Sometimes the small jobs are the ones that keep wildlife alive.
In Vermont, Faith Davis was driving up a mountain road in 2024 with an unconscious juvenile bald eagle in a tote in her trunk when she heard a steady thump-thump-thump. The eagle, which had been electrocuted on a power line and fallen to the ground, had woken up during the hour-and-a-half trip to the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, or VINS.
When she reached the clinic, the bird came out with burn marks but appeared likely to recover. “It was very wide awake and very agitated,” Davis recalls.
Davis is one of about 100 trained volunteers VINS sends out when the rehabilitation centre gets a report of an injured bird in Vermont, New Hampshire and eastern upstate New York. These volunteers collect and transport raptors, songbirds, waterfowl and other birds to rehabilitation facilities for medical treatment.
The system helps rehab centres deal with a basic problem, getting injured birds to care fast enough for them to recover and be released. “If we didn’t have volunteers,” says VINS avian rehabilitator Celia Reinhardt, “it would be very, very difficult to actually get that bird care.”
Birds across North America face growing pressure, often linked to human activity. Habitat loss is driving declines in common species, and researchers estimate that more than a billion birds a year die in collisions with buildings. At VINS, many of the more than 1,000 wild birds admitted each year have injuries tied to people, including car strikes, diseases from bird feeders and attacks by house pets, according to Reinhardt.
Similar volunteer transport networks operate from Minnesota to Alabama to Hawaii. In Washington in 2023, Spokane Audubon volunteers drove 5,000 miles responding to 249 incidents.
Davis started volunteering about four years ago after visiting VINS with her granddaughter. She said the role fit around her IT job. In online training, she learned how to capture birds using a sheet, gloves and eye protection, then place them in a dark container with air holes and keep them quiet to reduce stress.
Now she keeps old towels, sheets and containers ready for birds of different sizes. She has transported duck eggs cushioned with towels on warm water bottles, crossed a river to collect a badly injured heron, and driven almost six hours to pick up a hummingbird with a metabolic problem.
She usually does not learn what happens to the birds afterward. The survival rate is about 40 percent. “But if we didn’t do this,” she says, “it would be much lower.”
Birds that fully recover are released where they were found, Reinhardt said, so they can continue contributing to the local ecosystem. Research also suggests rehabilitation can boost populations of raptors, which tend to live a long time and reproduce at low rates.
The same kind of volunteer effort shows up on roads during amphibian migration season. In early spring, frogs, salamanders and newts head to breeding ponds, often the same ones where they were born. When roads cut across those routes, traffic can threaten local populations.
On “big nights,” when rain and warmer temperatures trigger large movements, volunteers gather at common crossing points with safety vests and flashlights to carry amphibians across the road.
People can also help wildlife tracking through BioBlitz events, where community members and professional scientists spend a day cataloguing living things in a specific area, such as a city park, stretch of coast or part of a national park. Participants can log sightings on platforms like iNaturalist.
Citizen and professional scientists have used these events to track pollinators, rediscover rare beetles and spot a locally endangered snake. The events have also given scientists data for research and brought more people into contact with nature in their area.
Read more from Reasons to be Cheerful.
