A Dream Come True:
An Interview with a Wildlife Rehabilitator
Tallon Nightwalker | nocowildlife.org
Tallon Nightwalker, director of the Northern Colorado Wildlife Center is living his dream. After growing up watching his father work with animals, he knew what he wanted to do since the age of five. He has volunteered since that young age until he got his license at the age of 18 and has now been working professionally in animal rehabilitation for almost seven years. Now, at 26, Tallon is able to live out his aspirations as director of one of the many Northern Colorado conservation organizations. Tallon was generous with his time and answered my questions about his career through an email Q&A.
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Q: As director do you still help with all the services or does each staff member have separate duties?
A: As director of a small nonprofit, I certainly still help out with providing the services. This works out pretty well though for a few reasons. It keeps me involved with the sides of the job that are my favorite and reminds me why I founded Northern Colorado Wildlife Center, helps keep my skills sharp so that I can help cover other staff members when they need days off, and it helps keep me as a wildlife rehabilitator and a director in my donors eyes and helps me prove my dedication to the mission to them.
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Q: Where do you work from? Are you able to work from home? Did work life shift during the pandemic?
A: I am lucky in the fact that I do work from home most of the time. NCWC does a lot of field work so my office kind of shifts around from day to day. If I am not at home working on my computer and writing grants, then I am usually in a school presenting a program or at a rescue site trying to get an injured or sick animal the help they need. Work life certainly shifted during the pandemic. When the pandemic first started in March of 2020, I was still volunteering my time for NCWC. However, I was quickly laid off from my full-time job at a factory when the pandemic forced shutdowns. Shortly after I was laid off, I was lucky enough that my board of directors offered me the position I have now, and I was able to become the nonprofit’s first paid employee.
Q: What do your work hours look like? Do you have an M-F job or do you work weekends?
A: Because the nonprofit is still pretty fresh and small, I usually end up working each day of the week. Some days are a little more intense than others, but typically something needs to be done on a grant or a wildlife rescue call will come up that I need to respond to. Having hired two employees in 2022 has helped a ton though and they take a lot of tasks off my plate which makes it easier for me to find down time and get closer to having days off.
Q: What are your daily responsibilities?
A: As the director, my daily responsibilities include working with donors, finding new donors/grants/sponsorships, and pretty much whatever else needs to be done to support the organization from an executive level. As mentioned before, I also stay very active in rescuing wildlife in need, educating the public, and providing care to the wildlife patients that we have. It certainly doesn’t get too monotonous.
Q: Does your job or the organization’s responsibilities change with the seasons?
A: Wildlife rehabilitation is a very seasonal job in general, and that somewhat affects my job duties throughout the year. While working with donors, the media, and supporters is a year around task, baby wildlife season in the spring and fall really dials up our efforts across the board. Not only are these the seasons where we are providing the most rescue calls and education programs, but it also overlaps with our main fundraising season. That means that in addition to leading my environmental educator and wildlife rescue supervisor, I am also engaged with planning events, searching for corporate sponsors, and working more with my board of directors to ensure they are happy with the direction of all of our efforts.
Q: Do you enjoy your duties as director, are you still hands on or do you miss that aspect of working at the Center?
A: While I still get plenty of time with the hands-on aspects of the job, I really do enjoy my position as the director of NCWC. I love that I am able to help build such a unique nonprofit for our community and that I am able to help hire employees and volunteers whose dream it has been to be a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Before I founded NCWC, thousands of wild animals in Larimer and Weld county had nowhere to go when they needed help, so they were euthanized at vet offices and humane societies. I am happy that NCWC has done so much to change that course and that now those animals have the help they deserve when they need it the most; especially when you take into consideration that nearly 90% of the wild animals we rescue need help because they were injured by human activities; whether it be intentionally or unintentionally.
Q: I noticed that in the 2020 annual report, the center took in mammals, why now is it only reptiles and amphibians? Even when it was mammals/birds, the animals you took in were on the smaller side, where do larger animals go for help? Is there a size limit?
A: Right now, because we still work out of a private residence in Loveland, we can only take in wild reptiles and amphibians. This is because there are federal enclosure size minimums and we only had space to build an outdoor snapping turtle enclosure (the biggest enclosure we would need since snapping turtles are the biggest animal we care for). Thankfully, this doesn’t stop us from helping birds and mammals though. In the cases where people find sick, injured, or orphaned birds and mammals, we can still send a wildlife rescuer out, but then we have to transport them to the next closest facility that is licensed for them. Typically this is down to a Longmont wildlife rehab center, but sometimes they need to go to Denver, Colorado Springs, or even Walden.
​Tallon helping catch a pelican | Facebook.com
Q: You are currently looking for a property to have a true facility for rehabilitation, so once that is complete would this allow you to expand the types of animals you take in?
A: We are working diligently to find property that will work for birds and mammals so that we can begin providing extended rehabilitation stays to them as well as the reptiles and amphibians we currently serve. While many people on our team already hold their bird and mammal rehabilitation licenses, we often get shut down by the city or county zoning departments when we find a property that we like. It is very difficult to find the correct zoning since many people do not want to live near a wildlife rehabilitation center, even though it doesn’t smell bad, animals never escape, and diseases are rare and quickly mitigated from patients.
Q: Your website also mentions an old facility that had shut down, was that part of your organization? Why was that place shut down? What have you learned from that station’s closure?
A: While I volunteered at that wildlife rehabilitation center, it was not affiliated with NCWC at all. In fact, WildKind (the old facility) was a part of the Larimer Humane Society. In 2012, the Larimer Humane Society decided to close this department to focus on domestic and companion animals. This is what unfortunately left thousands of wild animals nowhere to go when they needed help.
Q: Most funding for the Wildlife center comes from donations, where do you find the donators? What is the most expensive part of running the center?
A: Salaries are certainly the most expensive line item of our budget, with veterinary care to our patients as the second most expensive. We have been fortunate enough to find wildlife loving donors mostly through fulfilling our mission. Oftentimes we will get called to help a wild animal in distress and then that person will come on board as a donor, or word of our work will spread by word of mouth and then we receive a donation; the same is true for people who have attended one of our educational programs. I will also reach out to donors directly and see if they, or their business, are interested in supporting our mission; sometimes this works, but it comes with more of a rejection rate than when I ask for donations from folks who we have directly served.
Q: What is your favorite part of working here and your least favorite?
A: My favorite part is being able to help animals and people at the same time. I have seen that it can oftentimes be a jarring experience for people when they find a sick, injured, or orphaned animal and they are typically confused about what the next steps should be. It is very rewarding to take this burden off of them and be able to answer the call for help when they come in. I would say that my least favorite part is working with groups or individuals who do not see any value in wildlife and see them as “pests” to the human world. However, while this can be draining, these are the people who need education the most and where my team and I can have the most impact.
Q: What is the craziest story of rescuing an animal?
A: The craziest story I have recently about rescuing an animal came during the Cameron Peak Fire that impacted Larimer county in 2020. During fire line construction in the Poudre Canyon, a firefighter accidentally hit a rattlesnake with a sharp edged tool. Luckily we were able to respond quickly and picked up the rattlesnake who had a large laceration to its side. It took two surgeries, weeks of pain medications and antibiotics, and a lot of rest, but we were able to rehabilitate it back to the point where it was fully recovered and able to be released back into the mountains near where it came from. Thankfully its habitat wasn’t burned by the fire.
Tallon fighting fires | facebook.com
Q: What about your father and his job influenced you to go into this field? (Is Board of Directors member, Bob Nightwalker, your dad, or related in another way?)
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A: You’re right that Bob is my dad and that he is on our board of directors; he is actually one of our other founders! He has been infinitely influential to me and has been the person who has taught me most of what I know when it comes to wildlife rehabilitation. He worked at WildKind before it was closed down by the humane society’s leadership and would allow me to volunteer by his side. He still works as a wildlife rehabilitator in Longmont, but will be hired on by NCWC as soon as we are able to build a full facility.
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Q: If you were giving guidance to someone young who is also interested in this field, do you recommend getting a formal education to get into the field? Or do you think your path of volunteering and jumping right in is the preferred way to do it?
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A: I recommend that people jump into this profession and begin volunteering. While higher education is important to many people and careers, there is no formal education that really prepares you for the job of a wildlife rehabilitator. Learning how to feed pelicans, splint a fox’s leg, or even feeding baby birds is something that needs to be taught hands on for it to make sense. However, every wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit is required to have a veterinarian on their team, whether it be as a staff member or volunteer, so if people are interested in being a veterinarian, then they will certainly need to go the full distance with higher education.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to share about you or your job?
A: Wildlife rehabilitation is super rewarding work and it is a dream come true for me to be able to be the director of a wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit that I founded. I can’t wait to watch us keep growing and I really appreciate you reaching out to me for help with this project. All the best to yourself and all of your future goals!
Wildlife rehab runs in the family and Tallon Nightwalker is happy with his career choice. The animals he helps are increasing in number and as the word gets out more and more will be helped. He had a dream to work with the animals but it’s the animals that are thinking he was their dream come true.
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To get more information about Northern Colorado Wildlife Center visit their website here. To contact Tallon Nightwalker connect with him through his Facebook page or the NCWC website. For more information about volunteering visit the NCWC volunteer page here.