Space - It's All About the Need for Space!

From Merrilee Prior - President and Founder of PROWLS - as per her January 2026 article to qathet Living Magazine 

At PROWLS, we are welcoming 2026 with fresh enthusiasm for the direction our migration is taking us. It will be a long and arduous trip, but we are ready to take off and look for new habitat to keep us growing and strong. We have spent the last ten years (and six years before that as The Bird Lady) in my small Townsite home and we are now spreading our wings to take off.

When I started, I never envisioned the variety of species that people would call with. I expected the odd sparrow here and there, maybe a robin, but the sheer variety of critters now means we are sending more and more of our patients to facilities with adequate space to treat and condition them for release. Our water birds, from ducks and kingfishers to herons and swans, go to MARS Wildlife Rescue Centre in Courtenay; mammals, from flying squirrels and otters to beavers and fawns, are sent to either MARS or Critter Care Wildlife Society, in Langley; raptors are sent to OWL, in Delta; and bobcats go to Northern Lights Wildlife Shelter in Smithers. We still treat all our songbirds and some of the small mammals (squirrels, hares, deer mice), but other species stay until they are stable enough to put on a plane or a ferry then sent out.

While this is an adequate solution to the space problem, it is short-term and far from ideal. Some facilities send all the patients back, others send some, and others send none, so the animals are lost to us. It can also be a financial burden on the specialist facility. OWL had one of our eagles for 9 months before sending him back for release, at a cost of about $1,000/month. We would likely still send some away, simply because they would get better care with the specialists, such as otters to Critter Care and bats to MARS. For many of the others, however, if we had the space, we could do a full, professional job, from intake to release, here in their home territory.

Over the years, I have made several attempts to find us a home, approaching anyone I thought might have land for us, from private individuals and businesses to our municipal government. The responses have varied, but in the end, the efforts went nowhere. The most encouraging response was from Mosaic Forest Management, who said they loved what we are doing, but they never sell, lease or donate land, so they sent us a donation of $1,000. After a lot of consultation and research, our board has decided that enough is enough, and we need to get serious about doing this ourselves.

We talked with people from all the other facilities we have worked with, and all told us the same thing: that, if we are going to rehabilitate all the animals that pass through our doors, we will need at least ten acres, but more is better. It was the senior rehabilitator from OWL who made the size we would need clear: each eagle cage is the size of a football field, and when I was talking with him, there were five of our eagles at OWL. That's a lot of football fields! 

This means we will be looking for a fair-sized acreage in the regional district. We are open to developed and undeveloped properties. We have professionals who are keen to advise and help us and believe, as we do, not only that this is worth doing, but that we can also make this happen. We are starting our fundraising campaign now, and we know that this will take a lot of money and effort. 

So, we are asking our supporters to help us in any way they can. Small donations from many people add up, and every bit is appreciated. All the information is posted on our website (prowls.org), and we hope you are able to join us on this journey!