Kris Bevilacqua has worked as an wild animal rehabber for the past three years. For the last few months she has been taking care of Rocky and Possum, two nocturnal animals.
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Kris Bevilacqua has been an wild animal rehabber for the past three years. She takes care primarily of squirrels, opossums and bunnies at her house in Waverly Ave, Brooklyn. Her task as an animal rehabber usually starts during the spring and for these season, she is taking care of Rocky and Possum, hopping they can someday be taken back to nature.
Kris works as a psychologist and relays on her daughter to help her take care of any animal that comes through to her house. Although she once took care of dogs and cats, she became interested in wildlife after working as a volunteer at Shawn Casey Animal Rescue for seven years.
During that time, Kris has kept some animals, specially bunnies, that weren’t ready to go into the wild. This activity has allowed her to explore her motherly side.
Transcript
When I was a kid, people would always bring little rabbits and mice to me and I take care of them. For the past six or so years we’ve volunteer every Friday over at Shawn Casey Animal Rescue, where people turn in all kind of wild animals. From turtles, to birds to squirrels that fall out of trees and so in order to help them it made sense for me to become a wild animal rehabilitator. So when they get a squirrel they would say: Hey we’ve got another one, come and get it.
I think at the most we’ve had 19 squirrels at one time. You know when you have 19 squirrels and they need to be fed, it’s sort of like mmm no. You don’t get so attached and I ran out of names long ago. You tried not to get attached but every once in a while maybe you get a couple every year.
A piece of banana chip, she likes those, few pieces of cat food which has good stuff in it and maybe a little oatmeal and we’ll call it diner.
Come on is diner time…
Rocky is flying squirrel. How else would you name a flying squirrel? And she is very tiny, she is very nocturnal, she may have been a pet at one time. She was turned in at Shawn Casey Animal Rescue and I’ve been taking care of her ever since. But if she’s been raised by humans, she has no clue about how to make it in the wild.
Opossums are kind of fun because I’ve never had much experience with them, I mean they’re nocturnal, they are fairly secretive but they also are found in places like rain pipes in the spring and they’re orphaned. And so they get turned in and when they’re tiny, they have a face only a mother could love.
It gets to the point they are kind of like teenagers when they are ready to be released, you know? It’s handy if you feed them but then they don’t want anything to do with you but that’s how you know they are ready to go.
It’s incredible satisfying to watch them grow from being hairless, their eyes are closed and be able to take them along, to be along in the journey really as they grow up and they are ready to go out and do their thing in nature.
