Wild Instincts Wildlife Rehabilitation Center near Rhinelander takes in and cares for upwards of a 1,000 animals each year.
With three months still to go in 2024, they’ve already admitted more than 1,200.
“It’s been extremely busy this year,” said Rehabilitation Director Mark Naniot.
Before the busy summer season started, Naniot thought admission might actually be lower this year because of the mild winter.
“We thought, you know, the animals would come through in much better shape, and wouldn't really be a big deal. And it turned out to be a very big deal,” he said.
Instead, Wild Instincts was getting baby birds and fawns more than a month earlier than typical, and they’ve just kept coming.
Naniot says birds that usually have three nesting’s a year instead had four or five this year. Just a few days ago, they admitted some bobcats that are only eight weeks old.
“What it means for us is basically keeping them all winter because they won't be ready to be released,” said Naniot. “A lot of these cages we don't shovel, or do anything too, so of course, we're going to have to be shoveling these cages and maintaining things all winter long for some of these things that'll be wintered over.”
Though, based on the animals having babies this late in the year, Naniot suspects this winter won’t be too harsh.
“It's been something that we've noticed over all the years. We can kind of tell when things are early, things are fast, that there might be a kind of a nasty winter coming,” said Naniot. “When things are slower and late, then it's either going to be a later winter or a more mild winter. This year is shaping up to be maybe even both.”
Naniot says the animals that come to them are a mixed of injured, sick, and those that are displaced by human activity.
On top of the busy summer, Wild Instincts is still working with COVID protocols for many of the species it handles.
Wisconsin still has COVID-19 protocols in place for wildlife in the weasel, cats, and deer families. These are ones known to be able to carry the virus.
For example, some states are finding up to 40% deer in their study have been exposed to COVID.
The deer don’t show any symptoms. Naniot says the precautions are more for human safety.
“The biggest worry is the animal getting it, then giving it back to the caregivers, giving it back to the humans. It can change forms and thing, so you can get a variant that might come back in a different way that maybe our vaccines wouldn't cover,” said Naniot. “We can start a whole nother round of problems there, because the viruses mutate, and every time they get into a different host, things can go a little bit differently.”
Wild Instincts has also been collecting samples for a COVID study with the University of Florida.
They’ve been taking blood samples from deer and swabs of a whole range of species.
“They're trying to test as many different species as they can. We're testing a bunch of things, from flying squirrels to rabbits to you name it. We're doing some swabbing and trying to help out with that study to help them find out if there's any other things going on in the wild population,” said Naniot.
Wild Instincts is always in need of donations that range from monetary to paper towels to fish. Naniot says they were going to 35 pounds of fish per day this year.
Wild Instincts also keeps an Amazon Wish List of items it regularly needs.
