It’s time to look back on 2025! Check our blog between Christmas and New Year’s for a variety of stories and memories of 2025 from the staff of the Wildlife Center of Virginia.
Unsurprisingly, working with wildlife is rarely a straightforward endeavor. Each individual patient presents unique challenges and opportunities to learn, and even cases that seem routine often come with unexpected twists. Because of the degree of trauma many of our patients face, outcomes can be grim. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the number of animals we cannot return to the wild and to feel a creeping sense of hopelessness. Despite this, I choose to focus on those we are able to send home. I love being challenged and finding opportunities to grow, and this year gave me plenty of successes to celebrate.
To usher in the year, we admitted Virginia Opossum #25-0110, who had been caught by a dog and sustained fractures to her right radius and ulna, along with numerous puncture wounds. These types of fractures often require extensive orthopedic surgery, so I was immediately worried about her future. Fortunately, her radiographs showed the fractures were still well-aligned, allowing us to attempt healing with bandaging alone. I placed her in a thick bandage with a splint to stabilize the fractures; the bandage also included a small “vest” to keep it from slipping down her leg. We all immediately fell in love with her—and her adorable vest. After several weeks of bandaging and repeat radiographs, her fractures healed beautifully, and she was able to be returned to the wild. This case could have gone wrong in so many ways, but instead turned out better than we ever hoped.
As spring arrived and our hospital buzzed with new admissions, we received Virginia Opossum #25-0770—one of many opossums each year injured in vehicle collisions. His injuries were immediately obvious, including a large wound spanning the right side of his face. Admission radiographs revealed minor fractures to his upper jaw, but otherwise his injuries were primarily superficial. Given the size of the wound, I knew it needed to be closed right away. Our Hospital Manager and LVT, Jess, sometimes refers to me as an “opossum plastic surgeon,” and this case certainly fell into my area of expertise! With bone exposed and multiple layers of tissue lacerated, it took some careful work to piece everything back together. Once the sutures were in place, I was incredibly proud of how the wound looked. Over the next two weeks, he healed beautifully and remained one of the cutest patients in care. I was thrilled to release him into a beautiful forest just 15 days after admission.
Rounding out the year as winter’s chill set in, we received Ruddy Duck #25-4123. This individual had crash-landed on pavement—a common misfortune for aquatic birds—and was found impaled by a stick on their right side, with additional injuries to the beak. On admission, Dr. Zack debrided the large wound caused by the stick, but there was too much dead tissue to close it at that time. A few days later, I debrided the wound again and was able to close it so the duck could return to the water. While the wound itself was straightforward, the beak fractures posed a new challenge. I had never stabilized a duck’s beak before, and our orthopedic reference offered only a single sentence on the topic. With no clear roadmap, I started brainstorming ways to splint the fracture and landed on a tool that has helped heal many small creatures—the humble paper clip. I love the arts-and-crafts skills I get to use in this work, and I was able to suture part of a paper clip to the beak to stabilize it. The splint worked even better than expected, and the duck was swimming later that same day. Both the wound and beak healed flawlessly over two and a half weeks, and they were able to return to their winter home on the coast.
So many of our cases are fraught with unexpected problems and challenges that it brings real joy when a case goes according to plan. Each of these patients taught me new and innovative ways to heal and reminded me of the resilience of our native wildlife. Amid the daily trials and tribulations, there are always glimmers of hope. I am deeply grateful every day for the opportunity to learn from my patients and my incredible team. With every new horizon comes another chance to transform a life and help an animal journey back home.
— Dr. Olivia Schiermeyer, Veterinary Research Fellow