Interior Wildlife Rehabilitation Society

Interior Wildlife Rehabilitation Society Welcome to Interior Wildlife! Please visit our website: interiorwildlife.ca for more info!

The Interior Wildlife Rehabilitation Society (IWRS) has been established in 2020, in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of BC. We strive to contribute our part in joining forces with other privately funded centres to rehabilitate wildlife and educate about how to live with wild animals conflict free. As of June 2022 our provincial and federal permits have been granted for our care facility in Summerlan

d. This year we are set up to care for and house native small mammals and water birds.
*** Our vision: ***
To contribute to a future where people:
Respect wild animals as neighbours inhabiting shared space. Experience positive connections to wildlife, their natural environment and behaviour. Understand the importance and power of individual responsibility towards healthy ecosystems. Visit our webpage if you need help with an injured animal:
interiorwildlife.ca/found-injured-or-orphaned-wildlife/

06/16/2026

Skunk update: At 3 weeks old a little skunk came into our care, eyes closed and still at nursing age with a weight of under 200g. We've syringe-fed her formula every 4hrs. Slowly graduating to dish-feedings and introduced soft meat bits into her milk formula. She discovered how fun blueberry games are..and eats them eventually too! At 6 weeks she has doubled in weight to 400g, eats solid meat, whole insects, hard boiled egg, fruit and berries. She has also doubled in attitude, stomping her front feet and raising her tail like a big skunk already if we move too fast!

06/15/2026

Some native snakes come to us due to accidents (cat-caught injuries in this Yellow-Bellied Racer). Some come because kind people try to avoid persecution by people who don't want to coexist with wild snakes on their property (we don't judge, we educate)
Either way, we care for them, we treat them against bacterial infection (healthy domestic cats carry bacteria on teeth and claws that are lethal for wildlife). We also release snakes responsibly
This Great Basin Gopher Snake was released into suitable rocky, south-facing hillside habitat within 1km of its site of origin. A place where it has the chance to survive the winters by getting deep under rocks below the ground when the top few feet freeze and it needs shelter to brumate, yet with plenty of voles, mice and gophers to hunt during the summer
Please remember that it is illegal to relocate a wild snake several kms away from its site of origin, it is also illegal to house them in captivity for more than 24hrs without a wildlife rehabilitation license - no matter how good your intention may be. Please ask for help from a licensed wildlife centre, not "something you read somewhere on the internet" (from a non-reputable source). Thank you!

This secretive brown-and-gray marsh bird is called a Sora. When Sora's poke their heads out of the reeds in the wild, th...
06/12/2026

This secretive brown-and-gray marsh bird is called a Sora. When Sora's poke their heads out of the reeds in the wild, their bright yellow bills look unreal. The Sora usually walks slowly through shallow wetlands, a bit like a chicken that has had too much coffee... Together with coots and other rails they are semi-aquatic marsh birds. Easily startled, we house these types of birds away from human sound, sight and anything that doesn't seem like they are in a natural wetland. Soras primarily eat seeds from wetland plants, but also eat aquatic invertebrates. They rake floating vegetation with their long toes in search of sedge, bulrush, and smartweed seeds (a type of wild buckwheat). They also peck at the water's surface for aquatic insects, snails, dragonflies, flies and beetles. Yum!
We hope this juvenile will recover quickly from what we think is light head-trauma.

A first glimpse of our post-release monitoring efforts on released beavers Nelson & Tina: They are alive and well 😃🦫💕
06/10/2026

A first glimpse of our post-release monitoring efforts on released beavers Nelson & Tina: They are alive and well 😃🦫💕

Beavers "Tina & Nelson" are released into the wild nowSince they couldn't be returned to their respective sites of origi...
06/07/2026

Beavers "Tina & Nelson" are released into the wild now
Since they couldn't be returned to their respective sites of origin (as we would do with all other small mammals if they stayed in our care for a short time to recover from an injury only), their release story is different
In BC there are very few groups that have experience with moving beavers between wetlands, due to its complexity and costs associated
Challenges include finding suitable and unoccupied beaver habitat. Also, beavers are territorial, need enough time in the summer to establish a food cache for the winter, build a lodge with a water-entry to avoid predation, as well as have deep water pools and even underwater travel-channels available to manage their beaver wetland complex effectively and establish themselves for several generations at the new site
Complexities of moving beavers which IWRS addresses include: appropriate live-trapping/holding and transporting beavers as a family unit, comprehensive veterinary disease screening at our facility as well as long-term post-release monitoring looking at survival and movement patterns of relocated pairs and families. Predation of relocated beavers can be mitigated by providing temporary first shelter options until beavers have built their own lodge adjacent to deep water pools
The story of Nelson & Tina offers a window into what may be possible in the future if we all work together: Wildlife rehabilitators, wildlife managers, 1st Nation's land stewards, registered provincial biologists, community granting foundations and all our supporters that helped us see these two beavers through for a successful reintegration into the wild
We are excited to see how they will do when we evaluate their post-release monitoring data in the future
Photos: Tina & Nelson sleeping in their nest box before release. A visit of the temporary shelter box the first night after their release (a pit tag reader box can also be seen on the lower right corner of this trail cam picture)

06/03/2026

Beavers "Nelson" & "Tina" have been on our BeaverCam livestream for nearly 2 years now
They have grown up and turned into capable subadults now, ready for reintegration into a remote natural wetland habitat
The challenge is finding a suitable wetland where we are legally allowed to release them under a regulatory BC framework that was not designed for this kind of work
Since our province has no official framework for permitted beaver translocation, currently there are no established protocols for translocation methodology, site assessment, custodianship, or monitoring the outcome over longer periods of time post-release
Nelson & Tina represent an opportunity to build that case study — with full documentation of how we have raised them, release site preparation, post-monitoring plan and working in partnership with local 1st Nations who support local beaver reintroduction for the benefit of all
Preparations are in full swing now

Skunks are infamous for their formidable defense when threatened, but these misunderstood, mostly nocturnal small mammal...
05/30/2026

Skunks are infamous for their formidable defense when threatened, but these misunderstood, mostly nocturnal small mammals are also incredible ecosystem caretakers
Famous for their black-and-white warning colors, they primarily feast on pesky garden insects such as beetle larvae and tiny rodents, thus acting as a gardener's little helper - if you let them
THAT is precisely where coexistence and understanding wild species comes in!
Skunks will avoid conflict, and most frequently choose flight over fight. When they feel threatened, they will first hiss, growl, stamp their feet, walk backwards, and lastly raise their tail over their heads to display their smelly bits before they actually use their spray (a sulphur-compound designed to leave a lasting impression on the intruder or predator bugging them)
They avoid conflict, but do you? Using motion sensitive lights and sprinklers are excellent ways to keep skunks out of a garden (for those amongst us unwilling to learn to live with wildlife). It is possible to seal small openings under decks, sheds that a female skunk may see as a potential den in the spring. BUT, why not learn to live with them?
You can even teach your dog to leave skunks alone, so their babies don't end up in rehabilitation centres needing to be raised as solo babies by humans... who will have take on the important task of finding an appropriate release site down the road for singletons such as this sassy young female. She just opened her eyes at 3 weeks of age, the tail-raising and stomping behaviour already works!
You can do it. Give co-existence with wildlife a chance! Truly, your IWRS Team

05/26/2026

Thanks to IWRS's outdoorsy volunteers that have located a goose family with goslings on a local lake, we can report another successful gosling fostering plan has been completed
Canada Geese are highly social and known to be excellent adoptive parents that will often accept unrelated goslings into their family group (or "creche")
Watch closely as the orphaned goslings we have paddled up to the wild goose fostering family swim into the picture from the left, then call out to the unrelated family. The adults call back as they swim in from the top right with their brood, and all goslings join together under the watchful eyes of the wild adults
Video: Jonathan Laumer (IWRS)

What do the mallard ducklings in our care eat?Well, in the wild mallards are generalist foragers and will eat a wide var...
05/23/2026

What do the mallard ducklings in our care eat?
Well, in the wild mallards are generalist foragers and will eat a wide variety of food. They don’t dive, but dabble to feed, tipping forward in the water to eat aquatic vegetation and roam around on the shore picking at vegetation and small prey on the ground
We float finely chopped "duck greens" in their shallow pool for them to dabble off the water's surface every day
This includes wild mustard, dandelion, lamb's quarters and spring vetch - all which we have growing on our centre's property and harvest fresh in the mornings
If they can however, mallards will also eat aquatic insect larvae, earthworms, snails and freshwater shrimp - with us they get live mealworms from our own mealworm-farm. Yum!

Address

PO Box 988
Summerland, BC
V0H1Z0

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