“Baby animals fall out of trees all the time. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they need rescuing.” — Wildlife rehabber and clinic director, Rick Schubert

Spring is our wildlife  clinic’s busy season, as the wildlife baby boom hits, and people bring in baby birds that have fallen from nests or bunnies seemingly abandoned in their backyard. Out of the over 12,000 phone calls the clinic handles in a year, hundreds involve questions or concerns about baby animals being orphaned. That’s more spring babies than our clinic– or most similar clinics, I’d imagine– can treat onsite.  The good news is, many of these “orphans” really don’t need human help.

“The rehab and medical work we do here in the clinic may get all the attention,” says clinic director Rick Schubert, “but most of our work is done on the phone.” When taking a call, it’s important to ask the right questions: exactly where was the animal found, how long has it been there, has it been handled or fed, what’s its physical condition, etc. With this information, the clinic can determine whether or not the animal really does need clinic care and, if necessary, walk the caller through safe handling and transport.

The phone calls are also a critical opportunity for education and outreach. According to Schubert, “it’s much easier to prevent a problem than to correct the situation later, in the clinic.”

Many baby animals that you might think are orphaned, for instance, really aren’t, and would be better off left alone. But what if you’ve already picked it up, perhaps to check for injuries, or just out of an instinctive desire to care for it? Simply put it back where you found it and let the mother do her job.

“The idea that, once you’ve touched a wild baby animal the mother will reject it,is a myth,” declares Rick. “No wild animal will reject healthy offspring just because a human has touched it.”

(The key word there is “healthy.” Some animals will reject sick offspring, and even kick them out of the nest.)

Schubert considers the triage and education aspects of these phone calls so important that he rarely lets clinic volunteers answer the phone. That’s a job he reserves for himself and assistant rehabber Michele Wellard. He estimates that he spends an average of four hours a day on the phone. And while it may not be glamorous, that’s okay with him, because he can accomplish more good in less time.

So next time you find an “orphaned” squirrel, rabbit or bird in your yard—or any wildlife in distress— don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call your local wildlife clinic for advice before you act. That’s what they’re there for.

The wildlife clinic is caring for this sick turkey

By Naomi Leach, Marketing and PR Coordinator

As the gobble, gobble holiday approaches, at least one turkey has reason to give thanks, to the staff at the Schuylkill Center’s Wildlife Rehab Clinic, who are working hard to save its life.  The turkey was brought into the clinic Wednesday injured and very sick.  Clinic staff are working to rehydrate and feed the emaciated bird and evaluate its condition, with the hope of eventually releasing it back into the wild.

The story began with a call to the clinic by a woman who found what she believed to be a turkey vulture lying hurt on the side of the road in Eagleville. The clinic staff provided instructions on how to safely contain and transport the animal to the shelter in a cardboard box. When the woman arrived at the clinic, it turned out that the animal in the box was not a turkey vulture, but an actual turkey.

The turkey’s coloring and behavior indicate that it is most likely a wild bird, “But it’s impossible to be sure,” says our clinic director Rick Schubert, “especially considering the time of year.”

At this point, the bird’s prognosis is uncertain.  It has some sort of infection. Rick thinnks it may be avian pox virus.  The clinic’s veterinarians and  colleagues at other rehab centers are helping Rick diagnosis it.  If it is a serious case of the virus, the bird might not make it.  For now, however, the bird is being given frequent fluid therapy and antibiotics.

(NOTE: Avian pox virus cannot be transmitted to humans or other mammals. It only affects birds.)

Everyone here at SCEE is keeping their fingers crossed that this turkey, for one, makes it through the Thanksgiving holiday alive and well.

Thanks to The Roxborough Review for running a story on the turkey.  You can check it out at: montgomerynews.com.

What in the world, you ask, does ArcelorMittal and the international steel industry have to do with the Schuylkill Center? As it turns out, an awful lot!

ArcelorMittal has been a recent, loyal donor of ours. As part of its commitment to supporting conservation and environmental education in operating communities like Conshohocken, it has donated over $12,000 in grants to us in the last two years. What’s more: local employees at the plant have also contributed their time at volunteer Land Restoration events, which they’ve attended with their children and grandchildren!

Last week, ArcelorMittal responded to our need for a cover for an old, 19^thcentury well on our property in just a day’s time! (For those unfamiliar, we have lots of reminders of the land’s early history still peppering the woods. Some are old wells, some are the ruins of barns, buildings, and pump houses designed to bring water up to farms that used to dot Ridge Road. (That’s right!)) Yesterday, we were able to safely cover the well through a generous in-kind contribution orchestrated by Ian Mair, the plant’s Environmental Manager, and Lee, a Fabricator who made the grate.

Lee explains how he fabricated the well cover.

During our tour of the plant, on the way to pick up the well cover, we toured the cavernous buildings that make up America’s largest supplier of steel plate to our military, and the biggest steel producer on the globe. Hard-hatted and be-safety-spectacled, we saw raw steel from ArcelorMittal’s nearby Coatesville facility heat forged, cooled from over a thousand degrees by water on massive conveyors that appeared to be football fields long:

Red Hot Steel

Here’s a photo of the water evaporating from the surface of the steel:

 We also saw the inspection floor, where the steel is painted for use by the military and industry, and the yard where steel coil is set to cool for three days after being tempered. In a word: it was awesome.

The visit made me realize, like most relationship-building moments, why our mission is so important to our stakeholders like ArcelorMittal – and why it’s vital to support Environmental Education in general.

On our field trip, I learned not just about the unique material properties of steel (sometimes it’s magnetized, sometimes it’s not), but also about the ways that the plant uses and works to save energy, as well as precious water. Like many other corporations, ArcelorMittal works to model sustainable practices in a resource-intensive, but also necessary, industry. Water used in the process of making steel undergoes a rigorous purification and filtration process that exceeds industry requirements and re-uses the resource. The steel sludge filtered from water used in the tempering process is an asphalt extender.

Utilizing natural resources with minimal environmental impact is both necessary and challenging. And the ability to do both is predicated on a student’s ability to first grasp basic scientific concepts – the kind we begin to touch upon when we discuss water ecology at the Schuylkill Center, for example. We happen to undertake those investigations in unimpaired streams that feed the Schuylkill River – the same big blue ribbon of water that ArcelorMittal calls home.

The employees at ArcelorMittal understand this. It’s why they choose to support our work. We’re connected through philanthropy, but also through an understanding that it takes exposure to new ideas and experiences in nature to put a child on the path of caring for the environment – or a career in a STEM field that also works to protect the environment. They value the resource we protect: the largest remaining privately owned open space in Philadelphia.

If you or someone you know wants to make a difference, come visit us! We’ve got a couple of ways you could help. We won’t be able to show you how steel is made, but we can show you the end product sitting on top of our historic stone well – and we’ve got some young minds we’re intent on forging, too.

A very special thanks to our friends at ArcelorMittal!

Mike, Ian, Sean, and Joanne stand safely atop the well.

Warmly,

Emily, Director of Resource Development

The Schuylkill Center does a lot of exceptionally cool things: we teach thousands of people, protect hundreds of acres of habitat.

But just maybe the coolest thing we do is save animals. Lots and lots of animals.

Yesterday, WMMR’s Pierre Robert was given the honor of releasing a snapping turtle—a remarkably ancient predator—into the Schuylkill River, the same turtle he brought to our Wildlife Clinic almost 14 months ago. After 14 months of TLC—at great cost to the center—the world is richer by one turtle.

Pierre and Thomas Share a Parting Moment Together

But consider the animals still at the center today: about 55 opossums, 20 raccoons, 20 baby cottontail rabbits, 20 baby robins and rock doves each, 10 screech owls, a dozen mallard ducks, six red-tailed hawks, 2 vultures, and an entire rainbow of additional animals from scarlet tanager to blue jay. In all, more than 260 critters are crowded into our clinic, all getting the extraordinary attention of rehabbers Rick Schubert and Michele Wellard and their team of 70 volunteers.

All of these animals are brought here to us by people like my next door neighbor, who found a baby mourning dove on her deck, its wing bleeding from a fall out of it’s nest, or my neighbor across the street, who found a baby sparrow on their porch Sunday, called me in distress, and, with great relief, brought it to the clinic.

Or people like Pierre Robert, who saw a turtle crossing Conshohocken State Road in Gladwyne, a street where traffic moves fast. He had the presence to stop traffic—and bring it to us.

Here’s how important, no, vital, our clinic is: last week, we housed first a baby peregrine falcon that fell out of City Hall’s nest, and then a baby peregrine found dazed and confused on a Center City street (but that had hatched on a nest on the Walt Whitman bridge), and then the red-tailed hawk that had fallen out of the Franklin Institute’s nest, breaking its leg on the fall to the sidewalk. Three of Philadelphia’s most famous birds, in our clinic.

Peregrines, the world’s fastest birds, are highly endangered species, by the way.

That’s the clinic, a hard-working staff tirelessly taking in and repairing thousands of animals, maybe 15 or even 20 new ones every single day this time of year, as babies fall out of nests and mother opossums are hit by cars, leaving babies to fend for themselves.

Ironically, the day Pierre Robert released the turtle he nicknamed Thomas into the Schuylkill, guess what was brought into the clinic? A whoppingly large 40-pound snapping turtle. Just another day in the clinic.

If you agree that this is just about the coolest thing we do, please join me in supporting our campaign for the clinic by making a contribution online or by mail..

I post this early in the morning, and 20 more animals will find their way to our safe haven today. Won’t you help them? Thanks so much.

Opening Reception: June 25th 4pm-7pm

“In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we have been taught. ” – Baba Dioum   

Stories normalize the strange and explain the confounding. Our relationship with the environment is in a state of constant flux, and as an environmental education center, we are always updating how and what we teach about the natural world.  As our ways of seeing the world develop, the stories we believe in evolve and expand. Our relationship to our stories is tenuous, however, since they can sometimes oversimplify the reality of nature’s complexities. Historically, we relied on scientific facts until they become obsolete, transforming themselves into fables. What was once believed without question now sounds laughable (the Earth as flat, the medicinal use of leeches, to name a few ). Regardless, we will always need stories because they help make sense of the world we inhabit.

This exhibition, “Facts and Fables: Stories of the Natural World,” asks important questions about the human experience of the environment: How do stories affect our understanding of nature? What is true nature and what is fabricated, and how can we tell the difference? Is our experience of nature limited by our ability to sense the world around us? 

"Mother Nature" by Chad Curtis

The seven artists in “Facts and Fables” use diverse methods to address such questions: memorials, guidebooks, faux landscapes, fairy tale crime scenes, live video feeds, visual perception tracking, distortion of scale, predictions and invitations. Some artists tell stories, while others examine the ways stories are created, or retell old stories to unearth new ideas. These artists combine out-dated methods with innovative technology, offering the viewer a range of experience and ways to interact with the natural world.

For example,  Chad Curtis incorporates green technology into his installation, “Mother Nature” (pictured), through the use of a solar-powered video camera that generates a 24/7 live stream, available online here: http://chaddcurtis.com/schuylkill/.

-Jenny Laden, Director of The Environmental Art Department at The Schuylkill Center

I love it when a plan works: walking up the back steps at my home this week, I glanced at the large pots where we keep our kitchen garden. What caught my eye was a bump on the end of a sprig of dill:  a hunchbacked but handsomely striped insect, the unmistakable caterpillar of the black swallowtail, one of our largest, most striking butterflies.

But wait!  A smaller lump below the caterpillar on another leaf was actually a second one.  Then I spotted a third.  Wait, there are six. No ten.  Omigosh: I am the proud father of 13 bouncing baby swallowtails, crawling up and down—and devouring!—my dill.

When black swallowtail caterpillars are first hatched, very small and very vulnerable to hungry birds, they are not striped, but are camouflaged to resemble a bird dropping, black with a saddle-shaped light splotch in the middle. There are a lot of things birds eat (like caterpillars), but they will never touch excrement, so if your kid looks like crap, well, you get the idea.  After a few molts, it’ll put on the familiar striped suit of the bigger one I saw first.

While my dill was being reduced to leafless skeletons, I was elated.  For that was the plan:  we get the basil, rosemary and thyme.  Caterpillars get the dill.

And I am growing a bumper crop of butterflies.

An adult black swallowtail

Butterflies are exquisite botanists, the female laying its eggs only on the plants her babies eat, essentially placing their children atop their dinner plates.  So monarchs only lay eggs on milkweeds, tiger swallowtails on trees like wild cherry and tulip poplars, painted ladies on hollyhocks and pearly everlasting…

…And black swallowtails on dill, fennel, parsley, and wild carrots. 

So I hustled out to buy new dill, which they have already moved over onto, and will soon be transforming into butterflies.

Grow some dill yourself, and when you see that caterpillar devouring your plant, don’t kill it: buy it more dill.  And grow butterflies!

Mike Weilbacher directs the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education.  Email him at mike@schuylkillcenter.org and follow him on Twitter @sceemike.

Welcome to the brand new blog for The Schuylkill Center. Here we hope to educate, entertain and inform you with posts about environmental science, our local ‘green’ community here in Philadelphia, eco-art, workshop opportunities, and more!

Subscribe today to be the first to read our inaugural post – coming soon!

In the meantime, stay up to date with us on our website (www.schuylkillcenter.org).

-The Schuylkill Center Staff