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Episode 3 - Wildlife rehab, ecology and trees with Peter Smith
27 Plays10 months ago
Welcome to Walk on the Wild Side, an RSPCA podcast. We’ll meet people from this 200-year-old animal welfare charity, and learn about what they do. We’ll discover more about the amazing wildlife all around us, and how we can help it thrive, and be inspired to get outdoors and into nature.
In this episode, Holly gets a guided tour of RSPCA Mallydams Wood from Centre Manager Peter Smith, discovering a range of specialist facilities for the assessment, care and rehabilitation of wildlife. Outside, there are woodland environments for foxes and kestrels, pools where young seals can gain strength before returning to the wild, and aviaries for birds of all ages. Inside the centre, there are treatment rooms, specialist areas for cleaning oiled birds – a highly technical process – and isolation cubicles for larger animals. In the kitchen, specialist food is prepared for hundreds of different species of animals, mixed precisely for each animal. Holly and Peter also watch an RSPCA archive film about foxes, made in 1970.
Host: Holly Cushen
Writers: Holly Cushen and Morwenna Kearns
Producer: Morwenna Kearns
Audio producer: Chris Attaway
Wildlife advisor: Rebecca Machin
Executive producer: Sarah Millerick
Recorded on location at RSPCA Mallydams Wood near Hastings
Wildlife advice: rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/wildlife
RSPCA Mallydams Wood on Instagram: instagram.com/mallydams_wildlife_rehab
More information on how to get involved: rspca.org.uk/getinvolved/donate/audio
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Transcript
Introduction to RSPCA Podcast Series
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Walk on the Wild Side and RSPCA podcast. I'm Holly Cushion, an outreach officer at the RSPCA. Over this series, we'll meet some other people from this 200-year-old animal welfare charity and learn more about what they do. We'll discover more about the amazing wildlife all around us, how we can help it thrive and be inspired to get outdoors and into nature.
Wildlife Rehabilitation at RSPCA Mally Damswood
00:00:31
Speaker
On this episode, we'll be talking to Peter Smith, Centre Manager at ah RSPCA Mally Damswood, about wildlife rehabilitation, ecology and trees.
00:00:51
Speaker
So Peter, I know you've got a lot of outdoor space here at Mallydams Woods to help to rehabilitate animals before they return to the wild, and also to help wildlife who live in the area as well. So should we go for a walk around the centre, see what we can see? Let's go and have a look.
00:01:10
Speaker
Right. So we're going to go behind the Wildlife Centre and you can see we've got things like our x-ray room where we can x-ray a lot of animals have got broken bones and we can x-ray them and even fix them. Our vets are really good here and we've got a lot of facilities. We've got boiler rooms and water management because we need all that water for seals. We also have a specialist and facility for cleaning oiled birds Do you get that a lot here? We we had 20 oil birds this year from an oil spill in the channel but we need to have large amounts of water at exactly the right temperature and and it's a very specialist skill.
Releasing Wildlife After Rehabilitation
00:01:55
Speaker
ah We luckily to have so Richard our wildlife manager here is the one of the world experts in lugging after oil birds and we give those skills to other people and we've got real experts the team here
00:02:07
Speaker
really know how to save and we saved over 17 of those old birds and it's a fantastic success rate but it's hugely time-consuming. You've really got to know exactly what you're doing to rehabilitate those birds. One slight error and it's not good but we work very diligently with the best knowledge available.
00:02:28
Speaker
We've got a fantastic success rate of rescuing and those birds and then releasing them back to the wild. And what a feeling that is. Do you tend to release them back to where you found them? Yes. So nearly all wildlife we release is close to where they were found as possible so they can re-establish bonds with other wildlife.
00:02:47
Speaker
wildlife they can find siblings and groups they were in and they're very clever at doing this whether it's seals or it's oil birds or it's foxes or badgers we want to rehabilitate them as successfully as possible and every animal needs expert knowledge to do that.
Seal Rescue Operations at RSPCA
00:03:11
Speaker
oh
00:03:16
Speaker
We have got a leaky water container, because we need so much water, we can't just rely on the main supply, so we have to have a store when we're filling the big seal pools, and that's what this is. Unfortunately, it started leaking, so we need a new one. And that's programmed for a bit later in the year. So yes, a little trick. You get a lot of seals into the center here. Yes, huge amounts. And all the wildlife centers of the society get a lot of seals in, because it's something,
00:03:44
Speaker
these These poor seal pubs get washed up and they can get problems, yet we know how to do it. you know We're really the only people who know in in the UK who really do a lot of this seal rescue work because you need the right equipment, you need the right facilities and you need years of knowledge. Handling a seal takes years.
00:04:05
Speaker
to learn how to do safely. Very dangerous. They've got a disease that's really dangerous. It's a mycoplasma bacteria that is very hard to treat with antibiotics and learning how to hold a seal, to to tube feed it and then hand feed it, teach it to feed again and then going into the pools and learning to feed on their own.
00:04:28
Speaker
All that is absolutely essential if they're going to survive in the wild when we release them, yet we can do it and we put tags on them, we monitor them, we know we make a difference and that's the important thing what we're doing here. It's all about making sure that at the end of the day those animals can live full beautiful lives and our seals have been found all over Europe. They swim off to Denmark and Holland and they swim women off to France and they form and we know that they survive and that's what makes it so magical about the work we do here.
Triage and Biosecurity in Wildlife Care
00:05:07
Speaker
Hi Jess. Jess is one of our supervisors. She's absolutely the best.
00:05:18
Speaker
So what we've got here is ah what we call a triage tent. If a bird's sick, we have to make sure that it doesn't then infect any other animal. So we've got a little tent we've put up temporarily to deal with all the gulls and stuff like that, so the vet can make a proper examination first.
00:05:38
Speaker
before then enters one of our rehabilitation aviaries and we make sure that it hasn't got an obvious disease that could infect the others. That's super important. Biosecurity is so important at every stage so no and affection can move between any of the buildings and that's that's just one of the many complications we have of doing our work. Right, let's go and meet some girls.
00:06:09
Speaker
One of the many challenges of looking after girls is it takes a very long time to rehabilitate them. The larger the bird, the longer development time. So and they all get put into different age groups. So it's like a school. We've all got different weeks of birth and so the gregarious animals, they actually need to be with others.
00:06:28
Speaker
and this helps in their rehabilitation. So each of these six enclosures have got different age ranges of gulls. They're all being looked after, fed well and then finally they go to the big enclosure where they can do a little bit of flying, strengthen up, learn to sit on water and that helps with their feet because if you keep them You'll notice all this green matting we've got is all about keeping those feet healthy and then onto the pools so they can then and learn to get healthy again and then that's the final stage before they get released back to where we found them.
Stages of Gull Rehabilitation
00:07:05
Speaker
I feel like I'm at the seaside with all of these lovely cool noises.
00:07:11
Speaker
So that's what we call our case bird, Avery, over there. Now, we're not going to go in there. These are where animals that are part of a prosecution against somebody who's been cruel um or neglectful to animal health. And so inspectors can bring animals here and we have got the specialist skills to look after them to help in the prosecution. So it's super important.
00:07:35
Speaker
in the role the RSPCA plays in ensuring that we all treat animals with kindness and respect and reduce cruelty.
00:07:45
Speaker
Here we go. The last stage of rehabilitation. So we can see that they've all they love standing on the little flotation mats in the big pool, and they're learning how to, they'll have a swim, learn how to do that, all ready for reintroduction. You see, they're all rings, we can monitor them, see how well they do, and they're generally,
00:08:09
Speaker
They're pretty chilled, aren't they? They're really getting on with each other. So so this is final year of school and they're getting ready for graduation and back into the wild. Oh, there we go. They jumped into the water. See, they have to learn to swim. See, on cue they jumped in. Just for you.
00:08:34
Speaker
So we're walking through the wildlife centre here and we've come to almost like an opening in the woods, a clearing if you like, and there's a very well camouflaged and enclosure right in the middle of the forest. It really, really is quite amazing. um And so what did you say was in there, Peter? A care straw. We've got two, so you can see two enclosures apart.
00:08:58
Speaker
and there's kestrels in there and we've you can see the way we've designed it there's screening to help them and feel it's safe the enclosures are totally safe they have to be rat proof and rodent proof and all that kind of stuff and then we've put lots of branches to make it look like a woodland inside and this is the final stage where they're building up their strength to be released So why are the Castrols here in the first place? Well these are orphaned animals so the Wildlife Centre has two critical roles. One is orphaned animals where they would have perished if they had not been brought to us and the other is injured wildlife.
00:09:38
Speaker
These were orphaned wildlife and as young hatchlings they would have been fed by their mother but for whatever reason the mother either was hurt or for whatever we disturbed and we were notified that we can then rescue these animals and they can be brought to us and the specialists here know how to rear them first inside our wildlife building where they've got lots of little um areas where we look after them safely and as they grow we have to have the facilities then move them on so they can go through the stages of rehabilitation. So will they have been brought in by members of the public or will they have been brought in by the inspector?
00:10:19
Speaker
Well most of our animals are brought to us by members of the public. They will get in touch with vets and all the vets know who we are so they can follow them. Some members of the public bring directly animals directly to us who know them but in others take them to other rehabilitation centres where certain animals are beyond the skills of those rehabilitation centres so we so for the really high skilled jobs that's why they bring them to us.
00:10:57
Speaker
So we're just walking into a, Peter what is this building? Well this is our wildlife centre and this is where all operations happen but inside here is our specialist bird washing facility for oil birds. So we've got these troughs, we've got the specialist pumps and things that also help monitor the hot water that allows us to then clean the birds. So this is absolute best practice leading ah science developed over 50 years so we can actually save oiled birds. So this building is primarily a drying room for drying oiled birds after they've been washed, but it also acts as a general room for looking after different animals.
00:11:46
Speaker
You'll notice that everywhere you see little scales, you see towels, you see little syringes, and these are the tools of our trade. Because the wildlife assistants here have to feed every animal. We measure its weight every six hours.
00:12:04
Speaker
because that tells us about their health. We know we're doing the right thing so we've got to help feed things using syringes. We've got to develop and get exactly the right type of food that each species needs and it's all different. It's a vast amount of knowledge that has to be learned and people spend year after year learning this. All our team become super expert so they know how to save that individual creature.
00:12:31
Speaker
do i well So these are intermediary pools so they can be filled up to about a foot depth of water and this is where the seals learn to eat on their own for the first time. So when we're in the the intensive care area we have to force feed them. Sounds grim but they would die otherwise and that means putting a tube and getting a fish soup that we make up and that feeds them. When would they come in here we're we're teaching them, we're first feeding them fish ourselves. They have to be sort of pushed and super hard to grab a seal. Seal wrestling is not easy. And then this this is where they first learn to feed on their own and then they go to the big pool and they learn to swim on their own and then they can survive in the wild.
00:13:17
Speaker
So Peter, where are the seals? Well, it's
Seal Species and Rehabilitation Timings
00:13:20
Speaker
the wrong time of year. I've come at the wrong time. So in in Britain we've got two species of seals, right? The common seal, which the rest of the world call the Harbour Seal, and they live in our harbours and they live all round the course.
00:13:34
Speaker
and then we've got the grey seal and it's they have pups at exactly the different time of year so the common seal, the harbour seal, they're just about to have pups and once they start doing that's when they get started brought to us and then in about October over to about January that's when the grey seals have their pups and that's when they're brought so we're just at that period of time for two months in the year where we don't have seals So you've got the noise of the gulls or the barking of the seals. The but the real seals barking is haunting. So if you came here a three months ago, it would have been full of a haunting and they sound like children crying. It's haunting across and it's it's it's they're not in distress. It's just how they communicate with each other. And it really is a very different place when you hear that. It's a good job Mallydans is in the middle of nowhere. You've got no neighbours here.
00:14:39
Speaker
Right, next room.
00:14:49
Speaker
Isolation cubicles. Now this is where we can look after animals who need a much higher ah amount of care and can be dangerous. So things like badgers or foxes grown up things or seals and we can actually flood each of these individual cubicles to make them have enough water for water animals, swans All these big creatures that can be dangerous but have specialist needs, these isolation cubicles, we call them, have been developed to do that. And so and we don't have any baby seals in this year, this time of year, but we hopefully will have them very soon, so within a month's time.
00:15:32
Speaker
We'll have those first baby seals coming in and in that vital time where they might have an infection or they might have an injury or they might need very high support of feeding, of tube feeding, we can do it all safely within these cubicles and they're very technically complex to manage.
00:15:52
Speaker
and run safely. You'll see they're very substantial ah bits of kit and it's another one of those issues where the society has been leading the world in developing techniques of looking after wildlife.
00:16:07
Speaker
Right!
Feeding Processes for Wildlife
00:16:09
Speaker
The kitchen! The most important room. The most important room. So we've got a kitchen where we've got some really quite expensive specialist gear for grinding things up and in turning food into just the right type of food that all the different animals can eat. So you'll see a huge range of buckets with all kinds of things. We've got mealworms and grains.
00:16:33
Speaker
and we've also got all kinds of sizes of frozen fish and everything that an animal, we've got all powders and and specialist foods that we bring in that we can then mix up just as we're doing here and then that food has to be presented to the animals and it's really complicated. We've got hundreds of species and they all have to have their diet prepared chris precisely and what you feed them how much protein, how much fat, how much carbohydrate. All the different things have to be done precisely to make sure those animals are healthy and their journey through this organisation, their journey to recovery and being wild and free is done right. Shall we head to the next room? Yep.
00:17:21
Speaker
So we call this general care, but at this time of year, it's all birds. So it's a bit like the bird handling room. It's pretty much set up on exactly the same way. Ranks and ranks of little bird aviaries, the small floater ceiling. And then again, we've got air conditioning unit, because we've got to get it to keep it at the right temperature. yeah And we've got everybody putting them in. We've also got some incubators. They've got little birds that need to be a little bit warmer, you know, as if one was looking after them.
00:17:51
Speaker
And one of our wildlife systems is busy cleaning and getting the food ready. So they clean every, what is the job of a wildlife system? It's literally, you clean, you weigh and monitor the health and then you feed. And you do that and repeat for hour after hour, day after day. And you've got to be able to see any behavioral changes. isn So then our veterinary team, the vet nurse and the vets can come in and do anything needed to keep them on track and do any more complicated monitoring, whether it's take bloods, whether it's x-rays, anything like that, fecal screening, all that kind of stuff goes on here and it goes on every day like a production line. Day in, day out these fantastic people working hard to look after the welfare of animals.
00:18:40
Speaker
So do all of the wildlife assistants have to keep a sort of almost like a log for each animal so that they know what's been done and what needs to be done and things like that? Every animal's got paperwork, just like if you go into a hospital. It's identified, so you've got to identify the animal. So you know you've got to know what type of animal it is. You identified in all medication, all feeding regimes, all instructions for every animal has an individual card, and that's all kept and looked at. So it's just like working in a high dependency unit in a hospital. There's no difference. Right, we've got another room, the treatment room.
00:19:19
Speaker
Lots of rooms that all have very important jobs. My palace has many buildings and many rooms. So we've got a treatment room, the final room, and this is where all the operations happen. um The vets examine. We've got all kinds of scientific gear here. Lots of locked cabinets for all the medicines that need to be given, and our vets are amazing. The RSPCA gets the best of the best of the best. They are amazing. Their knowledge is beyond what you can think humans are possible of. They must have to know so much about so many different animals that, you know, the sheer amount just from from walking around this building and of different animals that you've mentioned, they they must have a whole breadth of knowledge. They are amazing, they're inspirational.
00:20:05
Speaker
Well, now you've seen pretty much all of Mallydam's, apart from the stuff right at the other end of the woodland and all the other places we reintroduce wildlife, but you've seen everything that there is. So we can take a walk to see the foxes if you wish. Let's go and explore. Right, follow me.
00:20:30
Speaker
They're gonna have a lovely walk in the woodlands. And it's blazing with sunshine. And the first thing you're gonna learn is trees are unnatural air conditioners. They're gonna keep us cool, not only from the shade, but also the transpiration pull, the water. Every tree is like a garden hose, pouring water at the same rate, but it evaporates so you don't see it. And as that evaporates, it takes energies out.
00:20:58
Speaker
cooling the air below the tree by up to three degrees in this heat. And then you've got the shade on top of it. So it is a perfectly beautiful air conditioner. Let's head into the air conditioning in that case.
00:21:15
Speaker
So Peter, where are we heading to now? Well, we've got a big walk ahead of us. We're going to walk right to the other side of the woodland, to the most secluded part of the woodland, because we're going to see some of the fox cubs where we're rearing. And whilst we're walking over, can you just tell me a little bit more about why the foxes are here?
00:21:36
Speaker
Well, they were, and again, orphaned animals. These orphaned poor foxes were abandoned. And when they come, they would perish. Now, we need to raise them. It's not hard to raise them. But if they get habituated to humans, they think humans are their parents, they can't be released, can they? And that's what we have to achieve with this.
00:21:58
Speaker
every animal needs its specific things to allow it to be rehabilitated and then to become truly wild again so they can live a wild life and it's one of the amazing things that we have a woodland we can actually achieve that now this is what's known as a
00:22:21
Speaker
Gill woodland, right? And you'll find out why it's called a Gill woodland. It means it's north, you see? It's on a steep slope, and it's very wet. As we've just tried started squidging through, even in the hot summer, it still hasn't lost all of the moisture and the salt. So there's lots of clay and lots of wetlands. And that's part of what makes this brilliant. Now over the years, it's been drained. Now we want to stop that and reverse it. We want to turn this back into a wet woodland again.
00:22:49
Speaker
It creates a giant sponge that stops a local village from flooding and it creates a unique habitat. With the right type of effort we can bring back the water vore and as we head further up the hill we're going to move from wet areas to areas that are more like a heath woodland.
00:23:08
Speaker
and that heathy woodland again creates a huge carbon store. The soils become really big over the many years of all that kaluna, the heather that lives there and that again can attract rare creatures that have gone extinct. We can bring back Animals like the Bechstein bat, animals like the night jar that all used to live in this woodland would have gone away. And that's what we're trying to do both here and our neighbours are trying to create a giant nature reserve where all the animals that used to live here can return once again.
Rehabilitating Orphaned Foxes
00:23:48
Speaker
Can you feel the natural air conditioning? It's definitely cooler up here.
00:23:57
Speaker
So over the last four years, a thousand foxes have been brought into our SPCA centres. So what's the most common reason you see them coming into mallydams? Well, mallydams, it looks after orphan foxes, really. I mean, we do treat adult foxes that have got an injury that we turn them around and get them back into the wild straight away.
00:24:16
Speaker
but with orphan foxes we have to be their mums and dads but they don't have to know we're here because they have to be wild so we feed them we treat any little problems and then we put them in a special enclosure which is what we're walking to now where it's right deep in the woodland and it mimics a natural habitat they're just a little fence where they can't escape until they've learned to look after themselves
00:24:44
Speaker
Wow, so Peter, says what are we looking at? Well what we've got in front of us is just, it's a big fence, a row fence that goes all around an area of woodland and the foxes, the fox cubs are now living in there and they're going to live there. We feed them every evening but we try to make sure that they don't see humans because they can't get used to us. So we try to feed them in a way where they don't see us feeding them and then once they're big enough we literally open the gates and off they go free and if you're if you yeah on our social media you can see where we've had camera people do all with the hides and secret stuff where we've seen how the foxes go we put out cameras these trail cams where we can see them at night and then slowly and surely they form natural packs when they're young and then they split off into breeding groups and just become part of nature
00:25:40
Speaker
That's really, really amazing. And, you know, foxes have such ah big social structures and they're really socially intelligent animals. And, you know, they're not they're not out at the moment because it's sunny, it's hot, and it's the daytime as well. But they make such an amazing array of calls, um over 20 different calls. Do you often hear hear that at Mallydams?
00:26:02
Speaker
well because we we keep them to the other side of the woodland but of course we hear them when they interact when they're younger they're playing with each other and they're talking to each other and that's that amazing socialization and we we stick little cameras up there so we can monitor them check that there's nothing wrong with them if anyone's got an injury we can bring them back in and treat that and we can hear them so we watch them and you know we do that every day looking after these foxes Well, it's definitely pretty warm out here today. Should we head back into the Education Centre? Yeah, let's go.
00:26:53
Speaker
So we're going to take a quick break and in a moment you'll hear something from the ah RSPCA archive, a clip from a black and white film called Foxes in the New Forest which was filmed in 1970 by Eric Ashby.
00:27:08
Speaker
Here at the ah RSPCA, we believe everyone can play a vital role in helping animals, from sponsored runs to making a donation. No matter how much time you can spare, we've got ways you can get involved. Join us, everyone for every kind. Help animals your way and click more info now.
00:27:35
Speaker
The RSPCA has been around since 1824 and it's amazing to look back and see how much we've achieved over the past two centuries.
Ecological Role and Behavior of Foxes
00:27:43
Speaker
We've got a huge archive of films, sound recordings, photographs, newspaper clippings and magazines. So let's dig in now. Contrary to popular belief, foxes are not entirely carnivorous. They lead to almost anything that's available, including a high proportion of vegetable food and berries.
00:28:02
Speaker
This one is catching insects, possibly grasshoppers.
00:28:10
Speaker
Another searches in a plantation. Unless disturbed, they will hunt throughout the day. Cubs often have to learn to fend for themselves. These are hunting for food in bracken and ditch well away from any earth. They probably live almost entirely above ground. Like kittens, cubs are attracted by anything that moves.
00:28:32
Speaker
such as a butterfly, a beetle, a piece of windblown paper. But whatever it is, it's never chased but stalked in the manner of a kitten. Foxes, in fact, are similar to cats in many ways and not as dog-like as one would think.
00:28:50
Speaker
So Peter, how are foxes good for the ecosystem? Every animal has its place in nature. Nature can be seen as a pyramid or as a web, and you can study how that animal creates a space. If you remove one part of the ecosystem, a fox, the animals below it, some can get too many, and the cascade of ecological effects causing problems for all the other animals. Predation is not a problem.
00:29:20
Speaker
wildlife have evolved to live with predation and without it they become unbalanced and you have all kinds of problems. Remove a fox, you could take away an earthworm, you could take away a beetle, that cascades terrible. We must be very cautious when we interfere with nature.
00:29:37
Speaker
So as well as being able to communicate using sounds like we spoke about earlier, foxes also use smell, don't they? They've got scent glands all over their body, including in between their toes, and they produce different scents that mean sort of different messages. It's really quite amazing. They're such amazing animals.
00:29:54
Speaker
That's right. We're only just starting to scratch the surface of how to understand nature. When an animal runs, it can leave tiny scent marks so the next animal following it can step exactly in the right place so it can run faster and chase and stalk better. There's messages left all around. Keep out of my territory. I want to be your friend. Would you like to get married? There's good food here. There is a huge range of communication. It is a hyper volume of information and our brains just aren't big enough to understand it all.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
00:30:31
Speaker
Well Peter, thank you so much for showing us around today. It really has been amazing to see how Mallydams works and all about the wildlife that lives here too.
00:30:39
Speaker
It's been wonderful to have you and to share the amazing thing that Mallydams is with everybody in the society so they know the fantastic work we do.
00:30:55
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the RSPCA Walk on the Wild Side podcast. It was presented by me, Holly Cushion, written by myself and Moenna Kearns, and produced by Chris Attaway and Moenna Kearns. Our wildlife expert was Rebecca Machen. The executive producer was Sarah Millerick.
00:31:13
Speaker
Special thanks to RSPCA Newbrook Farm and RSPCA Mally Damswood, all of our guests and everyone else who helped put this podcast together. To learn more about getting involved with the RSPCA, click on the link in the show notes or search RSPCA Wildlife Podcast or visit rspca.org.uk.