The Rural We: Maria Geel
Every day — and four times each day — 18-year-old Maria Geel has somewhere around 30 mouths to feed at Lucky Rehabilitation Center in Austerlitz, New York. When she was just 12, Geel started the now-nonprofit center dedicated to the care and rehabilitation of injured, orphaned or sick wildlife. She became a licensed wildlife rehabilitation specialist when she was 16, and, she and her mother Sue take in the animals with the express intent to release them back into the wild. It’s an all-consuming life: “Not one of those jobs you can go on vacation with,” she says.
My mom, Sue, started doing wildlife rehab when she was a teenager. She was trained by Jane Beavan, who ran the Ghent Wildlife Center for decades out of her home. I always grew up around animals and the concept of rehab. When I was eight, I wanted to start a center myself, so my mom reached out to Jane Beaven, and I started volunteering there. Jane had to close her center because she couldn’t maintain it on her own anymore. I decided it was time to open up my own. I called it Lucky Wildlife Rehab Center named for Lucky, a Canada goose that had been abandoned by its parents and who I raised when I was six. Both my mom and I are licensed through the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
We run the center out of our house. My mom gave a me a deal when I was younger: if I give up my playroom, she’d turn the basement into a rehab center. We’re building out a barn now, with the help of donations. Herrington’s donated all the lumber and equipment for the barn, and F H Stickles & Son, Inc. poured the concrete for free. Now we use the basement for NICU and intensive care.
It depends on the time of year, but in general, we get orphaned babies in the spring — squirrels, songbirds, young fawns. Right now we have a lot of uninjured orphans who come in skinny and dehydrated, but relatively unharmed. We get injured adults of all species that have gotten hit by cars. My favorite species is the possum. They gain such a bad reputation, but they’re some of the funniest and most harmless animals, and good for the environment. They don’t carry diseases and eat a lot of ticks. They have a tendency to open their mouths and look scary, but they don’t do anything.
Some of the animals are emotionally hard to care for. One of the most difficult was a fawn named Lumpy. He was only a few days old when he came in, covered with scabs and had deerpox and a secondary skin infection. Deerpox is contagious to humans, so we had to wear full hazmat suits. We didn’t think he’d pull through, but we got help from a local vet. Eventually he made it and was released. We still see him around occasionally.
People who bring in animals often hear of us through word of mouth, but the vet clinics, humane societies and local cops give out our number. We have a small group of volunteers that watch and learn and after training can do the feedings alone. We’re always looking for more volunteers.
I’ll be going to Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks to study wildlife sciences, with plans to eventually go to veterinary school.
Maria with "Clover" the fawn
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