After several weekends of heavy rain across the city, one animal rescue says calls for help have declined slightly amid flooding – which strikes its executive director as “odd.” “The reality is that we only get animals brought in when people find them. When we get this terrible weather and all this rain, there aren’t enough people out and about to find some of these imperiled creatures,” Dale Gienow, the executive director of WILDNorth, told CTV News Edmonton. At this time of year, excessive rainfall can be particularly hard for waterfowl who depend on certain levels of moisture or who may be susceptible to heavy winds, he added. Earlier this month, WILDNorth rescued 15 Franklin’s gull chicks who were washed out of their ground-level nests. The rain can also impact young ducks’ coats and their ability to stay warm and dry while in water. “Right now is fledgling season, so we’ve got a lot of young birds in nests, a lot of nests being blown out of trees. But it’s affecting animals in some really crazy ways that we’ve never really had to deal with in previous years,” Gienow said. “We had a call recently about a beaver whose pond swelled, and he ended up falling into a window well, going through a screen, ending up in somebody’s basement … So some pretty unusual stories this year.” Despite those unusual stories, Gienow says most animals are adaptable. “As a whole, nature is pretty good at accommodating these kinds of anomalies and dealing with them appropriately,” he said. He says the rescue receives around 14,000 calls each year on average from Edmontonians concerned about local wildlife. Most recently, WILDNorth fielded calls about ducklings in a downtown water pit who were in fact “doing just fine.” “Ducks and waterfowl that are in basins, maybe they’re in a development foundation somewhere – if there’s water in there, and there’s food in there, they’re great,” Gienow said. “They’re able to eat, they’re able to thrive, to avoid predation … Though we (understand being) concerned, and we appreciate the calls.” With nicer weather promising to roll into the city in the coming weeks, WILDNorth hopes Edmontonians will stay on the lookout for animals in need. With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Miriam Valdes-Carletti
