Donna Wesley Spencer: Recover and Release
The vultures led me to this project. The world had shut down, but I could wander, and the birds were available to me.
I had been watching the vultures come and go to a dead tree visible from my porch. The news then was a constant reporting of deaths in great numbers, and it was a time of worry and despair, with stories of great compassion and equally great callousness.
I started to notice that a large flock liked to roost in the dense foliage of the trees down the street, behind my neighbor’s house. I couldn’t quite get to them, so l left a note in the mailbox asking permission to enter their yard—something I’ve done many times over the years instead of trespassing. And that is how I met Ken, whose wife, Linda, runs an animal rescue center just outside of town. The vultures had chosen well.
I later made my first visit to her facility. So many little animals—why were they there? What had happened to them? What would it take to keep them all safe and fed, as well as attend to their daily needs for medical attention? Birds and opossums and squirrels and geese and rabbits and bats, and people working around each other to feed them, treat them, and to keep their environments clean. All with the goal of being able to set them free to be wild again.
Despite the fact that the entire country was arguing and suffering, the people in our town were still driving up to this facility with boxes and bath towels holding animals in need of care, many of them each day, with the hope that these could be saved.
I was witnessing a daily kind of compassion that was in short supply in so much of the world, and I started to get a feeling that I have had a few times before as a photographer—that an obsession was about to set in. I volunteered to make some photographs for their website, hoping to be useful and stumble my way into this new world, and soon found myself thinking quite a bit about the best way to make a ’possum portrait.
This facility could not care for every kind of animal, but they would accept most and then transfer to another appropriate facility, so I began to hear about the turtle people, the raptor people, the deer people, the bat person. The bat person? I had to meet these people.
This project grew from my own fascination as I became aware of the drama and wonder of wildlife in my own neighborhood. We are all experiencing a worldwide demonstration of our connectedness, and that a threat to one of us is a threat to all. I have had the privilege of seeing and experiencing wildlife up close, the wonder of the beauty of these animals and their great vulnerability, and equally, my admiration for the people I have met who know and care about the issues of wildlife and who are trying to put as many of them as possible back out into the world. They remind me of our great need to care for each other and to hope for the collective will and intelligence to save ourselves.
Read the entirety of Donna Wesley Spencer's introduction in her new book Recover & Release
Donna Wesley Spencer
Donna Wesley Spencer is a fine art photographer whose life as a birder led to her current project on wildlife preservation called Recover & Release. She studied photography at the Evanston Art Center during her years living in the Chicago area, as well as in various workshops, and Penland School of Craft. She is a founding member of Perspective Gallery in Evanston, IL. She currently lives in a small town in North Carolina.
