A visit to Wildbase Hospital where our treasured wildlife heal

New Zealanders are pretty keen on their native wildlife. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who feels indifferent towards our kooky critters.

This is why you might assume that someone, somewhere, is looking after them when they get crook. If a kereru gets hit by a car, say, or a kakapo gets a case of consumption, someone at the other end will put them on the mend.

Naturally — given how strongly we feel about our birds and lizards — there are wholesome folk out there who do just this. But it’s not a well-funded, well-oiled district health board-type system. It’s much more ad hoc than you’d assume.

Julie Leighton, for example, rehabilitates penguins at Okari just out of Westport – a small one-woman outfit on her property. On a bigger scale, the South Island Wildlife Hospital was only set up in 2007 because, according to their website, there was no such facility in the South Island prior. That was only 17 years ago. And they all rely heavily on charity.

Funding for this high-priority work is a disturbing struggle. Part of the reason for that is a sense of optics here – an assumption that these organisations are being fully supported, perhaps by the government or philanthropy.

If someone were looking to donate to a good cause, they might assume these professional-looking organisations are being sorted for and look to put their money elsewhere. But they’re all just scratching by.

Wildbase Hospital in Palmerston North is a prime example. It’s one of the veterans of wildlife care in New Zealand, and it just turned 21 – that’s elderly in wildlife care years. They’ve treated 7000 animals across 128 species, including our most precious – shore plover, kakapo, albatrosses, kotuku and, of course, kiwi. Not just birds, rare skinks and geckos, green sea turtles, and tuatara.

Yet the problem with Wildbase is that it’s attached to Massey University. It’s on the physical grounds of the main campus. Like other such arrangements, the university provides vet students, but Wildbase is not even close to being safely funded for the future.

The hospital looks high-end – to a layperson, it’s got all the right medical equipment, flashy stainless-steel devices that dazzle us non-medical folk. But look a little closer, and you’ll see signs of distress.

The empty Gopala yoghurt container used to store syringes and the garden sprinkler in the seabird recovery pool was clearly obtained from either the green or the orange local hardware chain. The medical equipment itself? Older, outdated models were donated by hospitals or perhaps secured in the equivalent of a garage sale.

Founder Professor Brett Gartrell says every year he’s never quite sure whether Wildbase will be able to keep its doors open the following year, and he’s been thinking the same way since it opened in 2002.

But these organisations aren’t just repairing our beloved vagrant varmints. They’re creating the knowledge about these animals.

Once again, an easy assumption is that with the internet, there must be loads of material on the physiology of our native wildlife, especially birds like the kiwi and kakapo.

There’s not. There’s hardly anything.

For example, Gartrell explained that because kiwi eat lots of worms, they thought they could feed them worms from worm farms. For some unknown reason, kiwi hate commercial worms. They get diarrhoea. No one knows why.

He also recounted a story of a time he was in the hospital by himself, and a kahu, or native hawk, hooked itself into his nose, flapping about wildly, blood, tears, and mucous streaming all over the place. There was no one around to help. What a scene. Luckily, Gartrell eventually remembered that if you straighten the leg of a kahu, it will loosen the talon, and you can peel it back.

Try Googling how to get a kahu to release its talon. You won’t find anything.

So not only are places like Wildbase rehabilitating thousands of our animals yearly, but they’re finding out all about them from scratch. Oh, and of course, they’re training our nation’s vets simultaneously.

You’d think that, with a nationwide consensus on the issue of protecting our native wildlife, it’d be low-hanging fruit for an aspiring politician. But if any politicians have thought that way in the past, very little has come of it.

And with 94% of our reptiles, 82% of our birds and 80% of our bats at risk of extinction, we’re running out of time.