By Eliza Ridgeway

Photo courtesy of Wildlife Rescue Inc. A Wildlife Rescue volunteer offers a meal to a baby bobcat.

As the summer wanes, newborn wildlife are spreading their wings and stretching their legs, and in backyards around the area, stray creatures inevitably appear.

Residents who encounter a hatchling or wayward duckling have a local resource: Wildlife Rescue Inc., a non-profit organization that cares for orphaned and injured wildlife from Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Palo Alto and Mountain View. A call to their hotline can help determine what to do and how to do it. Sometimes baby animals only look orphaned, and are best left alone.

Liz Nappinger, one of Wildlife Rescue’s animal care coordinators, said the key is not to try to raise the wildlife oneself. Each species, from hummingbird to barn swallow to squirrel, needs a specialized diet to grow up healthy and limited human contact for a safe return to the wild.

Because it’s still early in the season, Wildlife Rescue’s shelter is filled mostly with young birds. The staff feeds them a specialized blend of baby food with added nutrients during their first few weeks of life. The shelter has an escapee almost every day, Nappinger said. When a cliff swallow darted out of its cage during feeding, the staff quietly turned out the lights in the room and scooped up the renegade in a net.

“They hang out in their cages all day, all they want to do is escape,” Nappinger said. “It’s worst when it happens with doves or pigeons - they are so big, powerful and dumb that they run into every wall.”

Wildlife Rescue has, for years, crammed into a portable on the Cubberley Community Center campus, paying Palo Alto a nominal rent for the space. Mountain View, Los Altos and Palo Alto have all cut their funding for the non-profit in recent years. Los Altos Hills budgeted $2,620 for 2007, down from $3,300.

A.G. Ferrari Foods will cater Wildlife Rescue’s Fall Gala, scheduled Oct. 13 at the Thomas Fogarty Winery. The gala will feature a silent auction, raffle and avian guests of honor. Most of the organization’s annual budget comes from fundraising and private donations from long-term supporters and walk-ins who make donations when they drop off injured animals.

The shelter is open to all wildlife in need, which can lead to some surprising visitors. On a Sunday last month, the shelter got a call from park rangers at Rancho San Antonio, asking if they would take a baby bobcat that had been following humans around the park. The infant’s mother seemed to have rejected it.

“It was so thin, dehydrated and covered with mud you could tell it was really depressed,’ said Carrie Sipes, an animal care coordinator. “It really went to town on the cat food.”

After hydrating the cub for a day, Wildlife Rescue transferred it to a wildlife center in Morgan Hill where it will have other bobcats for company. Because of its small facility, Wildlife Rescue doesn’t rehabilitate animals bigger than opossums, but it has referred larger creatures, such as deer, to other refuges.

In addition to running the shelter for orphaned and injured wildlife, the non-profit conducts outreach education, especially in the area’s public schools. It also serves as a resource for bemused homeowners who don’t know what to do with the baby bird, squirrel or deer that turned up in their backyard.

The shelter’s staff have tips ranging from the familiar, “Leave it alone,” (fawns’ mothers often lurk just out of sight, and usually haven’t abandoned their young), to the more baroque. “If you hold up a baby squirrel by its armpits,” Nappinger said, demonstrating with her thumb and forefinger, “it will scream for its mother. Just set it back under the tree and she will probably come for it.”

If that fails, bring it in to Wildlife Rescue to join the other lost squirrel children that populate their own room until they are released into the wild.

Wildlife Rescue Inc. is located at 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. For more information, call 494-SAVE.