About Us
Our Mission and Vision
​​Our Mission is to promote awareness and protection of urban wildlife.
Our Vision is a world where humans, and the wildlife that share our spaces,
can safely and humanely coexist.
Our core value is compassion for all life forms and for our beautiful, life sustaining, planet
Our Message is one of hope and resilience.
Our promise is to help people help wildlife.
Our Story
The Context
As a NYS wildlife rehabber living in NYC I receive hundreds of calls from people who want to help wildlife. Sometime people just have questions about a raccoon they spotted on a roof, a bunny nest in their yard, or how to reunite healthy baby squirrels who have tumbled from their nest with their mothers.
Most of the time, though, these calls are literally cries for help for the injured, sick or orphaned animals that they happen to stumble across.
Each case brings with it both heartache and hope. Birds, squirrels, opossums, turtles, bunnies, even baby mice and rats whose mothers have been killed and whose tiny orphaned 'pups' cry out in hunger.
I get calls for them all.
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The sense of urgency that those who reach out to me express, whether in words or in tone of voice, is a testament to the compassion they have for the vulnerable animals they find -
and how deeply they care about what happens to them.
The Need for a Solution
Too often I hear from my callers that no one else would help; that their fruitless efforts to seek assistance from authorities left them feeling frustrated and even despondent; that as a final effort they searched for wildlife help and were directed to a list of rehabbers and started calling.
It should not be this hard to find help for a wounded or orphaned animal in our city. Or to find real-time help for a problem of issue that you encounter when the welfare of wildlife is a question of concern.
There should be a better system. But there isn’t.
The need is real, the need is now,.
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An Idea Takes Form
Most of the problems we rehabbers encounter are a direct or indirect result of human activity - cutting down a tree with a nest; using poison that kills nursing mothers; glue traps that cause extreme harm to ANY animal - including birds, squirrels and more. Mowing lawns where there are well-hidden bunny nests; taking baby 'fledgling' birds mistaking them for injured ; feeding ducklings bread that can cause malnutrition; walking dogs off leash and letting them chase squirrels. Each of these actions harm animals.
But these are all things that we can easily change.
And It Becomes Our Promise
Through my many conversations with people of all ages and backgrounds I have come to believe that given the knowledge, the tools, and the understanding about the needs of wild urban creatures all of us can do our part to greatly minimize these avoidable dangers.
What if we teach people what to do? Not only when they find an injured or orphaned animal, but how to be good wildlife stewards and prevent these problems to begin with?
What if we provide resources, offer assistance, present workshops, involve communities, speak at community board meetings, talk to residential and commercial landlords, approach small business owners, visit schools, reach out to local universities with environmental and animal study programs...
Those 'what if's' offer the promise of a safe future for our wild neighbors and sustainable urban habitats that nurture all of us.
Just because we live in a metropolitan city does not mean we cannot co-exist with wildlife.
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It just means we need to learn how to do so.
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