Animal ambassador: KDOT employee rescues wildlife

Abbie Wisdom-Williams holds a raccoon she rehabilitated. 

It all started with a turkey.

“My cat started chasing it around,” Abbie Wisdom-Williams remembers.

Abbie lived in Wichita at the time, right in the middle of the city, and started feeding the turkey in her yard.

“I left the food out on the front porch, and pretty soon, there was an opossum and raccoons,” she says.

She quickly got hooked rehabilitating wildlife.

Abbie, a Senior Administrative Assistant in the Kansas Department of Transportation’s South Central Kansas office, has been a licensed wildlife rehabilitator with the Kansas Department of Parks, Wildlife and Tourism for about 20 years now.

Abbie Wisdom-Williams feeds a newborn skunk.

In that time, she has taken in a real menagerie of animals. So far this year, she’s come to the rescue of newly-born raccoons, skunks, opossums, foxes and bunnies. Fawns will start needing her help in June.

She and her husband, David, also have rehabilitated badgers, bobcats, beavers and coyotes.

Abbie would love to get a call about a porcupine or a baby badger.

“I remember my Dad trying to catch a baby badger once. When my parents got a divorce, they didn’t fight over me. They fought over who got the cat,” she says, laughing.

Abbie has loved animals for as long as she can remember.

She and her husband have a pet skunk named Isadora Skunkin and five dogs. The skunk came to them as a baby. Its hips are not functional, so the skunk scoots everywhere using the power of its front feet.

Skunks are her favorite animals to rehabilitate.

A new-born skunk receives milk from a syringe. 

“The beavers were cool, but they’re an incredible amount of work,” she says.

She gathered limbs and twigs for them and had to fill, clean out and refill a stock tank every day for them.

“I was trimming everybody’s trees” when she had the beavers, Abbie says.

Her least favorite animals to work with are baby bunnies.

“I hate raising bunnies because baby bunnies have a tendency to be fine one minute and dead the next and you have no idea why,” she says.

Her crowning achievement as a rehabilitator, she says, was a raccoon that had been badly burned in a wildfire in the spring of 2016 near Burrton.

Photos she took show the raccoon’s progress — from burned to the bone and unrecognizable to ready to release. The raccoon stayed under Abbie’s care for eight weeks. Caring for the raccoon wasn’t easy.

“It hated me, and that was OK,” she says.

A baby opossum drinks form a baby food lid. The young marsupial was brought in after a dog found it. 

She continues to rehabilitate animals because “it’s my way of trying to repay them for all the damage that we as humans inflict upon them. And I’m trying to educate people to give them respect and space and not be so afraid.”

Abbie gets referrals from fellow rehabilitators and calls from the public. She remembers one call years ago from a woman concerned about a rabbit she had seen on a neighbor’s porch. It hadn’t moved in two days, the woman reported. Abbie drove out to the area, looked around and called the woman to confirm she was in the right place.

“Lady,” she remembers saying, “that rabbit is cement.”