Saving wildlife
A student feeds a baby Big Brown Bat at the May Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.
Campus lodging isn’t limited to students at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk. The school also offers temporary refuge for injured and orphaned wildlife ranging from species as small as hummingbirds to as large as bobcats.
The hands-on opportunities to work directly with the animals provides a unique learning experience at Lees-McRae, which offers a four-year Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife Biology. In addition, students completing requirements for a degree in Pre-Veterinary Medicine have a chance to work alongside the veterinarians at the May Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.
“It’s the fastest growing program at the college,” says Director Nina Fleschesser, “and wildlife rehab is the flagship program of the college.”
Currently, they care for approximately 1,700 animals each year, but the demand to take in more continues to grow. Fleschesser says the college plans to build a new $23 million facility to house the Dan and Dianne May Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. The new facility will include space for a wildlife hospital and education center. She says they have architectural renderings in hand, but a timeline for the project remains in the planning stages.
Dr. Sam Young, a veterinarian at the center, says the planned facility will provide more space and area for taking care of wildlife, and it will be open to the public.
“Visitors will be able to come in and see through windows and communicate through two-way speakers to talk with students and staff. We’ll also have an indoor amphitheater, classrooms for our students and visiting groups, and sort of a walk-through zoo setting for the ambassador animals,” he said.
“Getting students working with the equipment and enclosures and being able to communicate with the visiting public is pretty neat. It’s helping animals and providing another place for people to learn about conservation and wildlife.”
Saving wildlife
Surviving the Storm
Fleschesser started the program at Lees-McRae in 2003. At that time, she and her staff started off in a double-wide trailer beside the Elk River, located between the main campus and sports center. Prior to that, she opened a full-time non-profit rehabilitation center at her home in 1995, and she still maintains the ability to house animals there. That option came in very handy during evacuation of the center following Hurricane Helene in September 2024.
“We put all of the birds at my house,” she says, “and one of our other staff members, Kelly Johnson, took the reptiles.” Other rehab patients were sent to other centers.
Young found himself in a unique position when Helene ravished the area. He was the only staff member that had faculty housing, putting him in prime position to continue serving the animals. With cell towers and electricity out and roads impassable in many places, he didn’t have a way to contact others. He worked to safely attend to the animals at the center with the help of his wife, his son, and a few intrepid students.
“The center itself was luckily spared,” Young said. They released some animals earlier than normal, knowing their chance of survival would be better outside. They also worked to move about 60 animals to other locations.
But that doesn’t mean it was easy.
“We’re right by Mill Pond, which is dammed up at Elk River. It was breached by the floods,” Young said. “The dam itself crosses the river, which extends underneath the road. All of the soil on the down-end washed out and exposed boulders that had been there thousands of years.”
The family and students worked together to rock hop the kennels to lift them up over the dam to waiting hands.
“We did not lose a single animal in the entire process.”
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Saving wildlife
Students and staff stabilize an injured fawn.
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Saving wildlife
Two young Bobcats that were raised and released in summer of 2025.
Unique Hands-on Experiences
Visitors to the wildlife center might see some unusual sights if witnessing the students working with different species. Baby crows can imprint easily onto human caretakers, so the students learn how to take dead crows and use them as a type of puppet. They put coke bottles inside the cadavers and use their hands to control the puppet’s movements as they feed pieces of meat to the babies.
“Students are not only learning about genus and phylums of animals, they are treating them. They develop relationships with these animals,” Fleschesser said.
While not every animal survives, the center staff rejoice over the miracles they experience. “Sometimes the prognosis is so poor, we should put them down, and then something happens,” she said.
One example involved a litter of baby possums who came to the center weighing about 14 grams and really underdeveloped. Under 19 grams is usually too hard to rehab because the babies can’t handle tubes and don’t have a good sucking reflex. As one of the Center’s vets, Dr. Miranda Torkelson, examined one of the babies, it wrapped its arms around her finger, so she knew she had to try. They survived.
“We did research on different possum formulas and finding out which is best,” Fleschesser said. “They pulled through and survived, and are now in an outdoor enclosure waiting for release.”
Fleschesser has her own unique story of caring for some very special hawks. ‘I had a beautiful partial albino red-tailed hawk who came to me from another rehabilitator. Cloud Feather was with me for 27 years. I didn’t know if she’d get along with the hawk I had, but I put them together and they sat on a perch, touching feathers, and talking all day. They talked all day long like two old ladies on a park bench.”
When Cloud Feather’s companion passed away, Fleschesser introduced a hawk named Captain.
“He fell in love. It was like a love affair,” she said. “He would dote over her and take mice to her. When she started getting ill, he was very protective. When she passed away, he started feather picking [a behavioral issue] and couldn’t fly, but he’s better now.”
Making the Best Choices
Not every wild animal needs to be saved, even when it appears by human eyes that it may have been abandoned. “So many times people misinterpret what they are seeing, and we may be able to prevent them from removing animals from a situation that’s not bad,” Young said.
“A lot of times people will see a baby bird on the ground and call us,” says Fleschesser. “We try to talk them out of kidnapping it so we can prevent it being brought in. It’s notorious for people to also pick up fawn deer. People will find them in the yard, curled up in the grass and assume they’ve been abandoned.”
In reality, the mother deer placed her baby there and will keep it fed. She stays out of sight to keep predators away.
“Now, if they are laid out on their side or have flies flying around or have a wound or a mother deer is spotted dead on the road, then that could be a problem,” she noted.
She encourages people to call the center and talk to them about any animal they believe might need help.
Center staff will ask a lot of questions to make an appropriate judgement call, and if possible, they ask the callers to take a photograph of the animal so they can see the situation for themselves.
The May Wildlife Center is not licensed to rehab fawn deer, but they can stabilize an animal and make contacts to have it transferred to another facility. They also cannot handle black bears. Fleschesser says there are only two or three organizations licensed to care for injured or orphaned black bear cubs. In North Carolina, anyone who finds a cub must call the state wildlife commission.
The center has a fleet of transport vehicles for use when appropriate, and can even enlist volunteers through posts on their Facebook page when new situations for transport arise. Other volunteers at the center prep food, do laundry and clean cages. One volunteer who has been active for 12 years can feed animals, assist in surgery and build cages.
Saving wildlife
“Students are not only learning about genus and phylums of animals, they are treating them. They develop relationships with these animals.” —Nina Fleschesser, May Wildlife Rehabilitation Center director
Releasing the Animals
The goal of rehab is to get the animals healthy enough to return to their natural habitat. Some cases go quicker than others.
“Sometimes we get birds with broken wings who need orthopedic surgical repair and physical therapy restrengthening,” Young said. “Some will end up being with us all year. We had a snapping turtle that was hit by a car and had a broken jaw. We were able to wire that jaw. Turtles are super slow to heal fractures. He came in late in the season last year, and then it was too cold to release him. He stayed with us all winter.”
Earlier this year he was returned to a nice swampy area.
“Eagles that come in are always exciting,” Young said. “It’s a fun event when we release them.”