not a typical behavior – they might beg for food (juveniles especially), but they have no interest in being nice to you when they are truly wilded up – and I have the scars to prove it! However, we have had this bird for quite some time and he came to us shortly after arriving from his travels away from the breeding grounds in the Channel Islands. It is amazing to see one of these birds dive, to sieve the water from their pouches and swallow their catch, to know how determined they are to survive (these birds are incredibly resilient), and then to have one ask you to so gently share with it a basic necessity – it’s a rarity that can really put things in perspective (and kinda makes your day). 🙂