Boulder County – The baby raccoon felt like ice when Ron Patton found him a few weeks ago.
Patton and his wife, Sandy, had discovered the kit in the woods along a boulder trail, umbilical cord still attached. The baby was crying and wandering blind. Mom, Ron Patton said, was nowhere to be found.
“You get paranoid because you don’t know how to deal with this little fellow,” he said.
After a night of feeding it via eyedropper and warming it with a heating pad, the Pattons took the raccoon to the Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Sanctuary northwest of Longmont. The center, which helps nearly 4,000 animals a year, specializes in treating abandoned or hurt animals and releasing them back into the wild.
The center opened its normally closed doors to the public Sunday to provide a glimpse of how volunteers care for wild animals that have fallen out of luck, or in the case of their first patient more than 20 years ago, down a chimney.
It’s a situation they’ve seen numerous times:
Mother raccoon makes a nest in a chimney. Family inside the home decides to smoke her out. Sometime during the chaos of evacuation, one of the kits falls into the flames.
That first baby was pulled out of the ashes and rehabilitated by a group of people who went on to form the center. Before he was released, the wildlife volunteers named him “Greenwood” because green wood doesn’t burn.
The name stuck.
The sanctuary has successfully rehabilitated more than 20,000 animals and returned them to Colorado’s open space since 1998. The nonprofit has neither the staffing nor the money to take in animals that don’t need help, so it has focused on teaching people how to determine when to step in and when to let nature run its course.
That means much of their volunteer force is dedicated to education: determining when a hopping bird should be left alone (it’s learning to fly) and when a car-struck badger should be brought in.
“We rely on the public to bring animals to us,” said Victoria Nykamp, the foster care coordinator at Greenwood. “Of course that means the animal is down enough – desperate enough – to be held by people.”
Many of Greenwood’s patients come to the sanctuary as the result of human interaction, be it mistakes or carelessness, said Claire Campbell, the president of Greenwood’s board of directors.
Foxes hit by cars. Birds caught in fishing twine. Such interactions can’t always be prevented, she said, but there is a solution besides letting them suffer: Call the sanctuary.
“The problems aren’t going to go away,” she said. “If they do, that means we’ve lost all of our urban wildlife.”
Staff writer Melissa Cassutt can be reached at 303-820-1475 or mcassutt@denverpost.com.