Her calling is for creatures in need
By: Chelsea Phua
When Vivian Maxson plays hide-and-seek with coyote pups, she is not playing a game with them. She is teaching them essential survival skills.
"They have to learn to stay hidden," Maxson said. If not, they could be shot or hit by a car. As one of the few wildlife rehabilitators in Rhode Island, Maxson has been nursing injured wild animals back to health and raising orphaned ones since 1998 at her nonprofit organization, Born To Be Wild Nature Center, in Bradford. Over the last five years, she has rehabilitated an average of 125 animals a year.
Maxson often has to take on the rold of the mother animal, teaching the young animal survival skills that it will need when it is released back into wild.
"I have to get them ready for the natural world," Maxson said as she described her experience raising two male coyote pups in the summer of 2002.
The pups were stolen from their mother, labeled as German shepherd mixes and given away as pets. But the owners realized that they were not behaving like ordinary puppies and took them to Maxson, who immediately recognized them as coyote pups.
She bottled-fed them, and after they were weaned, she took them to a forest nearby to gradually acclimatize them to their natural environment. She taught them to dive behind a tree at the slightest disturbance, to avoid all human contact except with her, and to catch live prey such as mice and snakes.
Those times, Maxson reminisced, were some of her happiest.
When Vivian Maxson plays hide-and-seek with coyote pups, she is not playing a game with them. She is teaching them essential survival skills.
"They have to learn to stay hidden," Maxson said. If not, they could be shot or hit by a car. As one of the few wildlife rehabilitators in Rhode Island, Maxson has been nursing injured wild animals back to health and raising orphaned ones since 1998 at her nonprofit organization, Born To Be Wild Nature Center, in Bradford. Over the last five years, she has rehabilitated an average of 125 animals a year.
Maxson often has to take on the rold of the mother animal, teaching the young animal survival skills that it will need when it is released back into wild.
"I have to get them ready for the natural world," Maxson said as she described her experience raising two male coyote pups in the summer of 2002.
The pups were stolen from their mother, labeled as German shepherd mixes and given away as pets. But the owners realized that they were not behaving like ordinary puppies and took them to Maxson, who immediately recognized them as coyote pups.
She bottled-fed them, and after they were weaned, she took them to a forest nearby to gradually acclimatize them to their natural environment. She taught them to dive behind a tree at the slightest disturbance, to avoid all human contact except with her, and to catch live prey such as mice and snakes.
Those times, Maxson reminisced, were some of her happiest.
