"And their hearing is excellent," 

 she says. "It's said they can hear the 

 heartbeat of a mouse under a foot of 

 snow." 



She moves into a spacious covered 

 chainlink pen, where two soggy hawks 

 await dinner. "A man donated this 

 kennel after I raised a nest of Carolina 

 wrens he brought me," she says, 

 moving toward a permanent red-tailed 

 resident she calls Ranger. "In a cage, 

 they look pretty benign; but if you get 

 up on them, they can be very formi- 

 dable." 



She raises two gloved forearms 

 toward Ranger in what looks like a 

 martial arts stance. The hawk leans its 

 shoulders back and raises its claws. 



"They'll put their feet up to defend 

 themselves before anything else," she 

 says, sparring with the animal. 



Wounded by a bullet, the desper- 

 ate, emaciated bird was found chasing 

 kittens on someone's porch. But when 

 the hawk first arrived, it was too 

 stressed to eat. Concerned, Hucks 

 cupped a handful of chicken livers 

 beneath the bird's beak, and it grabbed 

 her wrist with its talon. 



"That taught me never to hand 

 anything to a hawk unless you have 

 gloves on," she says. 



A free-lance writer and wildlife 

 educator, Hucks was mentored by an 

 experienced Wilmington rehabilitator 

 and consults regularly with the 

 Charlotte Raptor Center. After a few 

 years of rehabilitating, she adopted 

 raptors as her specialty. Though she's 

 bottle-raised beavers, rabbits and 

 squirrels, she's known around this 

 small Pender County community as 

 "the owl lady." 



"The first bird of prey that was 

 ever brought to me was a barred owl," 

 she says. "I just couldn't stop looking 

 at it. I'm not a New Age type, but there 

 was a connection there. I thought this is 

 it. This is what I want to do. My 

 grandmother had always loved owls." 



Inside the house Hucks shares with 

 her three children, four orphaned 

 screech owls have begun a soft trill in 

 their cages inside a small indoor porch. 

 In a comer cage, red phase and gray 



phase screech owls look skeptical. 

 Hucks uses these two — both with 

 permanent injuries — in her educational 

 programs. 



She tosses a few mice into both cages. 

 The orphans patiently tear into the fur 

 with their talons and stuff pieces into their 

 mouths. A glass cage of lizards on the floor 

 beside them piques their interest in live 

 prey. The owls stab at the paper lining in 

 their cage, making confetti to bat and 

 attack. They're almost ready for the wild. 



c 



V_^artoon alligator lifeguards with pink 

 and green beachballs frolic on a plastic 

 swimming pool. In its shallow depths, four 

 real-life raccoons splash through the water 

 and climb up the front of their cage, 

 peering out beyond the orderly maze of 

 pens at OWLS. 



There's a large concrete pool for 

 pelicans, gulls and terns and cages of all 

 sizes and shapes for raptors, reptiles and 

 rabbits. 



"We take in all species of wild 

 animals," says Baptist, adding that 

 marauding raccoons receive the same 

 tender care as a pileated woodpecker. "All 

 of them, to me, are special." 



Inside the nursery, Maureen, a shelter 

 volunteer, reaches into a makeshift 



marsupial pouch inside a dry aquarium. 

 From an athletic sock wrapped around 

 a piece of PVC pipe, she extracts a 

 baby opossum. Maureen begins to 

 "gavage" or tube feed the shy patient. 

 A visiting photographer snaps a flash 

 picture; the opossum winces. An 

 onlooker muses whether this will train 

 the animal to avoid the headlights of a 

 car, an enemy that the opossum, if 

 released, will most surely face. 



To some people, including many 

 biologists, this is too much ado for a so- 

 called "trash" species with exploding 

 populations. Most rehabilitators don't 

 discriminate. But as volunteers see 

 escalating numbers of sick wildlife — 

 from the abundant to the rare — the 

 philosophical question of what level of 

 resources to devote to what species 

 becomes evermore persistent. 



The N.C. Aquarium at Ft. Fisher 

 gets more than 100 calls a year from 

 people who have found a seagull or 

 other shorebird with a broken wing. 



"It's not that we don't want to 

 assist with birds and whatnot, but it's 

 just too overwhelming," says Paul 

 Barrington, curator of animal hus- 

 bandry and a member of the Marine 

 Mammal Stranding Network. "Animals 



Continued 



Feeding time for baby chimney swifts at the shelter. 



COASTWATCH 1 9 



