Blue Ridge Wildlife Center Patient of the Week: Eastern Screech Owl

What inspired you to help wildlife? For many, it was this beautiful owl, Dopey.

Photos / Blue Ridge Wildlife Center

Dopey is a red-morph eastern screech owl who was admitted as a nestling in 2013, after being found on the ground and unable to be re-nested.

When he was placed in an outdoor enclosure with other young screech owls, he was often found on the ground and seemed unaffected by our presence. As he continued to mature, other neurological issues, such as seizures, developed, preventing him from surviving in the wild.

Because he was unable to survive on his own, and was comfortable and low-stress in captivity, we decided to permanently care for him at the Center.

Dopey is one of our 22 Wildlife Ambassadors and is part of our education team!

Our ambassadors are imperative to our mission at Blue Ridge Wildlife Center: to teach others how to be good stewards of our natural world. Seeing native wildlife live and in-person allows people to truly appreciate our native species. That love and appreciation ultimately develops into a desire to help our native wildlife and ecosystems so that we can all take advantage of the biodiversity, land use, and health benefits of healthy ecosystems.

But we need your help to get our awesome Wildlife Ambassadors to more educational events.

We currently rely on staff and volunteer vehicles to bring our ambassadors to programs and this greatly limits how many of the animals we can safely transport and how far we can take them. Your donation TODAY will go towards purchasing a van to transport our animal ambassadors, like Dopey, to educational programs.

Help us teach children and adults to appreciate and respect our native wildlife with your donation today.

This van will allow all our animal ambassadors to be safely transported and allows plenty of space for biofacts and other educational materials to make our programming as effective as possible. Our ambassadors, staff, and volunteers are grateful for your support!