Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 13, 1992 TAG: 9201130115
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
SHE TEACHES THE CALL OF THE WILD
In her homemade owl glasses, Eddy Anderson looked funny.But nobody in her young audience was laughing.
They were mesmerized, spellbound by the 3-year-old screech owl perched on Anderson's gloved hand. "It's alive!" one youngster shouted.
Others, unable to contain themselves, chimed in.
"Remember the silent ooooh's and aaaah's," Anderson interrupted.
Perkins, the owl, was getting a little spooked from all the noise.
Earlier, Anderson had taught the group to react silently to the animals by wiggling their fingers and flapping their hands in the air.
But the kids were just too excited to comply. Undaunted, Anderson continued, demonstrating with her funny owl glasses why owls need to be able to turn their heads nearly 360 degrees. Made with a pair of Anderson's own glasses, yellow construction paper and two paper cupcake cups, the glasses blocked her vision from side to side.
Perkins looked at Anderson and ruffled his feathers in disapproval.
"Owls have fixed eyeballs," she explained to the group of kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders assembled for her wildlife education program at Back Creek Elementary School in Roanoke County last week. "They can't move their eyes like people, so they have to move their heads instead."
Even the teachers were enlightened.
"I never knew that," one said upon learning that owls having stationary eyes.
Anderson offered some other facts:
Owls and icebergs have something in common. Like icebergs, only about a third of which are above water, most of an owl's eyes are hidden in its head.
Young owls are copycats. If orphaned at an early age and cared for by people - instead of being returned to the wild and a surrogate owl mother - an owl will not learn normal behavior or how to survive on its own. "It's called imprinting," she said.
"It will think it's a person and never learns to be an owl."
Take Perkins, for example: He was found by a family who cared for him as best they could, Anderson told her audience at the school. But they waited too long before contacting her at the Roanoke Wildlife Refuge. Despite their good intentions, Perkins had imprinted.
Their ignorance cost him his freedom.
Anderson recalled the first time she met Perkins, when the family brought him to her at the refuge. "He looked back at me and practically smiled," she remembered. A normal owl would have rocked back and forth and wildly puffed its feathers out.
"Which is to say, if you come any closer, I'll rip your face off," Anderson translated.
So now, Anderson uses Perkins for educational purposes to illustrate the do's and don'ts of wildlife rehabilitation and to teach school groups across Western Virginia about some of the animals that live around them.
As director of the Roanoke Wildlife Refuge, she is the person that game wardens and others often turn to when a wild animal has been found orphaned or injured and needs special care. She treats and cares for the animals and, if possible, returns them to the wild.
Anderson has collected a number of strays, like Perkins, who can't be released. She has some on display at the Science Museum of Western Virginia, where she works, and keeps the others at home.
The Wildlife Center of Virginia in Weyers Cave got word of Anderson's growing menagerie and enlisted her to be its area educator. Her first program was held last Wednesday at Back Creek Elementary. She also conducted a program for the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders.
"Eddy's wonderful," said Marilyn Nash of the Wildlife Center, who was on hand to observe. Nash is one of two staff members at the center who travel around Virginia and Maryland conducting similar programs.
She said Anderson is the center's first area educator, however.
But she is not the first - or the only - person to bring animals into the schools. Marvin Johnson, educational coordinator for the Mill Mountain Zoo, also conducts show-and-tell programs in area schools.
Where the two differ is on subject matter. While Johnson teaches more about the animals and how they live, Anderson says her program emphasizes wildlife rehabilitation, how injuries or abandonment occur and environmental issues.
To make a point, Anderson got a student volunteer at Back Creek Elementary to allow himself to be tangled in a volleyball net with his hands in his pockets and his feet tied together.
Then, she asked him to try to escape. He couldn't, illustrating what happens when a seal gets trapped in a fishing net at sea. Such nets, she said, get thrown away by fisherman or break from other nets and cause hazards to seals and other sea animals.
She demonstrated how plastic six-pack rings can get wrapped around the bills of ducks, causing them to starve to death because they cannot open their mouths enough to eat.
Cutting each of the rings prevents this, she said.
She also explained why snakes and bats are good for the environment. Farmers, she said, like snakes because they control mice and rats, which can eat into their grain supplies. And bats can eat as many as 600 mosquitoes in an hour, she said.
In between, she showed off Perkins, a broad-winged hawk named Ziggy, a flying squirrel named Skippy, a black snake named Fred and a cuddly opossum named Schmutzie.
Schmutzie, who nuzzled close to Anderson like a newborn baby as Anderson cradled her in her arms, was a particular hit with the kids, although Fred made a big impression when he tried to slither up Anderson's shirt sleeve.
Perhaps it was Schmutzie's size they liked - she was the largest animal Anderson brought along - or maybe they just never knew that the ugly, ordinary opossum really isn't so ordinary after all.
In North America, they are the only animals that have pouches for their young, like kangaroos, Anderson said. They can have 15 babies in a litter, all of which can fit into a tablespoon when first born. Opossums also have more teeth than any other mammal in North America, and often fall asleep face down into their food.
Being nocturnal, they also don't see very well.
Anderson had on her regular glasses for talking about opossums; she hasn't yet designed a pair of homemade opossum glasses. She didn't look at all funny.
Her spellbound listeners didn't seem to notice.
Keywords:
ROANOKE WILDLIFE RESCUE
Memo: Edie Anderson's first name is spelled EDIE, not Eddy.