The Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation (AIWC) took in a record 2,103 individual animal patients in 2025, exceeding the previous record of 2,064 set in 2020. “We’ve only ever passed 2,000 patients once before,” said Raylee Barth, AIWC clinic operations manager. “That was back in 2020 and even then we were still over 30 patients higher compared to 2024 and we were over 300 more patients than we had the previous year, so we were running around like crazy this year, taking care of all these animals.” Patient intakes included birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians from over 150 different species and many individual patients required specialized, costly care to return to the wild. “We don’t receive any government funding to take care of all the animals we get here,” said Barth. “Everything is donations or grants we apply for so every year just keeps getting busier and busier and with that higher needs for our patients, each patient has different needs, different foods, medications, enrichment that they need and all of that unfortunately cost money.” Barth says AIWC’s holiday fundraising campaign was a success, raising more funds than the institute was hoping for. “We actually went above and beyond what we were trying to get,” she said. “Which is absolutely fantastic, every one of those dollars is going to go towards taking care of wildlife this coming year so we are very, very grateful.” Barth says the increase in patients is part of a trend staff have been seeing over the past few years. She says many injured wildlife are a result of human activity and wildlife interactions. “The vast majority of things we see coming in, they’re hit by cars, they flew into windows, they were attacked by people’s pet cats that they let outside so we see a lot of that,” she said. “We obviously do see things that have illness and disease but a lot of it is from human interaction, also just a lot more people are finding out we exist which is fantastic and the more people that know we’re here, the more wildlife that can get help but it means that we’re busier.” Cassandra Lacusta, AIWC’s rehabilitation manager, says she and the other four full-time staff members were kept busy in 2025 with a record number of ducklings they cared for. But they’re also seeing more rare species that they don’t always see at the institute. “Our biggest one this year was our mountain cottontails,” she said. “We normally get like a handful of mountain cottontails every like once in a while, like one or two every (few years), this year we had so many I think our first group that we had was like 16 or so.” Lacusta points out that summer is clearly the busiest time of year at the institute, with a number of baby animals being admitted. A recently admitted great horned owl has head trauma that they think is a result of flying into a few windows. “We’re are being very cautious with gloves and the gowns (because) they can be a avian influenza species,” she said. “So, at this time, head trauma and avian influenza look quite similar so we’re just being extra cautious, but we’re running a bunch of bloodwork to just kind of see what’s going on.” The owl will need to be assessed, treated and then spend time at the facility to heal before it can be released into the wild again. Learn more about AIWC, and how to support it’s work here: https://www.aiwc.ca/support-us/.
