My essential questions:

• How does treatment differ for different types of animals, wild and domestic, and how do you learn what types of treatment techniques are best?
• How can shadowing a professional veterinarian help me to better understand wildlife rehabilitation and release?
• How can learning the best methods to use when caring for injured/sick wildlife, help me to better care for animals on my farm (chickens, geese, sheep, and wild animals), especially since vets aren’t trained to support long-term health?

One moment that I vividly remember from this past week was applying ointment to a barred owl that had lost one of its eyes due to a collision with a vehicle on the road. The eye had to be removed so that the infection wouldn’t spread (Especially to the other eye which is able to see). You could see with the owl’s behavior, that it really trusted us to help him heal, and knew we were just trying to help him. This experience really reminded me of one of my essential questions which is “How does treatment differ for different types of animals?” Since the pandemic hit in March, there has been a huge increase in the number of male barred owls getting hit by cars and having long-term health issues (almost always caused by head injures), which has often led to blindness in both or one eye. This hasn’t been the case with the other birds rescued and brought to this rehabilitation center. Barn owls, great horn owls, crows, ravens, and many species of hawks have been brought to this center for a variety of reasons but hardly any long-term head injures impacting their sight that have resulted from car collisions. Now since I’ve learned more about many issues involving specific species, I’m interested in why certain birds are now more prone to certain injures while others are not, and how we can change what we’re doing to help protect these animals from having long term health issues.