Macon Magazine

Vonda Morton has been a journalist and a part-time instructor of history and geography at Georgia College and State University, but she found her true calling in 1996 when she rescued a wood thrush from Priscilla, her cat. “When she was young, Priscilla was the great white huntress,” said Morton, who lives on her family’s farm between Dublin and Glenwood. “The first things I rehabbed I rescued from her. I did everything wrong with that wood thrush, but he survived.”

Priscilla is 19 years old now and her bird-catching days are behind her, but Morton has gone on to become a licensed wildlife rehabilitator - licensed by the state and by the federal government to recover and treat sick, orphaned or injured songbirds, ducks, deer and small mammals until they recover and can be released into the wild.

From 1996 to 2000, Morton studied various wildlife rehabilitation guides, learning how to care for the stricken critters she rescued from Priscilla and elsewhere. She was unaware that what she was doing is illegal.

“It’s against state law to keep any wildlife without a license, and it’s against federal law to keep birds,” she said. “In 2000 I found out it was illegal, but I was volunteering with the Dublin-Laurens Humane Society, and I thought they had a license. It turned out that they didn’t, but they thought I had a license.”

After that realization, Morton notified authorities at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and ‘fessed up. They were lenient, recognizing that she had made an honest mistake.

Before taking the licensing examination, she studied manuals as thick as a New York phone book.

“It’s tough,” she said of the exam. “You’d think it would be common sense, but you have to know a lot of things - such as species-specific diets, appropriate caging and how to handle the injured animals.”