Terry Prone: Clinic saving animals during a hurricane has plenty to crow about

When the mandatory evacuation notice came through about Hurricane Milton, families with pets faced three options. The first was to stick the pet or pets in the car and head off to higher ground, which was much easier with smaller pets. 

Owners of larger animals were left to consider staying put, which option generated much coverage for the risk-takers, particularly the family who brought their donkey upstairs where he, she, or it would have a great view of the storm surge, then predicted to hit 15 feet high. 

The third and last choice was the worst, where evacuating families couldn’t take their beloved animals with them and ended up tying them to gates, fences and posts with notes inviting others to take care of them. Infinitely sad, the photographs of these lost souls, although most, if not all of them, seem to have been rescued long before Milton’s 100mph winds swept through.

One of my Floridian friends, Michelle Menendez, texted me before all hell broke loose, saying she’d locked up the neat house on stilts where she lives in the middle of Sanibel Island, off the Gulf Coast, and headed for a hotel on the mainland. 

It would have been a slow and torturous journey, traversing the causeway serving as the only route between the island and the mainland. Even after that, the evacuees had to cover a long distance before reaching the city of Fort Myers.

Michelle is director of operations and Human Resources at the Clinic for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife, or CROW, a sophisticated operation on Sanibel with operating theatres, treatment rooms, auditoriums and gardens. 

When they don’t have to compete with hurricane season, CROW just deals with the ordinary extraordinary stuff, like a hawk hit by a truck which found itself embedded in the grill of the vehicle for 17 miles in the kind of rain southwest Florida specialises in even on non-hurricane days. 

Or a hummingbird at fledgling stage which tangled with a car wash and came off considerably the worse for the encounter. Or a juvenile river otter — those gorgeous sociable elegant swimmers — who seemed to have been orphaned.

Ambassadors

The list goes on and on, and if you attend one of the morning sessions where the workers introduce their recovering patients, you can meet anything from a turtle with a split shell to a pair of baby striped skunks whose mother disappeared, leaving them dehydrated and frightened. 

What’s important is that the animal 'ambassadors' be well on the way to recovery before they’re viewed by visitors. Strange humans don’t get to visit the 'hospital wards.'

“In accordance with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) Regulation 68A-9.006,” say CROW, “wildlife patients receiving care or medical treatment at our facility are NOT on exhibit to the general public. 

"As a wildlife rehabilitation hospital, our number one goal is the recovery and eventual release of the wildlife in our care. It is imperative that we minimize the stress on the patients while they heal to give them the best chances for a full recovery.” 

The bottom line is that no tourist should get voyeuristic notions. This place takes wildlife rescue and education around it very seriously. Each year CROW accepts between 45-50 students from around the world, who are trained to care for neonatal wildlife, administer anesthesia, give parenteral and oral medications and fluids and read cytology slides.

I had forgotten about where Michelle Mendendez works, once I knew she was safe on the mainland. When recollection came back, I texted asking her what she had done with the already wounded wildlife. Back came an immediate answer. Brief. To the point. 'Brought them with us to the hotel.'

Lest I doubt her, she included a rake of probative photographs. A bonded pair of screech owls known as Wallace and Gromit, sitting on a branch in a cage looking huffy, which is understandable, given their overland journey. Also given their previous experience — two years earlier — of a similar evacuation, when they were babies, long before they were appointed ambassadors for CROW. 

One squirrel. One rehabilitation student (Carmen), clutching a juvenile opossum and looking very happy about it. (The oppossum, on the other hand, looking neutral to negative, if we’re to be honest.) 

Hotel living

All the animals in close-ups, accompanied by a wide shot of a hotel bedroom with every surface loaded with cages of different kinds, each covered using a towel or blanket, to keep the bird within calm and cosy. 

Plus a picture of the inside of a fridge, packed to the gills, you should pardon the mixed metaphor, with different kinds of food appropriate for the evacuated patients. This means fresh produce, smelt fish in the freezer for pelicans and shore birds. (Smelt are little fish around six to 10 inches, oily with a soft texture and a taste and smell not unlike fresh cucumber. You eat them — or birds do, anyway — all in one go, head, bones and all.)

Including the food issue, the logistics of the injured wildlife evacuation were incredibly complex, right down to dispersing some of them to other Florida institutions.

“After experiencing major damage from Hurricane Ian, two years ago, we knew what we were in store for,” Michelle Menendez acknowledges, “so we implemented our evacuation plan on Sunday, four days before the projected landfall. We transferred many patients to our wildlife partners in areas of Florida not in the forecasted path of Milton. Pelicans were sent to the Keys, larger tortoises were sent to the East coast.”  

So when Milton made landfall, all the CROW patients were elsewhere and one of Fort Myers hotels — Suburban Suites — was housing a menagerie of displaced wildlife, watched over by six CROW personnel. The winds rose. The rain lashed down. 

But the storm surge — the wave of water going inland, powered by hurricane-force wings —  was lower than expected. Meteorologists had talked of a possibility of a wall of water 15 feet high. What turned up seems to have been less than a fifth of that. 

Which would still have done enormous damage to any houses not on stilts, but the causeway held and within hours of the winds dying down, in between feeding their charges, the CROW people in the hotel were thinking in the future tense.

“We are going out to the island today to assess the CROW campus for flooding and possible damage,” Michelle told me.

Because of their work, they will be allowed back on the island before some residents, and because they have previous experience, will quickly establish how soon their charges can be returned.

Within weeks, Wallace and Gromit will resume their ambassadorial functions as if Milton had never happened.