We Rancho volunteers are an enthusiastic and varied group of people who do everything from fostering baby raccoons for several months a year from our homes to answering our wildlife hotline, being part of our on-site wildlife assessment team, cleaning cages, building new rehabilitation pens, graphic design, website design, fundraising, newsletter and flyer design, transporting animals and supplies, grant-writing, and anything else that you think of that might be helpful to our organization.
You don’t need to have knowledge or skills; we will train you to work safely and humanely with injured and orphaned wildlife. If you’re 18 or under, you must have parental permission.
If you’re interested in helping wildlife, there are many opportunities to get involved, not just with raccoons, but with oppossums, skunks, squirrels, and every animal the day brings. Rancho Raccoon is a project of Yggdrasil Urban Wildlife Rescue, so if raccoons are not your thing, try our other avenues for helping keep our wildlife wild, healthy and free!
MOST NEEDED:
Foster care volunteers: if you have a flexible schedule or work at home, have space in your yard for a 8′ x 8′ rehabilitation pen, and want to help baby raccoons grow into confident juveniles and be released to live their wild lives, this may be for you! You must be extremely responsible, willing to feed babies with bottles until they’re weaned, and be able to keep them for up to 3-4 months, depending upon their size when they arrive. This opportunity is perfect for active retired or semi-retired people. However, many of our volunteers work full-time with flexible schedules.
Wildlife On-Site Assessment Team: Our hotline receives many calls from people who aren’t certain whether wildlife needs care, or are unable to bring the animals to our vet or our main site in Oakland. Most of the calls come from the Oakland,Berkeley,Montclair,Piedmont and Alameda areas.
At the end of January, 2009, we will provide a training for people who are interested in going out on occasion (probably no more than once a month) to check on the situation. You’ll need your own car; we’ll provide the training and equipment (traps, towels, food, reuniting boxes, etc) you might need to either bring the animal in or reunite healthy mothers with babies.
This is a very satisfying proposition…..few things are better than giving a frantic mother skunk, raccoon or squirrel the opportunity to come back and collect babies that have been displaced by human activity. Mothers will come back for their babies 95% of the time!
If these volunteer opportunities sound interesting, please call Megan at 415 488 1957, or email: megan@ranchoraccoon.org.
