A Wildlife Educator and Her Loyal Companion Spread the Word on Saving Animals in the Sierra Nevada

By Kara Pound
Jan 9, 2020 8:40 AM ET

Originally published in Drive Magazine | FALL ‘18

“We spend a lot of time rearing babies, waking up at all hours of the night to bottle-feed them,” says Theodora Flory, a nature enthusiast who goes by Teddy, of the job she’s held for the last four years. Flory, who spends most of her days with a blind screech owl named Marbles by her side, is a wildlife rehabilitation specialist at Tri County Wildlife Care (TCWC), a nonprofit wildlife rescue organization based at the Sierra Nevada Foothills in California. The babies she feeds are, of course, baby animals.

Caring for newborns is just one example of Flory’s role at TCWC. “There’s no typical day,” she says. “Sometimes, we’re dealing with injuries, such as a squirrel that’s been hit by a car. Another day, it could be an exhausted hummingbird in need of some TLC.”

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