tool name

Monday, May. 25, 2009

Horse farm doubles as a wildlife rescue and rehab center

Horse farm doubles as a wildlife rescue and rehab center

GEORGETOWN — In one of several yearling barns on Summer Wind Farm, two-week-old red foxes frantically chase each other in a closed horse stall. Inside the stall is an igloo-style dog house. That's their den. Two stacked bales of hay serve as a makeshift grassy rise. There's lots of clean straw for the all-day tumblepalooza.

This is some super fox fun.

Some of the world's most promising and well-bred thoroughbreds take no notice. This is Summer Wind, after all. Where animals are beloved regardless of their lineage. Where the 2006 Eclipse Award-winning, graded stakes-winning champion female Fleet Indian is standing in a field with her foal by champion and champion sire A.P. Indy, and both are in spitting distance of a) a wildlife neonatal facility currently nursing 40 baby raccoons, b) a rescue operation for seven orphan coyotes and c) a zebra.

Oh, and there are those 43 stray cats (each with names) who have all been spayed or neutered and micro-chipped and must be accounted for nightly because "they are our animals," wildlife rehabilitation specialist Karen Bailey says, as if that makes sense, and it does if you spend more than five minutes with Bailey.

Bailey is the daughter of farm owners Jane and Frank Lyons Jr., but this is not some idle horsewoman's hobby. This is the work of a woman with a master's degree in business administration from Vanderbilt University and an utter inability to see an animal suffer.

On this 850-acre horse farm, where the yearling son of Storm Cat and Fleet Indian is being raised to do his parents proud in the next Keeneland sale, Central Kentucky Wildlife Rehabilitation Inc. is in the midst of its high season. That's April, May and June, when Bailey gets, on average, three hours of sleep a night, so intent is she on bottle-feeding the newborns — be they raccoons, opossums, foxes, groundhogs, skunks, turtles, you name it — left homeless by accident, intent or cruelty.

Last year, she helped to rescue and rehabilitate 200 small wild animals, and that doesn't count the cats.

Her husband of one year, Summer Wind farm manager Mark Moloney, told her she could have one room in their house on the farm to do her wildlife work. It sort of expanded on her. And him.

"He asked me to come home with a six-pack," she says, laughing as she holds onto to six squirming baby coyotes. "I don't think this is what he had in mind."

She has now taken over at least four rooms and the entire multi-car garage area. She has incubators. She can pipe in oxygen. She can provide respiratory therapy with nebulizers. She has even gone so far as to apply some horse-farm medical advances originally tried on foals who were born orphans and asked her "savior" vet, Dr. Scott Tritsch of Central Kentucky Veterinary Center, if they could do something similar for raccoons without mothers.

The two then came up with a process of spinning down hyper-immunized raccoon plasma from her own raccoon blood donors. Her survival rate surpassed other, much larger rehabilitation centers working with raccoons, Tritsch says, and has attracted the attention of the University of California-Davis researchers.

She has built pens behind paddocks that serve as holding pens for new animals, to acclimate them to their new surroundings, to calm them, if need be. She has an elaborate two-step program of halfway houses, for her slow-release program for the raccoons released on her own farm.

From there, the almost-done-with-Bailey raccoons can easily keep tabs on the zebra and his three nappy burro friends who have their own paddock that has lots of lovely shade. The zebra, which was bought by Bailey's mother, who felt sorry for him, is affectionately (we think) named "The Rug."

Caring for the neglected

Karen Bailey's hands itch. She got a touch of poison ivy from one of her little charges, which must have had it on him when he arrived. A onetime national champion in show jumping with her 17.3-hands-tall Holsteiner stallion named Landsmann, Bailey shows no sign of being the woman in the crisp clothes and the polished field boots. For her work today, she is in sweats with raccoon-milk stains and more than a few stray animal hairs of unknown origin.