Volunteering in the Mammal Nursery at the Baldwin Wildlife Center will provide hands-on experience with several different mammal species, including raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, and opossums. Caring for some of these animals requires hours and even weeks/months of handling experience, specialized trainings, shadowing staff, and one-on-one training sessions. Everyone begins their training with cleaning & bottle-feeding baby raccoons, cleaning & syringe feeding baby squirrels, and cleaning out & feeding our self-feeding adult rabbits, squirrels, & opossums. The mammal species you are assigned to work with on any given day will depend on the animals currently in care. For those interested in working with our native Nebraska bats, additional experience and rabies vaccination with a current titer required.
*Doing laundry, washing dishes, and other general cleaning tasks will ALWAYS be a part of your shift, no matter how trained you are.
Accessibility & Physical Requirements
Helping care for our mammal patients can be a very hands-on experience. Many daily tasks involve kneeling or squatting to access floor-level enclosures, reaching in to safely remove young animals for feedings, and standing back up again. Depending on the number of patients, this may be repeated multiple times during a single shift. In addition, some nursery duties require lifting and carrying small animal carriers or supplies weighing up to ~20 pounds. While we do our best to support volunteers, we aren’t always able to adjust enclosure heights or reserve standing-height animals. We encourage anyone interested to consider these physical requirements and reach out with questions so we can help you decide if this role is a good fit.
How to Get Started
The first step is completing an online Volunteer Application Form by selecting the button below.
If you have any questions, you can contact us at volunteer@nebraskawildliferehab.org and we'd be happy to answer them. We appreciate your partnership in helping our patients return to the wild!
