File:Coast watch (1979) (20471422380).jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_7 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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The of the Wild By Carla B. Burgess The Virginia rail opens its slender beak reluctantly, and a volunteer inserts a feeding tube. Her voice respectfully lowered, Cheryl Baptist looks on. "You never get up close to these guys," she says of this marsh bird, which is very secretive in the wild. "This one was in the line of someone spraying for mosquitoes." Flushed from its marsh hideaway, the stunned and intoxi- cated bird then flew into a moving car. Here in the intensive care room of the Outer Banks Wildlife Shelter (OWLS) in Morehead City, the rail was treated for a head injury and given an antidote to combat the poison. The swelling subsided and the bird's circulation improved, says Baptist, but it has "eye problems" and still won't eat on its own. Outside the clean, white walls of this cinderblock building, cars and trucks whiz by on U.S. 70 toward Bogue Banks. An angler in a nearby estuary cuts and abandons a piece of tangled fishing line. A local gardener sprays her rose bushes for bugs. A bored child takes potshots at a hawk circling overhead. And the casualties pour into OWLS, where Baptist — the only paid staffer at this privately funded nonprofit shelter — and some 40 volunteers try to repair the damage caused by humans. Through donations, the shelter treated 200 animals in its first year of operation in 1988. The annual patient load has ballooned to 2,000 animals. They see wildlife injured on the highway, birds that have swallowed poisoned insects, owls and hawks wounded by gunshots and pelicans with fishhooks lodged in their throats. Continued COASTWATCH 1 5

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