Greetings and happy
birthday to all of Sydney Wildlife’s wonderful volunteers and all our
amazing wildlife vets and supporters!
It was 24 years ago this month
that Sydney Wildlife began operations and what an incredible time it is to be
celebrating our birthday!
Why? Because last week saw a
little bit of history in the making for the volunteer wildlife
rehabilitation sector in NSW and Sydney Wildlife’s volunteers were amongst
those that made a more than significant contribution to this!
This week the Nature Conservation
Council held their biennial Bushfire Conference and as Sydney Wildlife’s
representative on the NSW Wildlife Council (NWC) I had the privilege of
presenting our organisation’s and sector’s outstanding efforts to assist
wildlife during the Black Summer fires 2019-2020 and the needs of our sector
looking to the future.
In December 2019, during the
fires, a huge project undertaken by our wonderful members Joan Reid and
Lynleigh Greig came off the production line.
I am, of course, talking about our mobile wildlife clinic which was
immediately deployed, with a full complement of experienced local wildlife vets
and volunteers, to assist our sister groups and carers on the south coast and
Blue Mountains. Simultaneously on behalf of the NWC, I engaged international
animal disaster assistance who continued this work establishing triage centres across
the south coast.
Behind the scenes during these
fires our volunteers, Margaret Woods and Sarah Hylton and others, worked
extremely hard gathering and distributing resources to fellow wildlife carers
and organisations besieged by fire, not only in NSW but throughout the nation,
even commandeering a plane to Kangaroo Island to get through vital supplies. At
the same time, volunteer Anne Jackson was
also gathering and distributing vital medical supplies through her groundbreaking
Medi-Divert program that collects unwanted hospital medical supplies.
In the latter part of last week I
represented Sydney Wildlife as an exec on the NWC at a two day workshop held at
the State Emergency Response Headquarters with senior members of the Rural Fire
Sercice, the Dept. of Planning, Infrastructure and Environment, Dept. Primary Industries
and leading wildlife vets looking at how wildlife might be included in future
emergency responses and testing an emergency app (developed by yet another member
Imogen Scott of Worldwide Veterinary Services).
And finally, last week also saw
the first volunteer wildlife carer and advocate, Lorraine Vass, invested into
the Order of Australia for her contributions to conservation over the past
three decades and in particular for services to koalas (Friends of the Koala)
and her work with the NWC.
On top of this, what a year we
have just experienced with the covid-19 pandemic coming so quickly on the heels
of the Black Summer fires!
As an organisation we’ve had to
adapt our office procedures, data collection and rescue coordination to remote
based online systems. We’ve also had to transform our basic and refresher
training courses to online as opposed to face to face. These have been
enormous projects undertaken by yet more teams of our amazing volunteers. Similarly,
our fundraisers and community educators have also had to adapt to trying to
perform whilst safely negotiating covid-19 restrictions.
We’ve also spearheaded and
participated in rebuild programs for volunteers and sister groups in southern
NSW whose properties and wildlife infrastructure has been destroyed by fire. We
have been kindly assisted in these works by the International Fund for Animal
Welfare (IFAW).
And, of course, throughout the
pandemic ALL our amazing volunteers have continued their amazing rescue efforts
whilst having to safely negotiate covid-19 restrictions.
To all those that have worked so
hard on all of these projects and our entire membership adapting so very
quickly to this - I cannot express how proud and grateful I am to all of you!
Your commitment, innovation,
passion, kindness, resilience and straight out hard work over the last 24 years
and in the face of such huge challenges in the past 18 months for our wildlife
and our organisation and to assist our fellow volunteers in other organisations
is simply outstanding, inspiring and humbling!
Happy birthday beautiful people -
take a moment to pat yourselves on the back and do something nice for yourself
- you so deserve it️!
Sonja Elwood