WCA Volunteer Information

Thank you for your interest in helping Wildlife Care Alliance. We are a group of licensed wildlife rehabilitators and concerned citizens working together to benefit native Virginia wildlife. Wildlife Care Alliance is a non-profit organization made up entirely of volunteers. Our organization serves a geographic area encompassing Roanoke, Bedford, Lynchburg, Blacksburg, Covington, adjacent counties and beyond-a large area of central-southwest Virginia. Our organization needs people like you to help our rehabilitators provide quality specialized care to orphaned, injured, sick, or displaced wildlife. Our goal is to release healthy, viable animals into an appropriate habitat.

We are a network of individual rehabilitators and volunteers that operate out of our homes. We do not have a center for these activities. This network allows individual rehabilitators to specialize in one or two species thus providing a higher quality of care than if each one of us worked with multiple species. Our experience has proven that wild animals respond best to the individualized care and specialized expertise we offer them. Stress is reduced and recovery is faster when wild animals are housed in quiet surroundings and are cared for by one or two people rather than by many different people.

Home-based operation creates the need for different types of volunteer help:

• TRANSPORT of wildlife to appropriate rehabilitators is also an extremely important job. Because we are spread out geographically, the miles our transporters log allow us to spend that much more time, energy and money on animal care. We provide training and written guidelines for transporters so that our wild patients can travel as stress-free as possible.
• HANDS ON WILDLIFE REHABILITATION is available to those who wish to follow the steps necessary to obtain a permit to rehabilitate native wildlife. Our experienced rehabilitators will help you through this process. You can choose apprenticeship and set up your own home-based operation, or you can get a "baby-sitter's" permit and help in an experienced rehabber's home. In order to handle the caseload of wildlife in trouble, we need new rehabilitators.

There are many other volunteer opportunities as well. If you are interested in helping us, please print the volunteer form, complete and return it to us. We will contact you with further information. Thank you for caring about wildlife.