Silverwood Wildlife holding fundraiser April 26

WAPELLA — The Silverwood Wildlife Rehab Centre has been helping injured animals since 2019, and will be hosting their spring fundraiser on April 26.

The Spring Bloom Wild Baby Spectacular kicks off at the Wapella Rink at 5:30 pm and will include a supper, live and silent auction, plus entertainment.

“Eli Barsi is going to be our MC and the entertainment, she’s doing a mini concert and she’s good bringing a special guest to sing with her,” said Tricia Mogstad, Silverwood founder. The event will be catered by Mrs. Jameson’s Kitchen from Spy Hill, someone Mogstad purposefully chose. “I wanted to help boost up another local entrepreneur, and she’s got a really beautiful meal plan!”

The Silverwood Wildlife Rehab Centre takes in a wide variety of animals, providing a safe, temporary place for sick, injured, and orphaned wildlife. The staff at the centre work to assist the animals in order to release them back into their home territory, giving them the best possible chance of survival.

“We take in most of the mammals, big and small, and we also take all the migratory birds, raptors, and waterfowl,” Mogstad explained. 

Finding an appropriate space for each species to best recover can be a challenge, as Mostad pointed out.

“The raptors alone will often need at least three different styles of pens to be able to take them through the whole rehab process when they’re injured,” she said. “And raptors can be in with you for anywhere from a couple of weeks to a year, typically, depending on the severity of their injuries.”

Busy time of year approaching

The summer months are the busiest at Silverwood, also a time of the most diverse needs in terms of the age of the animals.

“Part of May, and then all of June, July and August are all intense because those are the orphan times, those are babies,” Mogstad said. “So you’re having to grow them from tiny little neonates through to the release size, and they have to meet release criteria.”

Returning an animal back to the wild is not simply driving into the country and dropping them off; the process is all about setting wildlife up to thrive.

“They have to have all the natural instincts that they’re going to need out in the wild,” Mogstad explained. “They need to know how to hunt or scavenge their food, they have to be healthy and big, they have to be a certain size as well to be released. When they’re not meeting those criteria, they have to stay. For some of them, that means they have to stay for the winter so they have a chance to grow up into adolescence and early adulthood, and that helps them be wilder.”

Recognizing what predators are is also a very important aspect for wildlife being returned to their natural habitat.

“It’s quite a regime that we go through here to ensure that the animals are as wild as they can be, and smart, and know what to do,” Mogstad said.

The Silverwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre is also a place for education on how important each species is to the overall ecosystem in our region.

“Part of our motto, our belief, it’s about helping people coexist with wildlife around them within their environment,” Mogstad said. “How to help farmers be able to be okay with the wildlife that is around them, people that have chickens or other things that wildlife is going after, I can help educate them on what to do.”

In many cases, wildlife that have found themselves encountering domesticated animals often meet a fatal end. Sometimes, even helpful motives can have negative consequences, as Mogstad illustrated through the example of live-trapping wildlife and taking it to a random place in the wild.

“You could be dropping a fox into completely coyote territory, which means that fox will die,” she said. “There is a lot of thought that has to go into how you manage the wildlife, and that’s part of what my goal is, to help people live better with the wildlife and also their environment. I think a lot of people may feel disconnected from the environment around them, to nature.”

How to help

While the unique needs of each animal can be met, the biggest challenge the centre faces is funding.

“The biggest challenges are finding the sponsors that can give a hand financially, because we are not funded by the governments,” Mogstad said, underlining the importance of the coming event. “It’s the annual spring fundraiser, that’s kind of the big one that can set us up for the season.”

Other items the centre needs include nitrile/vinyl latex gloves (powder free, mediuma and large sizes), heat lamps with red heat bulbs, dog kennels (soft covered sizes large and extra large; hard sided sizes medium to large with double doors), large round water troughs, lumber, and building supplies. 

The biggest item they go through the most, though, is food. 

“We go through a fair amount of puppy chow and kitten food,” Mogstad said. “I go through a lot of the big family packs of chicken thighs, skin in the bone. I’ll go through about five or six of those a week easy during the two (summer) months, because I use them for a lot of my smaller mammals.”

The chicken thighs, in particular, are a great way to get the smaller mammals healthy and fattened up quickly. Fresh produce, vegetables, fruits and berries are also things Silverwood goes through rapidly during the summer. 

Another important factor is having the right kind of milk on hand, as providing out-of-the-carton cow’s milk can actually be detrimental to some species.

“We order in species-specific milks for everything that comes in because you can’t give cow’s milk, it causes way too many deficits, and it can actually kill the baby mammals,” Mogstad said. “We always tell people, ‘Please don’t give them milk.’ It’s better to get them to rehab fast. Call and get help and guidance. Google is not guidance, the rehab is guidance because we go through a lot of training, and we continue to train to do our jobs.”

Tickets for the Spring Bloom Wild Baby Spectacular are $40 each and can be purchased by calling the Silverwood Wildlife Rehab Centre at 306-434-7272. Donations of live and silent auction items will also be accepted right up to the April 26 event at the Wapella Rink.