WATERVILLE – The mama opossum, with babies in her pouch, was huddled in the straw of an aluminum cage, trying her best to ignore the sound of table saws and hammering on April 25, as nine members of the Central Midwest Carpenters assembled three new outdoor cages for Nature’s Nursery Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.
“We do a lot of volunteer projects; we feed the homeless and build wheelchair ramps for people that are disabled,” said Union Business Representative Ayinde Bishop as he took a break from lifting a completed wall frame. “When we came out here and walked it, we thought this would be a cool project, something different from what we usually do.”
Nature’s Nursery Executive Director Allison Aey emailed the union a few months ago, asking if any retired carpenters might want to volunteer to help the nonprofit organization complete a project that’s been on her to-do list since moving to its Dutch Road location in 2023.
“They have expedited this to pull it together in less than two months. We got the cages designed, the wood ordered and the lumber on site so they could come out here today and do this,” she said.
While Nature’s Nursery used donations to pay for two aluminum framed cages at $75,000 apiece last year, the material costs for the three new cages were just $20,000. And the completion couldn’t come soon enough.
“We have crazy numbers and we haven’t even started with baby opossum season yet,” she said, explaining that at this time in 2020 – the year that the number of orphaned and injured wildlife delivered to the center reached its peak – a total of 500 animals had been turned in. As of April 25, 650 have come through Nature’s Nursery’s doors so far.
A cold snap in January and February resulted in opossums with frostbite, raptors that were ailing and a lot of bats. Then a windstorm in early March – the beginning of baby squirrel season – bumped those numbers up even higher. Rain storms then followed, washing baby bunnies out of their nests.
“And we haven’t even started with the opossum babies yet. We usually open up our NICU and observation room for volunteers on May 1, but we have already done that. We can hardly keep up,” Aey said.
The structures that the carpenters built are divided into four and covered with screens. These will be used for rabbits, squirrels, opossum, woodchucks, skunks, birds and bats as they recuperate.
After touring the indoor and outdoor areas of Nature’s Nursery, Bishop said he was convinced that helping the nonprofit was a great pick.
“We saw all the work they do to nurture animals back to health. I saw a turtle inside getting its shell put back together. They have turtles, owls, bats…just seeing what they do with their organization, I said, ‘This would be great.'”
Locally, the union has about 3,200 carpenters, and 50 formed a group that dedicates weekends to doing service projects to give back to the community.
Nature’s Nursery was founded in 1989 by Deb and Dave Cooper and Laura Zitzelberger, and has moved twice in the years since – giving the organization more space to help more animals. Covering an 18-county region, volunteers pick up injured and orphaned wildlife to deliver to the Dutch Road site for expert care. For more information, visit natures-nursery.org.
