Sarah Rages, Hutchinson senior, carefully eases a red, toothpick-sized tube down the throat and into the stomach of a baby bunny. She squeezes the syringe attached to the other end of the tube until all the formula is in the bunny’s stomach. She puts the bunny safely back into the shoebox with the rest of its siblings, opens another box and pulls out a bloated baby bunny on its last legs. She doesn’t know if she can save it.

Rages volunteers with Operation Wildlife in Linwood to save orphaned and injured animals from certain death in the wild, though she actually sees death on a regular basis when she works,

OWL, a privately run organization, was founded in 1979 by Diane Johnson and incorporated 10 years later. It provides citizens in northeast Kansas and northwest Missouri a place to take injured or orphaned wildlife for rehabilitation so they can be released back to nature successfully. OWL also educates the public about wildlife in the area. Rages’ own experiences at OWL are vast, exciting, traumatizing and sometimes even funny.

Rages, who is majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology, heard about OWL through the Biology Teaching Resource Center in Haworth Hall just over a year ago and has been volunteering ever since. She says she wants to do exactly this for her profession, but there aren’t many jobs available.

Sheryl Saunders, who currently holds one of only two paying positions at OWL, says Rages will just have to wait until her body gets too old to work anymore because she loves working as the Animal Care Coordinator.

There is no such thing as a typical day at OWL, but on Wednesday, March 28, Rages is busy acting the part of an emergency room doctor. She treats an American kestrel (a small falcon) with head trauma, another bird with a broken wing, and a pair of mating ducks that had been mauled by a fox.

Sadly, the duck couple probably doesn’t stand a chance; they’ll have to be euthanized. The American kestrel’s eye is swollen, most likely from hitting a car, but the eye isn’t lost and the bird has a chance to survive in the wild if it recovers.

Rages begins by giving the kestrel antibiotic fluids to relieve the swelling. She carefully weighs the bird, calculates the amount of medicine needed and administers it. She sets the bird aside; only time will tell its fate.

Between emergencies, Rages manages her typical responsibilities: “peeing” baby bunnies and opossums and feeding the other animals in the double-stacked cages lining the hallway in the main work area of the barn in which OWL is located.

Rages is all too familiar with bodily functions. She’s “peeing” the baby opossums, nearly furless creatures only a few inches long. They look like alien caricatures, with upside down eggheads and big eyes. She flicks her finger at their genitals to simulate a mother’s licking and wipes the urine off with a cotton ball. Later, she does the same for the baby bunnies. Baby animals can’t urinate by themselves; if they aren’t helped, their bladders can explode.

In essence, Rages has to do everything a mother animal would do, but without making the baby animals accustomed to human contact so they can be released into the wild again. Besides, she says jokingly, she wouldn’t want to lick them like their mother does.

During the feedings, a woman pokes her head through the doorway at the end of the hall. She alerts Rages and another volunteer that she has a squirrel that had been hit by a car in the back of her minivan. She rushes out to bring it in. Janet Nosseir, a Leavenworth resident who frequents OWL, lets her 14-year-old daughter, Megan, carry in a dog kennel with the squirrel while she tends to the paperwork she’s already familiar with.

Nosseir says she’s been bringing injured animals to OWL for seven years and does it several times a year. She can’t pass by an animal lying on the side of the road to be run over again and again, and she says she doesn’t understand how anyone else could just drive on.

Like many people who bring in animals, Nosseir is worried; she tells Rages she would like to be notified later on about what happens to the squirrel. Follow-up phone calls are a service OWL offers.

While she’s there, Nosseir donates two overflowing paper grocery bags of old towels and sheets. Rages says donations help OWL remain open because it doesn’t receive government funding.

Ultimately, Rages doesn’t find out if the bloated bunny she helped earlier in the day would live or not. She hopes that the drug she administered will cure the little animal’s ailment, which could just be hypoglycemia. All bunnies have it, she says, and a shot of sugar may be able to cure the seizure the bunny was having. She leaves after her shift and won’t be back for a week; one bunny in box of several, in a counter full of boxes, is hard to keep track of if she’s not there to see it die.