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| Twilight, at Forever Wild. |
The sun is flattening against the horizon as a red pickup pulls in between the trailers and flight cages at Forever Wild. There's a tap of the horn, and everyone in hearing range drops what they're doing to fall in line and bring the new arrivals in for triage. The moment echoes the opening credits to M*A*S*H, with its descending helicopter and crouching doctors. But these aren't fallen soldiers coming in from battlefield Tucson: they're doves, quail, owls; rabbits, roadrunners, hawks. Their maladies range from simple contusions and broken wings to heavy metal poisoning and rare avian diseases like “bumblefoot.” Many will not make it through the night; some will be nursed along hopefully for months before passing on to that great desert in the sky. Many are in perfect health, but nonetheless are orphaned, disoriented, distressed, dispossessed of their land. Lost, you might say, in the vagaries of the borderlands between the civilized new world and the ancient, wild one.
Down here, Tucson is just a distant dream, a glint of light beneath blue evening mountains. When Darlene Braastad founded Forever Wild Animal Rehabilitation Center in 1996, the 2 ½ acre property was smack-dab in the middle of nowhere; now, it's merely on the edge, and the armies of paper-doll houses are encroaching. The campus isn't cold, clinical, immaculate, like a veterinarian's office; the feel of the place, rather, is somewhere between that of a family farm and that of a private zoo. The roof of the barn is leaking, and makeshift solutions abound; there are flies and unfortunate odors. Partially this is because Forever Wild is always struggling to pay its bills; partially, it's because the facility isn't generally open to the public, except by special appointment or to those who can commit to show up regularly to volunteer. When I first called Darlene about volunteering, she was both skeptical and frank. “I don't want to put in the time to train you, and have you not stick around. . .”
But she's warmed to me, now, as I crouch on a Rubbermaid bin in the “Rehab Room.” There's a soft rocking armchair, up on blocks and draped in a yellow bedsheet, in the center of the room; Darlene settles into it, directs the cone of a gooseneck lamp onto her lap. It's the only light in the room. (I can't escape the feeling that I'm sitting up for cocoa with someone else's grandmother.) She lays a fledgling rabbit on its back in the palm of her left hand, and maneuvers an eyedropper into his mouth. “It's goat milk, organic,” she says. “They can digest that much better than cow milk.” A couple of baby raccoons are playing raccoon games on the back of the chair, swatting at each other from either side of Darlene's gray, reticulated curls. (There aren't usually loose critters running around, it's just that she’s multitasking.) I tell Darlene that I might be able to help out in the afternoons, but that I'm not exactly a morning person. “I'm really a night owl, too,” she says. The timbre of her voice is like gravel rolled in honey. “I need to read or something for quite a while before I can sleep at night.”
She's tired––more than 2,400 animals landed on her doorstep in 2010, and she's ultimately responsible for every last one of them. But responsible to whom? This is a woman who serves two masters: the call of the wounded wild, yes, but also the federal and state agencies which approve her permits and oversee her operations. That would be U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Arizona Game and Fish, respectively, and she doesn't see a dime from either one. Everyone who drops off an animal (usually at the Valley Animal Hospital at 22nd and Swan––Darlene swings by most afternoons to pick up the transients) has to fill out a form stating where the animal was found, by whom, what sort of injury is suspected, etc. Darlene then has to prepare a report on each animal: “whether they died, or whether they were euthanized, or whether they were released, and where they were released. . . ugh.” It's all destined for Arizona Game and Fish and/or U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and this applies not just to the birds of prey, but to the lowliest bastard of a pigeon.
Darlene is circumspect when I ask her about what they do with all that information, and about her overseers in general. “They're always fussin' about paperwork,” she says, finally, “and my desire is to take care of the animals.” She pauses. “And they've been known to. . . for instance, I had a baby coyote that someone had picked up, and because they couldn't tell exactly where it was from, and exactly who had gotten it, they came and picked it up and euthanized it, because they were afraid it would have rabies. It didn't. Of course.” She shakes her head and stares off. “And they can do that with any animal.”
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| A raven, learning how to fly again. "you were only waiting/ for this moment to arrive" |
Outside, an August evening's coming on, a pinch of monsoon rain splitting the sunset into fractions of light. Coyotes can be heard yapping in a menacing, ridiculous symphony across the road; javelina stamp off into the creosote flats when the spotlight snaps on, looking for all the world like dogs with anvils for their jaws. The hawks in their flight cages are quieting down, and the roadrunners have long since clownfooted into the dark end of their enclosure, but the bobcats are making unholy noises out at the edge. Twilight is hunting-time, hammer-time, for bobcats and other crepuscular predators, and their feral hunger is palpable from fifty yards away. Darlene fills a couple of five-gallon buckets from a hose, asks me to lift them into the back of the electric golf cart that's always breaking down. She adds a bucket of chicken leg quarters, and a few boxes of pigeons whose wounds are severe enough that they aren't going to make it. “We'd have to euthanize them anyway,” she says. “And the kittens need to be able to catch their food live if we're going to release them. We reuse and recycle here.”
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| "I want to chew your hand." |
The kittens she's referring to are a clutter of orphaned, tween-aged bobcats. There are six of these adorable monsters, presided over with a certain degree of apprehension and annoyance by Bisbee, a long-term resident of Forever Wild; she's currently serving as their foster mother. It's something of a Brady Bunch family, the kittens have been merged from two different litters. Three were found living inside the walls of a Northeast side home in June, and had to be rescued through a hole in the drywall. They were about six weeks old when they arrived, and won't be released until the spring.
I jump into the open cart next to Darlene and hold on to the side of the roof; we roll out past the ravens and the vultures to the cat enclosure, at the far edge of the property. Their den is a sea of gravel and pigeon feathers on a buried chain-link bed (so they can't tunnel out). It's about six feet high at one end, about twelve at the other. Bisbee is arching her golden back on top of a saguaro-rib skeleton propped up on the high end; the setting sun comes in through a gap in the shadecloth and sets her fur afire. The kittens are ricocheting here and there, emitting high-pitched growls abruptly diving into low grumbles, punctuated now and then by sudden, indignant hisses. Bisbee won't eat until her kittens have each claimed their share––it's unclear whether this is some instinct she can’t shake, or if she's simply too agitated to eat until they shut the hell up. Feeding happens through an industrial metal chute with a locking mechanism attached to the west side of the enclosure, under the deep sprawling shade of a Sonoran palo verde; the frightened doves are shunted through one by one as the kittens scramble up the inside of the chute, snarling, kicking. A stray paw pokes out for a second before Darleen slams the thing closed. I make a mental note not to feed them after midnight.
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These kittens are tremendously lucky to have Bisbee as a surrogate mother: wildlife centers around the country have had to come up with some pretty unorthodox strategies to raise orphaned animals. The Mercury News, a community paper based in California, recently reported on a Silicon Valley wildlife center that’s had to deploy human surrogates. Their trained volunteers don full-body cat costumes that have been liberally doused with bobcat urine, and crawl around on all fours with the kittens in order to socialize them. It’s like some fusion of the infamous Halloween party at Hampshire College and the film Gorillas in the Mist. The point here is not so much to fool the animal into thinking the surrogate is an actual bobcat (they’re not that dumb), but to disguise the fact that the surrogate is human. Along with the eons of survival skills these cats have inherited, one is rising to the fore in a world dominated by a single species of primate: staying alienated from the uncomprehending human race.
One of the dilemmas implicit in rehabilitating wild animals, of course, is the temptation to form emotional attachments to them, even to relate to them as pets. This is especially true with wild cats, who have the same expressive body language and vocalizations as domestic cats. Darlene, as you might guess, has a plethora of her own pets: a few dogs, several parrots and cockatoos, even a pair of six-foot emus roaming around her backyard. She keeps the two worlds distinct, though. With the wild animals, she says, “release is always our goal.” She’s always working on weaning them off their temporary dependence on her as rapidly as possible. But all you have to do is observe her profile when she’s dabbing iodine on the infected foot of a wild bird, and her attachment to the animals comes into focus.
Darlene’s intellect and temperament form the backbone of Forever Wild’s paradigm, and also set its mood. She’s got a tough, restrained sweetness about her (she'll call you "Hon" and "Kiddo"); it's a demeanor that makes a lot of sense when you consider that her passion is wild animals. She doesn’t talk about herself much, but has said that she was born with a severe heart condition which made her “an invalid at a very young age,” and spent her childhood reading copiously and fraternizing with her many pets: rabbits, hamsters, tortoises, and so on. In her early 20's, she underwent corrective heart surgery and was finally able to lead a more active life, spending years as a corporate travel agent, managing hotels and health food stores. But it was only after her husband's hearing-aid business took off in the early nineties that Darlene was able to retire and really get to work. (The couple have no children.) After training with Tucson animal rescue workers Janet and (the late) Lewis Miller, Darlene opened Forever Wild at its current location near the federal and state prisons south of Wilmot and I-10. (I will leave it to the reader to consider the irony of the location.) Her husband is active with MENSA, she told me on the day I happened to show up wearing a MENSA T-shirt (I'm not involved with the local chapter), but Darlene’s involvement with the group seems to be minimal.
Darlene has taught as an adjunct professor at Pima in past years, and visits schools, fairs, and churches to spread the gospel of the wild, but her legacy may well prove to be most potent in the future work of her many protegés. Many young women, especially, have been volunteering with her since they were girls, and some are now enrolled in animal science or veterinary programs at the U of A or at Pima. They come to Darlene with a general interest in animals, and they get hooked. Ashlee Williams, a recent graduate of Santa Rita High School, grew up in the tiny Cochise County town of St. David. “We lived in the middle of nowhere, and wildlife surrounded us,” she says. “Every day, I looked forward to seeing the roadrunner go through his daily routine by my house, or playing with the huge lizard in the shed." She's got a soft, easy laugh, and radiates compassion. "Or hoping someone’s escaped horse or cow would wander into our yard.”
In high school, Ashlee was asked to do a year-long project for an agriculture class, and her teacher recommended Forever Wild. Long after the project is over, she keeps coming back every week for what she calls “nature in action,” somehow squeezing it in between her job as an insurance agent and her studies at Pima. “Darlene is the most inspirational person I know,” Ashlee says, “and she’s sacrificed a lot for the animals.” She also accompanies Darlene and some of the resident hawks and owls (what Darlene calls “Wildlife Ambassadors”) to community events on occasion. “I have a blast every time I go,” she says, adding that she still gets a kick out of feeding the bobcats, no matter how many times she does it.
In addition to its primary mission, Forever Wild also functions as a sanctuary for many domestic animals. At the moment, there’s a flock of domestic geese and ducks (their eggs are fed to the raccoons), and several lettuce-and-apple-fed rabbits; these are mostly the survivors of poorly-conceived sojourns as pets. Many were rescued from horrendous conditions, others were just abandoned. Darlene bristles when the subject comes up. “My feeling is, and has always been, that if you take in an animal, you better adopt it for the full term of its life.” That quote, by the way, is typical of Darlene’s speech. She never harangues; she speaks briefly, falls silent, and lets her words sink in.
There are also a number of permanent residents who, like Bisbee, are for one reason or another unreleasable, but are nonetheless tremendously valuable as potential foster parents. Consider Boondock, an eyeless burrowing owl who's called Forever Wild home for some time now. He has no protegés at the moment, but the daily mouse he consumes may well be paid back in spades, come nesting season. His waste products, too, are valuable as an educational resource. Owls, hawks, and some other birds have the convenient habit of regurgitating the indigestible bits of their prey in condensed little packages called “pellets,” which they produce in their gizzards. Darlene collects them in a jar in the “Avian Center” and takes them along when she visits schools, giving students a unique opportunity to get dirty for science.
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| A redtailed hawk lies dying. |
There are sadder tales, of course. A red-tailed hawk was recently taken in with severe heavy-metal poisoning, lead being the most likely culprit. An x-ray confirmed the diagnosis. Darlene treated him for a few days with Calcium EDTA, a chemical agent which binds to metals, rendering them less reactive and helping to carry them out of the body. It's often used in treating humans who come down with lead poisoning, in what is known as “chelation therapy.” In this redtail's case, however, it was too late. He wouldn't eat, and was too weak to stand upright. When I visited him, he was slumped limply on the floor of his cage, like a sick dog. He died a few days later. It was a pathetic, dismal end for this lord of the sky, with his glaring, primeval eyes and hooked, patrician beak. I asked Darlene how he could have ended up with such high levels of heavy metal in his body.
“Well, he would have eaten something that had lead shot in it, most likely. You know, there are lead-free bullets out there, and the thing is, it's not good for people, either, when they eat things shot with lead bullets. I just think they should be banned.” Indeed, lead bullets tend to fragment on impact, spreading tiny shards of metal as much as a foot away from the wound. So “eating around the bullet” is not an entirely safe solution. “Green” bullets are 100% copper; they’re less toxic, and don't shatter like lead.
But what might be a minor health risk for humans can represent serious debility and death for animals that feed on wounded or dead animals, such as the famous California condor. Despite its nearly ten-foot wingspan, the condor weighs a mere 25 or 30 lbs., and that's the most of any North American bird. Its relatively small size, along with the peculiarities of its digestive system, make it vulnerable to lead poisoning to a degree that larger animals (like bears or mountain lions) aren't.
As is so often the case when it comes to environmental policy initiatives, Arizona lags behind California in taking legislative action to protect condors. In the summer of 2008, the Ridley-Tree Condor Preservation Act came into effect in California, prohibiting the use of lead ammunition throughout most of the condor's range in that state. Around 70 of the 190 remaining wild condors call this side of the Colorado home, however (mainly on the Kaibab plateau, up in the northern part of our state). Arizona Game and Fish appears to be taking the plight of the condors seriously, noting in a pamphlet on the subject (obtainable as a PDF on their website) that “[l]ead poisoning is the leading cause of death in condors, and the main obstacle to a self-sustaining condor population in Arizona.” And Game and Fish does, in fact, provide lead-free ammunition free of charge to big-game hunters in parts of Northern Arizona. (The program is funded by lottery and gaming revenue.) Game and Fish's own studies suggest that 93% of big game hunters find that the lead-free bullets “perform as well as or better than” lead bullets, in terms of bringing down game. This is encouraging. But it's still perfectly legal in Arizona to use good-old-cowboy-lead to kill deer, and leave the carcasses in the field to poison the handful of condors we've so arduously reintroduced since 1996.
But even if Arizona did adopt an equivalent Condor Preservation Act, that wouldn't help smaller raptors such as the red-tail that lay dying at Forever Wild a few weeks ago, or any animal that feeds on smaller game or lives in Southern Arizona.
I sat down with Darlene Braastad again in October for a more formal interview. She never really has time to talk until after the sun’s gone down, which has been happening earlier and earlier lately. We’re in the Rehab Room again, Darlene in her armchair at the focal point of the room. I perch on a stool by the stainless-steel surgical table in the corner, next to the sliding glass doors which lead out to the food-prep area of the barn. It’s a silent scene, but for the couple of fish-tanks of feeder mice making microscopic noises on the shelf. The baby possum is quiet in his dark cage, and the ground squirrels are practicing for their coming hibernation. Darlene tells me there were more wildlife rehabs in Tucson when she first started out, and I ask her why she thinks that is.
“Well, it's time-consuming; it's expensive. It's difficult work, it's either hot, or cold, raining or something.” Again, she looks very tired.
“And you've got to be here every day.” I don’t even want to ask her the last time she’s had a vacation.
“Yes. . . and it's very difficult to do the work and the fundraising and everything else that you need to do, because we don't get any support from the government.”
I'm surprised by this. “None, whatsoever?”
In some states, Darlene says, wildlife centers do have access to a limited amount of funding: the states will sell specialized license plates, for example, and the funds will go to qualified rehab centers. “But in Arizona,” she says, “we don't get anything.” [The proceeds from Arizona's "environmental" plates go to designated "environmental education centers."] She pauses; her eyes light up. “Oh! I've gotta feed my coot.”
I blink. It takes me a second. (Coots, for the record, are water birds often mistaken for ducks; some of them have a featherless shield on their foreheads, from which we get the expression “bald as a coot.” This expression goes back almost 600 years.)
I follow Darlene over to the Avian Center, the rotting old trailer just outside of the barn. While I’m waiting, I get into a staring contest with a great horned owl. I move my head a little, towards the left; she moves hers a tick in the same direction. I roll right; she rolls right. Owls’ eyes are tubular, not spherical; as such, they're fixed in their sockets. When an owl wants to change her field of vision, she has to rotate her head.
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| "How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" |
Darlene wraps the coot in a towel, puts him in her lap, gets an eyedropper in his mouth. She’s totally absorbed in the task, and yet, in a way, it’s such a meditative moment that she seems to want to speak freely. I ask her what she thinks can be done about habitat loss.
She laughs, a little painfully; composes herself quickly. “Well. . . one of the things that we always need to hope that developers would do is incorporate wildlife corridors, so that the wildlife can get to open spaces and still find their food, and still reproduce, and still have places to hide out. . . and it's really important for people to learn that they need to leave wildlife alone, and that you can live peacefully with them. . . if your little poodle isn't outside by itself at night, and you don't try and poison things.”
The coot is transfixed, looking right at her.
“I think the people in this part of Arizona, though, are more conscientious about wildlife, and. . . they care about them. People want the wildlife. But some are absolutely petrified. Or they like only certain wildlife, you know, they like the quail and they like the cardinals, but they don't like the doves, they don't like the pigeons. You know, that's very common.”
I’ve never seen Darlene without a pensive expression on her face, but it’s always changing, like the palette of the desert above us. Her thoughts seem to be best expressed in action; she asked not to be photographed for this story.
Ani DiFranco, the indie-folk icon, explains in her 2003 song “Evolve” why she never comes out right in photographs: I don't take good pictures cuz/ I have the kind of beauty that moves. When I watch Darlene lay a chilled packrat onto a cutting board, gut it with a big rectangular cleaver, and toss it into a bucket. . . well, for some reason, that brings DiFranco's song into my head.
