The South Plains Wildlife Rehabilitation Center is asking for more volunteers to help them after a spring that’s been exceptionally full of baby animals.
“This year because of the weather, we started early in February started getting all the baby mammals coming in, we started having twice the number of animals that we had last year at this time,” explained Gail Barnes, executive director of the South Plains Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.
Barnes said that every day they receive more animals, some are abandoned, others are found with injuries. SPWRC already has especially high numbers of baby birds, possums, and rabbits.
Each of the animals they take in are documented, monitored, and put on on a species-specific feeding plan. Most baby animals require intensive care, including many of the baby birds who have to be fed every thirty minutes during daylight hours.
SPWRC will be losing their college volunteers as the Texas Tech semester wraps up, and the center is already are overwhelmed with animals. They welcome any assistance, from feeding animals, to helping with educational programs, to donations of food.
Managing these animals each day is hectic for Barnes who is at SPWRC nearly every day of the week.
“You go from one incubator to the other incubator and then you start over again, and then you need people in the mammal area to do the mammals, and you need people to handle drop-offs, and you need people to pick up the phone,” she explained.
“We have one and a half paid employees, the rest of us are volunteers, we all operate off of donations, we don’t receive any funds from our regulatory agencies so we rely on the public that brings in donations for us to operate,” she added.
If you would like to help SPWRC you can apply on their website where you can also find their wish list of food donation items.
Barnes said that she welcomes any volunteers and will put them to work immediately. She adds that work with baby animals can be messy, but there’s plenty of work to do even for people who don’t want to hold the animals.
“We’ll start you the day you get here, just wear barn attire and come in, it’s a fun place to be,” she said.
