|
|
WCA Volunteer Information
Thank you for your interest in helping Wildlife Care Alliance.
We are a group of licensed wildlife rehabilitators and concerned citizens
working together to benefit native Virginia wildlife. Wildlife Care
Alliance is a non-profit organization made up entirely of volunteers.
Our organization serves a geographic area encompassing Roanoke, Bedford,
Lynchburg, Blacksburg, Covington, adjacent counties and beyond-a large
area of central-southwest Virginia. Our organization needs people like
you to help our rehabilitators provide quality specialized care to orphaned,
injured, sick, or displaced wildlife. Our goal is to release healthy,
viable animals into an appropriate habitat.
We are a network of individual rehabilitators and volunteers that operate
out of our homes. We do not have a center for these activities. This
network allows individual rehabilitators to specialize in one or two
species thus providing a higher quality of care than if each one of
us worked with multiple species. Our experience has proven that wild
animals respond best to the individualized care and specialized expertise
we offer them. Stress is reduced and recovery is faster when wild animals
are housed in quiet surroundings and are cared for by one or two people
rather than by many different people.
Home-based operation creates the need for different types of volunteer
help:
- HOTLINE: Answering phone calls from the public is vital to
the work we do. The Hotline has the very important function of connecting
wildlife in need with appropriate trained rehabilitators, reuniting
parents with young, and teaching callers about the natural history of
our area's wildlife. We provide training and a hotline manual that details
how to handle most situations. We use a remote-access answering machine
so you can check the line from your home phone. You can choose the hours
or days you are available.
- TRANSPORT of wildlife to appropriate rehabilitators is also
an extremely important job. Because we are spread out geographically,
the miles our transporters log allow us to spend that much more time,
energy and money on animal care. We provide training and written guidelines
for transporters so that our wild patients can travel as stress-free
as possible.
- HANDS ON WILDLIFE REHABILITATION is available to those who
wish to follow the steps necessary to obtain a permit to rehabilitate
native wildlife. Our experienced rehabilitators will help you through
this process. You can choose apprenticeship and set up your own home-based
operation, or you can get a "baby-sitter's" permit and help
in an experienced rehabber's home. In order to handle the caseload of
wildlife in trouble, we need new rehabilitators.
There are many other volunteer opportunities as well. If you are interested
in helping us, please print the volunteer form,
complete and return it to us. We will contact you with further information.
Thank you for caring about wildlife.
|
