Local woman is training to be a wildlife rehabilitator.
By: Leon Tovey
The duck was not cooperating, maybe because it was a little camera shy.
"Usually, I’ll wrap it in a towel to perform this procedure," Monroe resident Renée Hobbs told the photographer as the duck flapped and struggled in her grasp.
Ms. Hobbs continued to hold the duck tightly in her left hand as she set down the razor and began to squeeze and massage the green abscess on the animal’s webbed foot with her right hand.
A small amount of a substance best left undescribed oozed out of the sore and Ms. Hobbs quickly wiped it off, cleaned the foot and put the frantically squawking white waterfowl back into its cage.
"Well, how was that?" she asked the photographer. "Did you get some good shots?"
The duck, one of several Ms. Hobbs keeps as pets, was suffering from bumble foot, an infection of the foot pad that is particularly common among waterfowl that walk on hard-packed ground. The best way to treat it, Ms. Hobbs explained, is to lance, drain and clean the sore daily, and keep the animal from walking around too much.
She demonstrated the procedure to The Cranbury Press on Monday as a way of illustrating the difficulties of treating animal injuries. A marketing consultant for the Princeton-based firm Marketech, Ms. Hobbs is trying to garner public support for a new project she is undertaking: a non-profit wildlife rehabilitation clinic.
"I’ve always been into animals," said Ms. Hobbs, an athletic woman in her mid-30s with blond hair and an air of big-sisterly helpfulness. "And with the amount of development in the township, there is a growing problem of animals injured and sickened from contact with humans.
"Plus, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with all this land."
Ms. Hobbs and her husband, Tim, live on 12 mostly wooded acres on Federal Road in a house built more than three decades ago by her step-grandfather. Ms. Hobbs has lived there for 25 years and over the past few years has managed to amass a virtual menagerie; there are goats, ducks, a rabbit or two, a peacock and chickens lots and lots of chickens.
Overall, Ms. Hobbs said, 117 animals make their homes with her. The most recent addition is a rather large and imposing white dog, a Great Pyrenees who goes by the name of Jack, that Ms. Hobbs adopted to protect the chickens from predators.
In addition to this already lively mix of livestock, fowls and pets, Ms. Hobbs wants to fill her land with wild animals like foxes, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks and deer that need to be nursed back to health. She plans to call the facility Harmony Wildlife Clinic. She’s currently in the midst of a one-year apprenticeship to become a state-certified animal rehabilitator.
The apprenticeship involves hands-on work with sick and injured animals under the supervision of a certified rehabilitator. Since there are no facilities in Middlesex County along the lines of what Ms. Hobbs wants to open, she drives every Friday to the Mercer County Wildlife Center in Titusville, where she is apprenticed to Diane Nickerson, a 17-year veteran of wildlife rehabilitation.
Once she has finished her training and received DEP approval of her facilities (she’s required to have an adequate number of cages, proper fencing and a service agreement with a local veterinarian), Ms. Hobbs can begin treating small, injured animals like squirrels and rabbits, as well as caring for "orphaned" animals until they are old enough to strike out on their own.
The clinic will also offer educational programs aimed at teaching people how to get along with wild animals that might live near their homes or property.
"The objective is not to keep them but to return them to the wild after they’ve had a chance to heal," Ms. Hobbs said. "Obviously, with all the development in the area, that can be difficult, but it’s important to at least try to avoid disturbing the ecology of an area as much as possible."
Paradoxically, a big part of avoiding disturbances is knowing when not to help an animal, Ms. Hobbs said. She said in her time at the Mercer County Wildlife Center she’s seen a number of residents do damage when trying to help by bringing in young animals they mistakenly thought were abandoned.
"A lot of time when people find an animal, it hasn’t really been orphaned," she said. "Someone will find a fawn underneath a bush in their back yard and they’ll panic and think its mother is dead or has abandoned it, when what’s really happened is the mother just left it there while she went to forage."
For this reason, Ms. Hobbs anticipates that once the clinic opens, a good deal of her time will be taken up responding to phone calls and telling people to leave that nest of baby birds, or that apparently motherless fawn, alone.
But the work will require additional help; Ms. Hobbs said she’s looking for volunteers to assist with care for the animals, provide administrative support and help establish the clinic as a non-profit corporation. She’s also looking for materials (she recently obtained several hundred feet of horse fence from U.S. Homes, which had been using the fencing at one of its developments), and because the clinic is going to be a non-profit venture, monetary assistance.
Ms. Hobbs just finished her rabies pre-exposure vaccination a series of three shots over a four-week period at a cost of $150 (her medical insurance would not cover it, but her doctor’s office was kind enough to charge her only for the vaccine). She said this is just one example of the myriad small startup costs for the clinic, which she expects eventually to total about $20,000.
"It’s an expensive and challenging thing I want to do," she said. "But it’s worth it. I think people in the community really want to help these animals and to learn how to live with them, and that’s what this clinic is going to be about."
For more information on the clinic or on how to get involved, contact Ms. Hobbs at [email protected] or by phone at (732) 446-5648.