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Bluewater Centre for Raptor Rehabilitation

For Lynn Eves, it has always been as simple as 1, 2, 3. One: See an injured or abandoned animal. Two: Nurse the animal back to good health. Three: Set it free. Eves, a retired laboratory technologist, has been doing it since she was a little girl growing up in Sarnia. "It has been my passion all my life," Lynn says. "I was looking after a lot of random wildlife as a child with the help of my parents. I became aware that I wanted to do this with the help of other people, so I put an ad in the local Sarnia paper asking if anyone was interested in taking in wildlife to rehabilitate it. That, or take in orphaned animals that needed help. I started out doing mammals. The songbirds and raptors came along later."

Lynn says her ad attracted a good response and she and her new group worked at helping the likes of baby squirrels, bunnies, raccoons, and even baby skunks. They also helped songbirds and the odd owl and some larger birds, too. "I had the mammals taken care of by foster parents and eventually I became more interested in the birds," Lynn says. That led to her starting Bluewater Centre For Raptor Rehabilitation (BCRR) in 1991. It is located on her farm in Wyoming on 28 acres and features plenty of cages for the birds. There is also a small clinic on site. BCRR is a non-profit organization and registered charity that functions to help injured, orphaned, and displaced raptors, loons, herons, and waterfowl with the object of releasing these animals back into the wild. The group operates depending on volunteers and donations from the public.

"Our goal from the beginning was to get the wildlife in the community the help they needed," Lynn states. All medical x-rays and surgeries are done by veterinarians. Day-to-day maintenance and care is performed by Lynn and the 8-10 volunteers who circulate through the week and along with students that visit the BCRR as volunteers on the weekend.

While Lynn could rattle off numerous stories about birds and animals her group has nursed back to health, one stands out as being particularly special. "It was not about a raptor," Lynn recalls. "It was a loon. Loons are migratory birds that go north to south for breeding and wintering. Sometimes in a storm or during a long flight, they'll come down on a wet road or wet field or, in this case, a small pond. They can't take off from a small body of water or wet fields and wet roads so they get stranded. In this case, it was a drainage pond and this loon had been there for more than a week. It was spring and the pond was getting smaller and smaller, so it needed to be rescued. It took four of us and a great big net to catch the loon. It was an amazing rescue and an even more amazing release. It would have been a death sentence if it had not intervened to rescue that loon."