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Community Corner

This Couple Can Tweet!

A Place Called Hope Founders Couldn't Be Wilder About Birds

If you discovered an injured, orphaned or ill bird, would you know what to do? Would you call the animal control officer, the police or the vet?

Patch interviewed Christine Cummings-Secki and Todd Secki, experts in raptor rescue and rehabilitation who operate A Place Called Hope, a center for non-releasable birds of prey. The two offer insight into their own lives, the lives of their adoptees, and what we all need to know. 

How do you balance your day jobs with rehabilitator responsibilities?

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Christine: We both have full time day jobs. That's the way we make our money because being a nonprofit we don’t get paid. The state, the government, they don’t fund us. Isn’t that sad?

Fortunately for me, I own and operate my own dog and cat grooming business I’ve had in Guilford for 18 years. Because I’m the owner and operator, I get to bring a lot of animals with me. In the springtime when we get the baby songbirds, they have to be fed every eight minutes to start. It’s a big deal! Basically baby birds are in my pocketbook when I go anywhere. It’s a real tweet for sure!

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Luckily for A Place Called Hope, we do have a lot of volunteers at this point.  We first really started operating in 2007 so we’ve got a couple of years under us where we’ve gained a lot of attention and have a lot of people who are as enthusiastic as we are. That’s a wonderful thing because volunteers are crucial to what we do.

Once a week we have to clean all of the aviaries on the property and that’s a time-consuming chore. It takes a lot of time and patience and energy ... and then add the rehabilitations into the mix.

We have a rehab room inside the house and then all the outdoor aviaries. The ones that are inside are the critical care cases. They usually graduate to go outside if they recover from whatever they are suffering from. It’s a round-the-clock ordeal. I don’t know how we balance our workdays, and 100 percent of our time and passion goes to A Place Called Hope.

We think it’s because we really enjoy what we’re doing so much. We love what we’re doing with the birds. Once you get involved with something like this and you get to connect with any of these birds it grows. Every day you love them more and you want to do more. With every bird that gets successfully rehabilitated and released it’s so rewarding. There’s no pay that can be enough. It’s addictive.

Do you suffer from separation anxiety when the birds leave?

Christine: In the beginning I would lose a lot more sleep but now that we’ve been doing this as long as we have it gets easier. I won’t say that it ever completely goes away; you always worry and you always wonder and you always hope. All we can do is know we’ve given birds or wildlife a  second chance. They would have died if we hadn’t intervened.

Springtime gives us the most restless nights because when we do renesting it’s a big deal. It takes a whole crew of people. It’s a wait game because you don’t know if the babies you put in the manmade nest are going to be taken care of by the adults. You have to wait and watch and keep checking.

Since 2006 every renesting project we’ve ever done has been successful so you’d think you’d relax and not lose any sleep but you do.

As kids were you really into wildlife?

Christine: Always. I’m sure a lot of wildlife rehabilitators just got turned onto it through seeing a birds of prey presentation or wolves or whatever you’re into, but I’ve always been into animals from the get-go.

In Todd’s case, he came from a family that is respectful of nature and he’s really into photography. He’s been doing wildlife photography for so many years so his passion for wildlife has always been there.

Our kids are now young adults so we are finally able to focus on what keeps us passionate about life and wanting to get up every day.

Somebody said "find your passion, follow your bliss." If you can make your life’s work what it is that you’re passionate about it’s no longer work. With wildlife rehabilitation, even before we were licensed we would get calls from people who didn’t know what to do. We were kind of directed this way because we would find ourselves answering those calls anyway.

Why is wildlife rehabilitation so important?

Christine: They all have their reasons for being here. It would be such a shame to lose some of these species because of human conflicts and what we’re doing to the planet and human pollution. Everybody has their role.

With the bat population, the bats are suffering from white nose syndrome. Last I knew we’ve lost 85 percent of the bat population here in Connecticut. That’s a lot and that means the mosquito population is going to be unreal this year, which means that we’re going to be looking at more cases of West Nile and encephalitis and all of those things that come along with mosquitoes.

Everybody has their role, and in order for us to continue to be a healthy planet, we need to be able to preserve what is here, not to mention that it would be a shame if the children of today don’t get to experience these incredible creatures. 

What are the goals of the organization?

Christine: The most basic goal is to get the birds back to freedom whenever possible. We rescue, renest and rehabilitate injured, orphaned or ill birds. Our goal is to get everybody back to where they belong, giving them a second chance. For those that can’t be returned to freedom, we go onto our next goal which is education.

The next goal is educating the public about lessening conflicts and what you can do if you come across one which is injured, orphaned or ill. For instance, mouse or rat poison. A lot of people don’t think about what that does to the environment. When you poison a mouse or rat, they go off to die and then another animal comes along and eats it. Then that animal dies and it’s a chain reaction. Little simple things like that – we like to educate people on not using those types of poisons and pesticides.

Our favorite – this time of year a lot of babies are about to be born. It’s a myth that if a human being touches a baby bird, the parents will reject it because of the human scent. We all grow up believing that if we touch the baby birds, the parents won’t take them back. It’s not true. We really stress that because it’s critical to know that you can take those babies and you can put them back in their nest.

If a nest is not reachable or you cannot find it, you can make a nest out of household items – baskets, butter tubs or little containers that you can fasten to a tree as close to where the babies were found but high enough off the ground and out of direct sunlight.

People going through the process should call a wildlife rehabilitator to walk them through it, but it is easy and fun and you can monitor and watch the family reunite. There’s nothing better than that because birds should be raised by birds, and it lessens my job because I don’t have to bring babies everywhere with me!

How does one become a rehabilitator?

Christine: It is a process. You go through the Department of Environmental Protection. First, you have to volunteer and get a lot of hours under your belt. You have to go to seminars that the DEP puts on. There’s a very long test that you have to take. Once you pass the test and get the hours and you get a veterinarian to sign off on you saying that they would help you with surgeries or whatever it is they are willing to help you with. Then, you get your first license which is your basic wildlife license which allows you to work with some small animals and the non-native birds like pigeons, starlings and grackles. You don’t get to do very much.

If you decide you want to specialize in something (like fox or raccoons), you go into training for that. In our case it was migratory birds. All birds are federally protected except for the non-native species like the starling, the house sparrow, the pigeons. All the other ones are protected so in order to work with them legally, you have to get a federal permit. In order to get a federal permit, you have to build aviary space wherever you live. Once you have the aviary space up, you go through an application process with US Fish and Wildlife Service.

It’s quite a process and it discourages a lot of people when they understand it, but if it’s something people are passionate about doing, they follow through.

If you have a bird that is non-releaseable, you have to get an educational permit. You are now allowed by the federal government and the state to house the bird for the rest of the bird’s life provided you do educational presentations.

In order to do that and be successful at it and not go broke – and all of this is out of your own pocket – you can go the next step which is what we did and go nonprofit. We became a nonprofit organization, a center, so that we could have volunteers and so that people could donate to us – whether that is time or supplies or money – tax deductible.

A lot of the places like schools and libraries like to see that you are nonprofit because then their money is going to a cause and it’s tax deductible.

It costs a lot of money to get set up. That’s money you don’t see in your pockets but that’s what we wanted to do. Our house has been converted. Everything is all on our property. Our neighbors, when they drove by, were certainly curious!

Some of our aviaries are quite large, and there are 11 aviaries on the property and it’s an ongoing thing because you never have enough space and no cage for any bird is ever big enough because these are wild birds which should be flying free.

A lot of the birds that are in our care are birds that can’t go back to freedom. Our goal is to get them all back to freedom where they belong but some can’t go back to their environment.

What are the biggest challenges you face?

Christine: For me personally the biggest challenge I’ve faced over the years is making mistakes because you feel very responsible. When you make a mistake, you learn from it and never make the same mistake twice. It’s not a good feeling to make a mistake and have an animal suffer for it.   

Todd: One of the really big things is keeping this whole machine up and running. It's unbelievable -- huge aviaries, all kinds of electricity, there's heat, there's cleaning, there's taking care of the birds, there's feeding every day, there's cleaning the food and food storage. It's a huge operation and everything is outside. The winter was insane. We're here no matter what. It is a huge challenge to keep this up and running. Behind the scenes it's just crazy. 

How many volunteers do you have, and are you looking for more? 

Christine: I would say our regular volunteers fluctuates between 12 and 17 people. We always accept new volunteers. Particularly in the summertime we see a lot more of the younger kids come – the 11 and 12 year olds – which we welcome on Volunteer Day. We have volunteers who come through for community service hours or high school community service hours. We do have volunteers who come through for hours and life experience and move onto something else or decide it’s not for them, and we have some that are so committed that they eat, sleep and drink it like we do.

Our vice president, Grace Krick, she was teaching an Introduction to Wildlife Rehabilitation class through Middlesex Community College Adult Education. That’s how we started – we went to her class and lo and behold at this stage in the game she is now vice president of this organization. [Christine is president and Todd is secretary/treasurer].

What happens to the birds that can’t be rehabilitated?

Christine: It’s up to us [whether they go to other centers]. We see mostly Red-tailed Hawks come through but we can’t keep everybody. What we do in that case, if we have a non-releaseable bird, we try to get them placed in another center.

It’s not always easy but you can do it, and you can have that done across state lines.

We just recently acquired a Barn Owl from Texas. Barn Owls are endangered in Connecticut and we’ve only seen one in rehab. It’s not likely that we’ll ever come across a Barn Owl that’s a non-releaseable case that would become a resident. So, we looked elsewhere for a Barn Owl that was non-releaseable that we can have at our center that we can train so it can do educational programming to help us with the message of the Barn Owl in Connecticut.

The Barred Owl, another kind of owl that is common in Connecticut, I think right now is probably the most common owl that we have because we have so many that have come through in rehabilitation. Usually when we see higher numbers of injuries of a particular species, that tells us that that particular species is thriving. The ones that we don’t see as often are ones that probably aren’t big in numbers in Connecticut.

How do you get funding?

Christine: Education is critical for our support. We go out and do these presentations and some places will hire us with a suggested donation fee and others will have us come out and collect wish list items and people will donate to us. That’s basically how we’re funded – through fundraising events and donations from the public.

We’ve had a couple of grants over the years and that’s something you can only do if you’re a nonprofit. That’s one reason to be a nonprofit if you are in wildlife rehabilitation because you can apply for grants. It’s very important that we get out there and get our name out there so we do get support from the public.

Another thing that’s important for the public to know is that, when you do deal with wildlife rehabilitators, it’s proper etiquette if you’re bringing an injured animal to somebody to give them some sort of donation. A lot of people don’t know that, and in the crisis of the moment you don’t always think about that.

A lot of people don’t think about it because the bird is the number one priority, but then a couple of weeks go by and you get a donation from them in the mail.

Wildlife rehabilitation has restored my faith in mankind. It’s been such a positive experience in that sense because I have met so many wonderful, caring individuals.

With our organization we’ve been able to work with other great organizations that have the same mission to preserve the planet and wildlife and nature. It’s been a joyous ride.

What should we know about renesting?

Todd: There are so many things that baby birds and animals learn from their parents at that stage that it is so important to get them into the hands of a rehabber. We can't teach them certain things like how to hunt and the different calls and sounds they have - that all comes from the parent - and who's a predator and who's not. Some of it's as simple as putting a baby robin five feet off the ground in a tree in a basket, and a lot of what we do is putting Great Horned Owls back up the tree. In some cases we're going 70 feet up in a tree to put the owls back up.

Owls do not build their own nests; they take over other nests from birds like hawks and ravens and crows. In a lot of cases, the owls are nesting in old nests that are ready to come down. What happens is a big wind comes up and one of the babies will be blown out of the nest. If we can't get back up to the nest or we don't think the original nest is safe, I build a platform nest out of plywood, branches and sticks. I go up in a boom truck about 70 feet up and fasten the platform nest into the trees, and then we fill the nest with food and put the babies in the platform nest and wait to make sure the parents come down and feed them again, which has always been the case. It's really amazing to do this and see that the parents come back and take over. 

A lot of the times in renesting the parents are right there flying around making all kinds of noise. It's almost like they know exactly what we're doing. I've had that happen quite a bit and it is pretty cool. 

Who does one call if they see an injured bird? 

Christine: You get calls at any time and any hour. If I get a call and I’m at work I call Todd because he is more able to leave his jobsite than I am. If he’s not available I call Grace. If she’s not available we go down the list. It depends on what kind of bird it is and the volunteer’s experience level. We have a network of people we call on.

We do rescuing basically local but we go across the state.

When people come across injured wildlife, they don’t know who to call typically. The answer to that is the DEP. They list every licensed wildlife rehabilitator in the state by town and what it is they specialize in.

Most people don’t know that. I think it should be listed in the phonebook under "Wildlife Rehabilitation."

Most people think "animal" – I’ll call the vet or a police officer or the animal control officer. Or, I’ll call that couple.

What we promote when we’re at presentations, we always suggest people take our business cards because if they should be in that situation and, even if it’s not a bird, they can always call one of us and we’ll point them in the right direction.

Once people understand it’s the DEP it’s quite simple to find who’s closest to you and make the phone calls.

The DEP has a 24-hour wildlife crisis hotline. Whoever mans the phone gives out the phone numbers. The number is 860-424-3333 (for emergency dispatch). The basic number is 860-424-3011. The website has a list you can print and keep in your glove compartment of your car at www.ct.gov/dep

Inevitably, everyone is going to come across wildlife at some point that does need assistance.

For additional information on A Place Called Hope, their programs, and how you can help, please visit http://www.aplacecalledhoperaptors.com/

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