Nature

Then one year, catastrophe struck. Dad was rototilling, Mr. Dodo was abiding unseen, and in one brief, terrible moment, their paths converged. Mr. Dodo suffered a grievous wound, a deep laceration to his back. Children weeping, parents distraught, the family tenderly bundled up the toad and rushed him to Waynesboro, where Mr. Dodo was delivered, with much earnest entreaty for his care, into the hands of the staff of the Wildlife Center of Virginia.

Founded in 1982, the Wildlife Center is a veterinary hospital for Virginia’s wild creatures, treating an ever-varying cast of fauna large and small, from orphaned black bears to box turtles with broken shells. In 2009 alone, the Center admitted more than 2,500 animals for treatment, including two rare peregrine falcons, 45 mice, 101 white-tailed deer, 64 red-tailed hawks, and one five-lined skink.

The Wildlife Center, which is supported almost entirely by private donations, is also one of the world’s leading teaching and research hospitals for wildlife medicine, focusing on issues from conservation and environmental education to disease surveillance and bioterrorism. The Center’s staff is involved in telemedicine, education and consultation with wildlife centers and veterinary teaching institutions around the world. It also consults with and advises local, national and international government organizations. In 28 years, the Center has trained some 900 veterinarians and 22 post-doctoral interns or residents from the U.S., Canada and 32 other countries; in addition to the three staff veterinarians, there are usually one or more students training at the Center, some only for a few weeks and others for months or longer. Through its outreach and education programs, the Center also reached more than 1.4 million Virginia schoolchildren and adults over its years of operation.

“It is not success in our mind to be one of the best or to do well what other people can do as well or better,” says the Center’s president and co-founder, Ed Clark. “Our mission is to blaze new ground, learn new things, and empower other people to do more, and that is something to which we have been loyal and true since the beginning.”