Synchronicity and wildlife rescue

Yesterday was AMAZING.

Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary hosts over 60,000 visitors a year at their lovely site near Brighton, 15 minutes or so north of Hobart. There, they showcase various rescued wildlife that is either as happy in captivity as in the wild, or too injured to be reintroduced to the wild, or both.  They run educational programs, but one of their most impressive achievements is their work rescuing native animals. Almost all the wildlife needing rescuing (they get between 3 and 7 callouts a day on average) has fallen victim to some anthroposophic ill or other (traffic primarily, dog / cat attack, toxoplasmosis from ingesting cat poo, getting caught in fishing line, etc). For a couple of years now, Bonorong has been the official after hours emergency number for Parks and Wildlife Tasmania. They train, co-ordinate and provide phone support and coaching to a large and growing group of volunteer rescuers and a smaller but highly committed group of volunteer wildlife carers. The wildlife rescue programme costs 100,000 dollars per year, and astonishingly, they run it with no government money at all.

And the cool bit: since last Saturday, we are among those volunteers!

When Chloe was doing the Visa Activation / recce here earlier in the year, she visited the Sanctuary and was enormously impressed and inspired by what she saw.  She spoke with staff members about getting involved, and finally Saturday was our opportunity to take a first step along that road. In fact, Chloe had A Feeling about Bonorong, and I’ve learned not to underestimate those.

So we went to the training session and it was, in a word, inspirational.  Greg talked for three hours with nary a PowerPoint slide, and had everyone in the room absolutely riveted.  We learned how to handle joeys of all kinds, echidnas, possums, macropods, lizards, and the list went on.  The information was simple, entertainingly delivered and really comprehensive.

Along the way, Chloe and I started brainstorming about ways that we could help.  We will be going out and helping rescue animals as the need arises; but we also thought that we might be able to help with caring, particularly for birds (a special interest of Chloe’s and also of mine); and then we thought that we could contribute to fundraising (with knitted items, free singing gigs, children’s books / illustrations, paintings etc) and possibly admin (because I am a spelling, grammar and procedures Nazi, hear me roar).

So we went up afterwards and started to mention some of this stuff to Greg, and he was happy enough but very pressed with other people wanting his attention.  We approached him a second time…

And a magical thing happened.  Chloe mentioned (apropos of something or other) that we were going to be starting a natural building school, and blow me down if Greg didn’t ask: “Have you guys heard of Cal-Earth?”

Well, yeah, a bit.

That sparked off a hugely exciting discussion.  Early days to say what form/s our collaboration will eventually take, but it’s pretty clear to me that, once again, Chloe’s Feeling was right on the money.