A Healing Nature Woman Earns Award For Years Of Caring For Orphaned Animals

Bud Vanderbilt may not have children, but he knows all about bleary-eyed midnight feedings.

He married a woman with a passion for saving wild baby animals.

“I can’t tell you how important it is to have a supportive husband,” Mary Vanderbilt said Wednesday. “It’s like having infants every year.”

The Vanderbilts’ cattle ranch near Hayden Lake is a foster home for deer, elk, bears, raccoons, squirrels, bobcats.

They’ve even had a moose. It grew 100 pounds a month. To feed it, she said, “we brought willows in by the ton from the lake.”

For that kind of effort, Mary Vanderbilt received an Eddie Bauer Heroes for the Earth Award, given “in recognition of individuals who have made a difference through often unpublicized efforts to preserve the natural environment.”

Vanderbilt is the only person in the Idaho Panhandle who is licensed by the state Department of Fish and Game to rehabilitate mammals. Until she volunteered, only a few people in the region dabbled in the effort.

“Mary and her husband have been the only ones involved for a long time,” said department spokesman Phil Cooper. “They developed the facility and expertise and the system to keep those animals going and bring them to adulthood.”

One reason Vanderbilt is low-key is that she doesn’t want people to think she runs a petting zoo.

The whole point of the effort is to return the animals to the wild. She loves taking care of them, but aches to see them free again.

Take the deer, for example.

“They’re pretty tolerant of being in captivity, until right after Christmas. Then they start pacing, and never stop,” Vanderbilt said. “Keeping them would be like penning up your child and saying, ‘You won’t be free for the rest of your life.”’

Still, she gets attached. She keeps journal notes on all of the animals and keeps photo albums. “Though I’ve stopped taking pictures of every one,” she said.

When it’s clear an animal will survive, it gets a name.

Vanderbilt nodded toward the pen where black bear cubs were playing.

“The two brown ones fell out of a tree, so we decided to name them Orville and Wilbur,” she said.

Bears are born in early winter and can show up any time. Bobcats come around the first of April, raccoons soon after; moose by the end of May, elk by the first of June.

This is an unusual year, because the Vanderbilts have only deer and bears so far.

It’s also uncommon because they have six bears at once, and earlier than usual. All were orphaned during the spring bear season, Vanderbilt said. One set of triplets was found walking along a road in the Priest Lake area by a Fish and Game officer.

After hunting is over next spring, the bears will be released in a part of the national forest where there is enough food, but not already a lot of bears.

The five fawns will also be released then. Right now, they’re young enough to be in a small enclosure just steps from Vanderbilt’s kitchen.

The deer drink formula made from actual dried does’ milk, which costs $2.75 a pound. While Fish and Game helps pay for some animal food, Vanderbilt said she doesn’t feel right asking the department to pay for the premium feed. So she and her husband do, and they share the five-times-a-day feeding duties.

“We’ve only been away together three days in 11 years. One of us always has to be here,” Vanderbilt said as the spindly, spotted creatures vied for the upturned Coke bottles full of milk. “They won’t eat for anyone else but their ‘mothers.”’

Taking care of that one moose cost the couple about $1,000, Vanderbilt said. When the Eddie Bauer prize came with a $10,000 check, they figured they had spent way more than that over the years.

Vanderbilt hoped to use that money to expand their animals shelters, and provide better protection from rain and wind. But then the price they get for their cattle dropped, she said, and finding money for the project has become harder.

“We’ll do it somehow,” Vanderbilt said. For those who would like to contribute, the Vanderbilts have opened an account at the West One Bank in Coeur d’Alene, under the name Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

“She needs to expand all of her facilities,” said Karen Hayes, a veterinarian and neighbor who helps when animals are brought in injured or sick. “She never knows from year to year what she’s going to get. One year she had 17 baby deer.”

Hayes hopes people will contribute to the cause. That’s one reason she nominated Vanderbilt for the Eddie Bauer award.

“I’m not too unlike other people,” Hayes said. “Their heart just sinks to their feet when they see a wild animal in need, and they think ‘I can’t do that, I don’t have time to do that.’

“As long as Mary is doing it, I don’t have to.”

Vanderbilt, 52, has no plans to stop.

“I’ll do this as long as I’m physically able.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Two Color Photos

MEMO: Cut in the Final Edition

This sidebar appeared with the story: Don’t try this at home, folks Chased by dogs, hit by cars, orphaned. There are a lot of reasons why young animals end up in the care of Mary and Bud Vanderbilt of Hayden Lake, Idaho. One reason they should not end up there is because people actually have snatched them from the wild, wrongly believing the animals have been orphaned. That’s especially true of deer, said Phil Cooper of the Idaho Fish and Game Department. “An adult doe spends very little time with her young,” said Cooper. “The more time she spends near them, the easier they will be found by predators.” Unless people are certain that an animal’s mother is dead, Cooper said, they should leave the wild baby in the wild. - Julie Titone