The 



of the 

 Wild 



By Carla B. Burgess 



The Virginia rail opens its 

 slender beak reluctantly, and a 

 volunteer inserts a feeding tube. 

 Her voice respectfully lowered, 

 Cheryl Baptist looks on. 



"You never get up close to these guys," she says of this 

 marsh bird, which is very secretive in the wild. "This one 

 was in the line of someone spraying for mosquitoes." 

 Flushed from its marsh hideaway, the stunned and intoxi- 

 cated bird then flew into a moving car. 



Here in the intensive care room of the Outer Banks 

 Wildlife Shelter (OWLS) in Morehead City, the rail was 

 treated for a head injury and given an antidote to combat the 

 poison. The swelling subsided and the bird's circulation 

 improved, says Baptist, but it has "eye problems" and still 

 won't eat on its own. 



Outside the clean, white walls of this cinderblock 

 building, cars and trucks whiz by on U.S. 70 toward Bogue 

 Banks. An angler in a nearby estuary cuts and abandons a 

 piece of tangled fishing line. A local gardener sprays her 

 rose bushes for bugs. A bored child takes potshots at a hawk 

 circling overhead. 



And the casualties pour into OWLS, where Baptist — 

 the only paid staffer at this privately funded nonprofit shelter 

 — and some 40 volunteers try to repair the damage caused 

 by humans. Through donations, the shelter treated 200 

 animals in its first year of operation in 1988. The annual 

 patient load has ballooned to 2,000 animals. They see 

 wildlife injured on the highway, birds that have swallowed 

 poisoned insects, owls and hawks wounded by gunshots and 

 pelicans with fishhooks lodged in their throats. 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 1 5 



