4 minute read
KC Cares
KC Cares
WILD SOULS
By Beth Lipoff
When you find an injured owl or an orphaned fox, don’t swoop in to help them yourself. Call Wild Souls, a wild animal rescue and rehabilitation facility in Blue Springs.
For April Hoffman, the nonprofit is a dream come true. She built Wild Souls from the ground up, starting by taking classes for two years to get all the training she needed. Right now, she’s working on opening a second location in Lone Jack.
“I have this thing in my personality when people say, ‘You can’t do that. It’ll never be done. You’re crazy.’ I’m like, ‘Watch this.’ It just got bigger than I ever dreamed it would become,” she says.
It’s been five years since Hoffman got her permits, and Wild Souls boasts an 89% release rate.
“We have a hotline that assists the public with free education on how to coexist with your wildlife neighbors, how to humanely evict your wildlife neighbors that you’re having conflict with, and to determine or identify rehabilitation candidates,” she says. “Instead of hiring a pest removal company to come out to your house and pay $500, we offer humane solutions for free.”
The majority of their hotline calls come from Blue Springs and Kansas City; they’re only licensed to work in Missouri. Their transport team, staffed with volunteers, responds to calls where hotline volunteers have determined an animal may be truly orphaned or injured.
“Say there’s an owl stuck in a fence— our volunteers will go on site, get the owl, bring it in, and then we rehab from there,” Hoffman says.
Animals they help include squirrels, opossums, beavers, skunks, foxes, coyotes, eagles, hawks, and owls. They do not work with deer due to rules about transporting deer across county lines. Typically, they can respond to local calls, either with a callback or an actual visit, within an hour.
The Conservation Federation of Missouri named Wild Souls its conservation organization of the year for 2022.
Right now, Wild Souls operates on donations, but Hoffman hopes to secure government funding in the future. The grants they have received are for their educational public outreach efforts.
And it’s not just the animals they’re trying to help. This month, they’ll be holding their fourth annual “Shop with a Conservation Agent” program, where they take kids who have experienced some sort of hardship to purchase equipment for outdoor adventures.
Wild Souls is partnering with 13 game wardens from all over Missouri for the program. Each warden takes one kid shopping. Seeing the kids enjoy the experience means a lot to Hoffman.
One recipient was an 11-year-old boy who had undergone two years of cancer treatment.
“Obviously, being cooped up in the hospital is no fun for a kid. His family got hit so hard financially with the chemo. With the shopping experience, he bought a tent, a fishing pole, and camping boots. Then we teamed up with other affiliate programs to where once they get that, we send them to another partner where they have free programs of going camping for a weekend,” she says.
She’s not the only one moved by the experience of helping the kids.
"You see these grown, stone-cold game warden faces turn so soft at the end of a day with all these kids," she says.
With Wild Souls, Hoffman's overall message to the public is, "Don't kidnap wildlife. Let animals be. Don’t take them from their mom. Just because you find an animal doesn’t mean it needs help,” she says.
Volunteers must be 18 or older unless they have a parent or guardian who is also volunteering. Even then, younger volunteers are not as hands-on with animals as adults for insurance reasons.
Lee’s Summit resident Susan Hughes, the hotline’s lead volunteer, knows how critical it is to educate yourself on the animals you might be handling.
“There’s always more to learn because each animal is different, not only species-wise, but you never know how an animal’s going to react, so the body language of the animal is very important,” Hughes says.
For Cheyenne Cook, the hardest thing about volunteering with the animals is, “You can put your all into it and try, but at the end of the day, we know we can’t save everything. We have to come to an agreement with ourselves. We’re not God. Some things are out of our control.”
Although Wild Souls always needs volunteers to work the hotline and do the animal handling. Hoffman says what she really needs right now is someone to help coordinate events.
For more information on Wild Souls, visit wildsoulswildliferescuerehab.org
