At this week’s Log Lunch, the Williams community gathered to hear from Sarah Cooperman ‘17 about her wildlife rehabilitation work. Sarah expressed her life-long love for wildlife protection; growing up she had big dreams of becoming a marine biologist, but her passion for wildlife underdogs eventually led her to researching the importance of bats through the Florence Chandler Memorial Fellowship. After traveling to several different countries and studying the interactions between bats and their environments, Sarah found herself with an even stronger interest in wildlife conservation but no clear idea of how to apply her motivation.
She decided to start by getting a job at a wildlife sanctuary and working there for a year or two; cut to five years later and Sarah is the executive director of the Rockfish Wildlife Sanctuary, a non-profit organization whose mission is to rescue and rehabilitate animals. Almost 20 years after the founding of the sanctuary in 2004, Rockfish is now a full-on facility with 52 enclosures, caring for 870+ wild animals throughout the year. The sanctuary also works closely with the community, providing personal education programs involving onsite tours and ambassador animals as part of their initiative to inform the public about how to interact with and protect local wildlife.
The main approach that Rockfish takes to wildlife rehabilitation is to prioritize rehabilitating each individual so that they can be successful upon re-entering the wild. Rehabbers use their knowledge of species-specific natural history to ensure the best possible outcome for each individual. As Sarah described, the job of the rehabber is to immediately address the animal’s health by rehydrating, feeding formula, and giving medical care before focusing on getting them ready to be released. Part of Sarah’s approach at Rockfish involves the “One Health” concept, which focuses on the intrinsic relations between animal, environment, and human health. As rehabbers, Sarah and Rockfish are on the frontline of this intersection. In order to do this work effectively, rehabbers respect the fact that wildlife should be separate from domestic human life; even though the baby opossums and barn owls are very cute, rehabbers do not care for the animal like its their own, but are there to step in and care for the animal when its own species can’t.
Sarah and her team care for a wide range of animals, including red fox kits, baby barn owls, skunks, bat pups, and many more. She shared a couple of her favorite rescue stories with her audience, including one in which her team rescued a goose with an arrow through its abdomen, provided the goose with care and rehabilitation, and ultimately released her back into the wild. As Sarah described, there are less glamorous and heroic but still necessary parts of her job as well, including cleaning enclosures and analyzing fecal matter. Nevertheless, Sarah emphasized how much she loves this work, even though she didn’t expect it to become her life. While working at a small non-profit isn’t exactly how Sarah imagined she would have a large impact on environmental action, she has since learned that having a local impact is just as important and necessary to conservation work. Sarah’s parting advice to her audience of Williams students was to follow the parts of life that are fulfilling no matter what they are, to put aside the expectations of prestige and preconceptions of what “success” looks like (consulting jobs, maybe?) and let the things that we love become what we do.
The Log Lunch cooks made a delicious meal including a chioggia beet salad salad, some aloo naan, maple-roasted dijon carrots and turnips, and a clementine cake with a chocolate glaze. In celebration of maple sugaring season, the maple glaze for the vegetables was made with syrup from our very own Hopkins Forest maple trees.
Log Lunch is a CES program hosted every Friday at noon. During Log Lunch, a vegetarian meal prepared by Williams students is served, followed by a talk on an environmental topic. Speakers are drawn from both the student body and faculty of Williams, as well as from local, national, and international organizations. Learn more here.
BY CAMPBELL LEONARD ’25