HERE’S A TIP: If you ever find yourself about to enter a suburban Chicago bedroom filled with dozens of birds and wild animals, don’t wear sandals.
Exposed toes are a tempting treat. I find this out on a hot afternoon just before the Fourth of July when a 20-pound snapping turtle stretches her head out of her fractured shell, and with primordial purpose begins crawling across the hardwood floor.
I am absent-mindedly flexing my open toes. From the turtle’s perspective they must look like busy crayfish. Lunch.
The snapper and I are in what used to be a bedroom on the second floor of a comfortable yellow house on 7 1/2 acres in Barrington, shaded by oak trees. It’s the kind of spread a corporate executive might own.
We have plenty of company. There is a turkey vulture with a broken wing and an upset stomach, a sickly squirrel and an American kestrel-a small grayish colored falcon-suffering from West Nile virus, to name just a few of the 98 injured or orphaned creatures crowded into the room. Nearly two dozen more are in another bedroom down the hall. Four fawns are out in the barn.
This indoor wildlife has survived being hit by cars or flying into office buildings. They have narrowly escaped being ripped and torn by dogs and orphaned by bad luck. But now they are safe, recovering in incubators and cages, in cardboard boxes and pet carriers stacked almost to the ceiling. They squawk and flap, screech and flutter. Their songs of the wild bounce off the bedroom walls.
Distracted, I take my eye off the snapper for just a moment and don’t notice that it is less than 12 inches from my left foot until the mistress of the menagerie, Dawn Keller, reaches down and snatches her up. “She saw her next meal,” Keller says, holding the turtle like a platter. “She could have taken one of your toes right off. Now that would have been a mess.”
I cringe, envisioning limping through life. But Keller just grins and goes happily and expertly about the business of mending the turtle’s shell, which had been fractured in two places when it was run over by an SUV in Antioch.
Keller cleans the cracks and smoothes an antibacterial cream over them. Then she gently pulls and straightens the snapper’s hind leg, looking for the best spot to inject it with antibiotics.
“I’m so sorry,” she tells the turtle before putting it back in its pen. “I know it hurts. But it’s going to feel better soon.”
For the 43-year-old Keller, there will be no respite anytime soon. Long into the night and well into the next morning, she will climb up and down the stairs, washing, feeding, injecting and soothing the animals temporarily living under her roof. If she is lucky, she’ll get to lay her head down for three, maybe four hours. “I work 20 hours a day, seven days a week,” she says.
She wears animal-stained jeans, with holes under each knee, a radical departure from the stylish business suits she wore in the corporate world, where she had been an executive for a decade. Now on hiatus from that world, Keller doesn’t make a dime from her labor of love. She spends plenty of her own money, though, on food, medicine and $30,000 for something called a flight chamber, a 40-foot-long, 15-foot-high enclosure behind her house for injured birds to practice flying.
Keller is a member of a dedicated breed of animal lovers called wildlife rehabilitators, rehabbers for short. The mission of these citizen conservationists is to treat injured and sick wildlife and release them as quickly as possible back to the woods, fields and skies from which they crawled, limped or fell.
“Releases are why we do what we do,” Keller says. “It’s what keeps us working the long hours. Even if something happens to an animal two days after I release it, at least I gave it its ability to be wild again.”
The 250 volunteer rehabbers in Illinois are licensed by the state to provide emergency care for most kinds of wild mammals, and they are a crucial safety net for overworked government and private wildlife-protection agencies. However, their numbers are dwindling, says Brian Clark of the state Department of Natural Resources, which issues the licenses. “I think a lot of people are realizing how much work it actually is to be a rehabilitator,” he says. “And it’s not an inexpensive proposition.”
Keller also has a federal license that allows her to take in birds, making her the hawk-deer-sparrow-owl-squirrel-vulture-b unny-woodpecker-snapper-opossum-whatever-else-you-can-name whisperer.
Most of the volunteers work out of their homes and typically care for just a few animals at a time.
Keller has 127 animals under her care and mostly works at home, but she recently signed a deal with the Chicago Park District to operate a bird clinic and triage center on Northerly Island. She runs the center out of two rooms in the former terminal building at what used to be Meigs Field.
Since April 1, when the downtown clinic first opened its doors, it has treated about 400 injured avians. The most serious cases are transferred to the Barrington house.
The vast majority of the animals she cares for come to her from the general public, such as an injured kestrel brought in by the Chicago firefighter who drove out to Barrington on his day off, or the baby squirrel that a little girl and her mother carried in a shoebox. The little girl left a note in the box saying goodbye to the squirrel and informing Keller that its name was Pumpkin.
Keller will take in any wounded wildlife except for raccoons, bats and skunks. If you do find yourself stuck with an injured or sick raccoon, don’t despair: Keller will refer you to the Raccoon Lady, a rehabber in Wonder Lake who specializes in those critters. As for bats and skunks, they are frequent carriers of rabies and no one is licensed in Illinois to treat them. All Keller can do is suggest you call the Department of Natural Resources.
In 2003, she founded Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation, operating it out of the second floor of the three-bedroom house she shares with her supportive “significant other,” Phil Hampel, a 44-year-old information technology consultant who also runs a sports photography business.
He often takes the 60 or so calls Flint Creek gets a day. He also maintains the Web site, flintcreekwildlife.org, and organizes fund-raisers. Keller gets no government funding and relies on donations and volunteers to keep the doors open and incubators humming.
So how does Hampel feel about the upstairs of his house being converted into a wildlife MASH unit? “I get to play the martyr,” he says. ” ‘Hey, I have 127 animals living in my house. Somebody please be nice to me.’ “
In the beginning, they had one incubator in the corner of one room and treated 150 animals over the course of a year. In 2005, they helped 1,100 animals. So far this year, they have cared for more than 800 animals and birds, and they expect the total will be more than 2,000 by the end of the year.
Keller can’t remember the last time she saw a movie, worked out in the gym, toiled in her garden or had a full night’s sleep. Her last vacation was five years ago, a weekend at Starved Rock State Park.
“I miss a lot of family functions. A lot of times, I’m by myself and I can’t leave the animals. My family is supportive, but I don’t know if they get it. Unless you’ve done it, you can’t understand what it’s like to have something this consuming.”
But she has no intention of “working these crazy hours for the rest of my life.” She wants Flint Creek to be able to operate without her someday so she can go back to corporate work. She has one full-time employee, Becky Buzenski, 25, and a roster of volunteers.
Right now, Flint Creek seems a long way from surviving without its founder. Keller compares the effort to getting any fledging business off the ground: Putting in grueling hours goes with the territory. “The only difference is we’re a not-for-profit,” she says.
A more immediate goal is to move Flint Creek out of her house and into a permanent building of its own. Then she could have a guest room again-for people.
In the bedroom, it’s time to give the red-tailed hawk its medicine. Keller pulls on a pair of thick brown welding gloves for protection. “I can’t think of a rehabber I know who hasn’t been to the emergency room,” she says. “Sooner or later, it’s going to happen. But I’ve been very lucky. I’ve never been to the hospital.”
Her arms are covered with red welts and scratches. Once a hawk stuck his talons into her. “It wasn’t too bad,” she says.
The closest she came to going to the hospital was a squirrel bite. “Phil wanted me to go,” she says. “I monitored it. It stopped bleeding.”
The do’s and don’ts of rehabbing are contained in a thick volume called “Principles of Wildlife Rehabilitation: The Essential Guide for Novice and Experienced Rehabilitators,” written by two veteran Illinois rehabbers, Adele T. Moore and Sally Joosten, published by the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association.
Under the heading “Knowing limits” is a discussion of “the most important thing of all-human safety.” It warns, “Do not be the next well-meaning person to lose an eye to a heron, or to lose the use of one hand because a great horned owl tore some tendons.”
As it turns out, the next day Keller has a date with a great horned owl.
There are other dangers discussed in the book, from rehabber burnout to “zoonotic disease,” an ailment “transmissible from any other animal species to people.” The diseases, the book says, can be caused by bacteria, viruses and parasites among other things.
“The squirrel you’re handling could have tularemia,” it says, “or a tick carrying Lyme disease might crawl onto you.”
Keller believes she has already survived a bout of West Nile disease two years ago. “One day I was fine,” she recalls. “The next it hit me like a freight train. I think I slept for two days straight.”
Sally Joosten of Woodstock, the co-author of “Principles of Wildlife Rehabilitation,” has been rehabbing for 40 years and an animal lover her entire life. When she was 9, her cat brought in some bunnies by the scruff of the neck. Little Sally rescued them and looked around for a way to keep them warm. That’s when she saw her mother’s fur coat. She cut it up and turned the remnants into a bunny bed. “The bunnies survived,” she says. “I almost didn’t.”
Joosten says that although people have been helping distressed animals for centuries, only in the last 20 to 30 years has wildlife rehabilitation grown into a structured discipline. The National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association, for example, was founded in 1982 to provide information and training. It will mark its 25th anniversary next year with a convention in the Chicago area.
The group has adopted an 11-point code of ethics, which states, in part: A wildlife rehabilitator should be responsible, conscientious and dedicated, should place optimum animal care above personal gain and should respect other rehabilitators.
That isn’t always easy, says Linda Breuer, founder of Barnswallow, a bird-rehabilitation center in Wauconda. “Some of us don’t get along that well,” she admits. “There are some rehabbers who do it for ego, because it makes them look cool. ‘Look, at me, I have a fox running around my kitchen.’ I’ve seen it happen.”
Keller is definitely not one of those people. Wildlife is largely restricted to the second floor, “and we don’t interact with the wildlife any more than necessary,” she says. “Feeding. Cleaning. Medical care. Release.”
Keller works closely with a couple of local vets, who taught her how to run an intravenous solution into a sparrow and how to give a frightened fawn a sedative so its wound could be cleaned. She has local animal hospitals on speed dial for the more complicated cases, a closet full of medicine and syringes and an extensive library of wildlife books, including “Reptile Medicine and Surgery.” She has IV pumps, feeding tubes, incubators.
“I never want to be in a position where I could have done more for an animal but didn’t have what I needed,” she says.
She also has a special freezer to accommodate an inventory of black plastic body bags containing the remains of animals that didn’t make it. When the freezer is full, Keller calls a cremation service.
Death is a weekly occurrence at Flint Creek. Some of the animals die of their injuries or disease; others are euthanized to end their suffering.
“I’ve come to view it as a gift I can give them,” she says.
Still, it can be a hard choice to make. “We don’t want to be premature on euthanasia decisions,” she says. “Sometimes you don’t know what’s possible until you try.”
Keller has finished caring for the hawk and is sitting at a small work table, examining a sick robin. “This one almost died two days ago,” she says, a small syringe dangling between her teeth like a cigarette.
She has fed everyone, the kestrels and the heron, the squirrels and the opossum orphans (their mom was hit by a car). Now Keller needs to wash up for her own lunch. “This is typical,” she says, looking down at the front of her Flint Creek T-shirt. “I’m covered in poop. This is bunny poop. This is crow-stepped-in-its-food stuff. This is turtle something or other.”
The washer and dryer in her house are kept running almost as much as Keller is. In addition to her own clothes, she washes dozens of towels and blankets she uses for the animals. She’s sorting through a pile of soiled towels when Chicago banker Linda Braasch pulls into the long driveway with a tiny finch in a big white plastic bucket by her side.
The night before, as Braasch drove to dinner with a friend, the baby finch fell out of its nest and landed on top of her car, stunned and hurt.
“I felt so bad for it,” Braasch tells Keller. “I certainly couldn’t just leave it on the side of the road for some cat to get it.”
Keller says, “Thanks so much for the long drive.”
A couple of days later on a Sunday afternoon, Hampel is answering call after call while Keller is upstairs tending to the animals.
A woman wants to bring in some baby bunnies she rescued from a girl who was throwing them against a brick wall. At 1:45 there’s a dove coming in, an opossum between 2 and 2:30, a starling at 3 and a blue jay at 4.
Rhonda Ramsey brings the opossum in a box. She found the animal by the side of her house, tiny and alone. Hampel meets her in the driveway and has her fill out an information sheet. She hands him a bag of bath towels as a donation.
“Everything helps,” he says.
It took Keller years to answer the call of the wild. She grew up in Glenview and Northbrook and had a couple of dogs as a child. Taffy and Tugs. But she never had any Dr. Dolittle aspirations.
She majored in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois, and for most of her professional life she has steadily climbed the corporate ladder, including 17 years at Morton Salt.
“But I wanted to do more than make money for a company,” she says. “I wanted to give back, to look beyond myself.” In 1985, she was transferred to Texas and began volunteering at a local humane society, fostering dogs like the one a group of kids doused with gasoline and set on fire. “That still blows my mind,” she says.
In 1993, she returned to Chicago and was so busy with her career that she didn’t have time to volunteer at the humane society. Then one day she watched in horror as a cat was hit by a car in Palatine and she got involved again in what she calls domestic animal rescue. “I missed helping,” she says. “I felt I hadn’t been doing anything for anybody except me.”
Then a bloody opossum changed her life.
In 2001, shortly after her father died, Keller was driving home from work in his 1990 black Lincoln. He loved that car and Keller could feel his hands on the wheel as she cruised down Long Grove Road and spotted an opossum, bleeding and battered, lying along the shoulder. She pulled over and walked back to inspect the animal. She had vowed to herself never to simply keep driving past an animal in distress.
The opossum was still alive. Keller took off her leather coat, wrapped it around the opossum and put the animal in the trunk of the Lincoln. “It was bleeding profusely,” she says. “I remember saying, ‘Dad, sorry about the blood.’ “
When she got home, she spent several frustrating hours on the telephone trying to find help for the animal. One rehabber handled only birds of prey. Another was strictly rabbits. Someone else helped only songbirds.
Eventually she found someone who was able to treat the opossum, but the experience convinced her that there was a need for a place like Flint Creek, a Noah’s Ark of rehab centers.
It would be two years of extensive training before Keller opened for business. She volunteered at a rehabilitation center and put in 850 hours. “That’s a lot of Saturdays,” she says.
Last April, a great horned owl crashed into a building on the tree-dotted campus of the Allstate Insurance Company offices in South Barrington. The owl was knocked unconscious and landed on the sidewalk. Allstate employees called Flint Creek.
The owl had suffered major head trauma, and it spent its first days with Keller in a coma-like sleep. Now, nearly three months later, the owl is wide awake. He has his eyes on Keller and the net dangling from the end of the long pole she has carried into the flight chamber.
Keller slowly moves toward the owl, holding the net in front of her. Suddenly, she drops it and grabs the owl with her gloved hands. “I don’t like to net them unless I have to,” she says.
The owl flaps his wings and Keller tells him everything is going to be all right. He’s going home.
She puts him in a cardboard box and loads it onto the front passenger seat of her father’s Lincoln. (“I can’t afford a new car,” she says. “I give all my money away.”) She drives the owl back to the Allstate campus. If possible, rehabbers like to release wildlife where they were found; the animals already know the territory, the best places to find food, the dangers.
Keller is joined at the release by Hampel, Becky Buzenski, the Flint Creek employee, two volunteers and a couple that once brought an injured animal to the center. “Everybody likes to see a release,” Keller says.
Carrying the box with the owl, she leads the way, searching for the best location. One spot is too close to the highway, another too close to the buildings. Finally, she chooses an open expanse of lawn.
Keller lifts the owl out of the box. It bites at her shirt. She holds it away from her until it calms down.
With dusk falling, she opens her hands, gently launches it into the air and says, “Good luck, buddy.”
Wings spread and snapping, the owl is gone, headed for the trees.
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LICENSED WILDLIFE REHABILITATORS IN THE CHICAGO AREA
– Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation, Barrington and Chicago, 847-602-0628. Call to make an appointment.
– Willowbrook Wildlife Center, Glen Ellyn, 630-942-6200.
– Fox Valley Wildlife Center, Elburn, Ill., 630-365-3800.
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dterry@tribune.com
