Introduction

This is a book about wild things in peril and what people have done to help them. It is also the story of a remarkable woman and the organization she founded to provide that help. In it are many successes, a few tragic failures, and chapters that finish somewhere in between or have no end at all. Whatever the outcome, there is always hope. It is the one force that runs through every page, the talisman that gives magic to each tale.

It all began in 1997 when Hope Swinimer founded The Eastern Shore Wildlife Rehabilitation and Rescue Centre. In 2005, the name was changed to Hope for Wildlife Society, and to avoid confusion, that is what it is called in this book. Work done out of the organization’s Seaforth base has helped birds, animals, and other wild creatures from every part of Nova Scotia and earned Swinimer the Canadian Wildlife Federation’s 2008 Roland Michener Award for outstanding achievement in Canadian conservation.

The society is both a group of volunteers and a charity built around those volunteers to help finance their cause. This book takes you inside work with orphaned foxes and injured eagles. It introduces a blind raccoon and a doomed moose. There are stories of a car-crushed turtle that lived, but a spoiled deer that did not. Hope comes to a young bobcat someone mistook for a domestic kitten. An owl that collided with a salt truck gets a new face and another chance at life.

Through everything at Hope for Wildlife run the beliefs of its founder. Hope Swinimer is passionate in all she does, and has given herself a lot to do. Swinimer is a certified veterinary practice manager and holds a full-time job as administrator of the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital. She recently took over the Halifax city animal pound service, founding Homeward Bound City Pound to run it. Groups all over the province constantly ask her to speak or to lead tours of her Seaforth facility. Universities have sent students, sometimes entire classes, to see how wildlife rehabilitation should be done.

Swinimer’s work has made her a larger-than-life figure in Nova Scotia, a person whose name and organization are touchstones for care of the province’s wild creatures. Hope for Wildlife is a continuing story with many chapters, including tales that were told, and retold, long before they were discovered by the media or printed here.

One of the reasons Hope Swinimer and her followers attract so much interest is that their adventures tend to start off in one direction, then go in another. For example, when she took the job as administrator for the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital, Swinimer had no intention of getting involved with wildlife. Hers was to be a life of cats, dogs, and other domestic animals that people keep as pets and companions. These were the ones her doctors worked with. These were also the ones whose owners paid the bills. However, she found herself more and more drawn to injuries veterinarians did not deal with, such as the backyard blue jay that collided with a window or the porcupine with legs broken by a pickup truck.

One day in 1993, a couple who had run over a skunk brought it to Swinimer’s workplace. The veterinarians could not look after the animal so she decided to take it home and do it herself, and that was how her wildlife rehabilitation started. Under her care, the skunk recovered, but was blind in one eye and could not be released. Instead, Swinimer decided to use the animal she called Zorro to teach Nova Scotians about their native wildlife. Of course, to prepare a skunk to meet the public, it had to be de-scented, which segued into the unexpected element of this tale, the part people still talk about in veterinary circles when the topic of skunk surgery is evoked.

Zorro, Hope Swinimer’s first rehabilitated animal, is a legend at the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital and in a certain veterinarian’s household. Who knew musk glands were worse out than in?

Swinimer decided Zorro’s anal musk glands had to be removed, and found no veterinarian willing to help. Finally, she badgered Dr. Ian McKay at her hospital to try. People would learn in time that letting Hope Swinimer talk them into things could have unforeseen results. McKay agreed to do the de-scenting despite warnings from his colleagues.

A skunk’s scent glands may be situated similar to a dog’s, but they are much larger, about the size of two very large grapes, compared to the pea-sized canine ones, and much more potent. McKay worked carefully. He got the glands out without nicking them, which was his biggest fear and the subject of endless warnings, then secured the ducts to prevent any leakage. There was a slight aroma in the operating room, but no one out in the waiting area of the hospital was complaining. Swinimer and McKay declared it a success.

“I got them both out, intact, and they were sitting on a tray while I finished sewing Zorro and let him wake up. I was quite pleased, very proud of myself. I’d done it, we’d got along fine, and Zorro had lived through the surgery. We hadn’t contaminated the hospital, and things were looking pretty good,” said McKay.

The chickens should not yet have been counted. Another staff veterinarian entered and asked how large a skunk’s musk glands were, and McKay proudly extended the tray to show him. Both glands rolled off. McKay said it was like a car accident, when everything goes into slow motion and eternity passes as your vehicle swerves across the road and hits another. It seemed to take at least five minutes for the glands to roll off the tray and hit the floor.

Meet Hope Swinimer and the pine marten Gretel. In 2002, Swinimer faced arrest over her little friend. For details, see chapter 4.

“Then it was kind of like an atomic bomb blast,” he said. “I can still see those things hitting and exploding into a mushroom arc. The odour was just incredible. It was so strong, not at all like driving by a dead skunk on the road. That would be mild by comparison. They exploded like balloons full of water, and the smell filled the hospital almost instantly. People weren’t happy with me. They weren’t happy with Hope. It was bad.”

The entire Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital had to be evacuated and scrubbed out, inch by inch. McKay was strongly advised to shed his clothes and either bury or burn the lot, but he insisted on taking them home and trying to wash out the scent in the family laundry. Nothing good came of that. The clothing still reeked and the aroma had happily invaded his entire house. His wife arrived home from a trip a few days later and, despite an entire weekend of his frantic deodourizing, immediately asked her sheepish husband how the skunk had got in.

So there it was, the first story of many. The legend of Hope Swinimer and the strange things that happened to her and her band of wildlife workers was underway, and would keep growing. Tales of glorious success and heart-wrenching failure, often couched in irony, spread year by year from there. Before long, Hope for Wildlife was rehabilitating and releasing more than 1,500 animals each year. In doing so, word of its work spread, and young people in particular found enchantment in it. For many, contact with Hope and her animals helped form their futures.

Sarah Snow and Laura MacDougall look after an orphaned raccoon. Volunteers are the backbone of Hope for Wildlife.

Lower Sackville’s Tiffany Sullivan was one of these. In 1995, when she was twelve, a friend invited her to supper in Eastern Passage, where she could meet her friend’s father’s unusual girlfriend. They were eating pizza at Swinimer’s kitchen table when it happened.

“I felt something on my foot and looked down. I’m pretty sure I screamed and jumped up on a chair because I’d never seen a skunk in someone’s house before,” Sullivan said. “It was the first wildlife I’d ever been close to. It kind of scared me a little bit.”

Swinimer quickly intervened and went into education mode.

“First she said he just wanted the onions off my pizza, so I gave him those. Then she started to tell me all about wildlife, that Zorro was injured and couldn’t go back.”

It was Swinimer’s first year, even before she’d moved to Seaforth, but her Eastern Passage home cradled the idea that would grow into Hope for Wildlife. Sullivan remembers Swinimer’s backyard and just how small things were in the beginning.

“Hope had just started rehabilitation, and she had four of those chain-link dog pens. There were a fox, a raccoon, and some other little stuff,” she said.

Swinimer explained how wild creatures sometimes got injured and needed human help, but the concept was entirely new to a suburban twelve year old whose closest prior contact with wildlife was watching roadkill flash by her car window.

“Before that, I never really thought about it. You’d see dead animals on the side of the road, and I always assumed that if they got injured, they just died,” Sullivan explained.

As she grew older, finished high school, and entered university, Sullivan always held in the back of her mind that touch on her foot from an onion-hungry skunk. Because of Zorro, she had decided that helping animals would be her life’s work, but she had not kept in touch with Swinimer, and didn’t know about the internationally recognized rescue, rehabilitation, and release program those four cages in an Eastern Passage backyard had grown into.

By late 2008, Sullivan was attending Nova Scotia Agricultural College and looking for a place to get in some required volunteer hours with animals. During a web search, she typed in “wildlife” and up popped “Hope for Wildlife” and the name Hope Swinimer.

“I must have called her several times a week for at least four months. I just completely harassed her to get in there. And then I went to my first orientation, and I’ve been there ever since,” Sullivan said. “I knew once I found her again, this was where I was supposed to be.”

Sullivan was a volunteer worker that summer at Hope for Wildlife. In the spring of 2010, Swinimer, on a whim, applied for the contract to run the Halifax city pound service, and won. She opened Homeward Bound City Pound and one of the first people she hired was Tiffany Sullivan.

Surrounded by people who shared her dedication, Swinimer led the fight for provincial permission that would allow a private group to do wildlife rehabilitation in Nova Scotia. When government officials said she could not get a permit for a private rehabilitation centre because no guidelines for such a document existed, she promptly sat down with two biologists and wrote what was needed. Now other people in Nova Scotia who care for wildlife are following in her footsteps, under regulations she helped create.

“Wildlife has been the passion of Hope Swinimer’s life and she certainly has lived by that passion,” said Jen Costello, a regional biologist for the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources.

That passion is rooted in a purpose that goes beyond Hope for Wildlife’s doctoring and nurturing of injured animals. Swinimer believes most people do not know enough about the wild things they share their province with. If they can be taught to care, wildlife will be more than just roadkill or something smelly that has moved in under their garage. It will become a public treasure, as precious to everyone as it is to Hope Swinimer.

Underlying all the adventures retold here, that is the one real hope.