Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center of Roanoke

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Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center of Roanoke The Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center is a no-cost nonprofit wildlife veterinary hospital and rehabilitation facility treating ~2,800 patients annually.
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We specialize in raptors, reptiles, mammals, songbirds, including threatened and endangered species. We are a wildlife veterinary hospital and rehabilitation facility dedicated to the protection and care of injured and orphaned wildlife. If you want to learn more about how you can support us or conservation efforts in your community visit SWVAWildlifeCenter.org

To donate visit: https://swvawildlifecenter.org/make-a-donation/

If you are bringing us a patient please make sure it is secured in a ventilated box and drive no faster than 10 mph on the gravel drive (as soon as the pavement ends). Thank you! Community Guidelines:
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- Persistent violators may be banned. By participating, you agree to help us maintain a welcoming and respectful environment for all. Thank you for being a part of our lively page!

A photo of our very own Kat McGrath was at the top of the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association newsletter this w...
10/20/2026

A photo of our very own Kat McGrath was at the top of the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association newsletter this week! 😁

With baby season slowing down (knock on wood, you never know...), we're going to be doing a little spotlight on one of our hard-working staff members each week so you can get to know us a little better!

Katherine McGrath is our Manager of Operations and the Work Mom/Work Wife to pretty much all of our floor and front desk staff (she may deny this, buuuut it's true 😜). She is a Roanoke native who graduated from Le Moyne College with a B.S. in Biology in 2023. Her interest in wildlife rehab and experience interning with our friends at the Wildlife Center of Virginia made her a great fit when she joined us in 2024.

Since then, Kat has been a force of nature and a real taskmaster around the center. She is a wealth of knowledge from both her schooling and her ongoing curiosity about the natural world. She's keeping patients fed, fixing enclosures during down-time, getting animals released, handling volunteers and interns, putting out (metaphorical) fires, and she's a bulwark against our collective tendency to keep old stuff we really don't need. 😅

We've seen her deftly pluck escaped songbirds from the air mid-flight, climb things she probably shouldn't, and we've seen her butcher meat in our kitchen with her bare hands more than once (for OSHA reasons, this is a joke). Most of our staff report that if they were stuck on an abandoned island and could only take one thing with us to survive, it would probably be Kat or Allyson (that's real, though).

She's resourceful, she's whip-smart, and we're fortunate that the Kat Distribution System dropped her off at our doorstep! ✨

We're nominated for the WSLS Hometown's Best Local Non-Profit this year! 😍🦅🐢You can help us win the award by casting YOU...
10/19/2026

We're nominated for the WSLS Hometown's Best Local Non-Profit this year! 😍🦅🐢

You can help us win the award by casting YOUR vote here:
www.best.wsls.com

Thanks SO much to the sweet folks who nominated us, and we are so grateful to those who vote for us (and support us in general)! 🥰

DID YOU KNOW? Your old newspapers can help injured and orphaned native wildlife! Newspapers make for a great disposable ...
10/19/2026

DID YOU KNOW?
Your old newspapers can help injured and orphaned native wildlife! Newspapers make for a great disposable substrate or divider between enclosures, and we use LOTS of them each day.

We're running pretty low, so if you can spare your old newspapers, please bring them by anytime during our business hours! ❤

Business hours are 10am-5pm DAILY, including weekends and holidays!

The answer to yesterday's is the Pied-billed Grebe! (Podilymbus podiceps)Did you guess the correct species or family o...
10/19/2026

The answer to yesterday's is the Pied-billed Grebe! (Podilymbus podiceps)

Did you guess the correct species or family of birds? Let us know in the comments!

Grebes are cool little birds. They are a somewhat common patient at our wildlife hospital during "Weird Duck Season" each migration, despite being decidedly Not A Duck (TM). They are about the size of a jumbo sweet potato, but their attitude is at least 10x their size.

Why are their feet so weird? 😬
It's rude to judge them, firstly. And secondly, the mix of lobed and webbed toes are adapted for underwater propulsion! Grebes are athletic diving birds who must be able to turn on a dime while chasing fish, crustaceans, insects, and other foraged wetland critters to survive. The webbing and lobes give them extra surface area to push against the water, letting them swim faster. The asymmetrical lobes are believed to function similarly to the inner/outer vanes of a bird's primary flight feathers: The smaller side automatically rotates back on the return stroke, reducing drag and making flight (or swimming) more efficient!

The aquatic adaptations don't stop there. They can fluff up or squeeze air out of their down feathers to control buoyancy. In their wetland environment, they may hide from predators or birders by sinking everything but their face and tail tip into the water.

Their legs are also set FAR back on their bodies, increasing hydrodynamics but making walking on dry land difficult. They cannot kick off from the ground to fly, so they rely on bodies of water and "patter-flying" across the water to build up enough speed to fly. On rainy days, wet parking lots can look like bodies of water, causing these birds to mistakenly crash land on the pavement and become stranded.

Luckily for this Grebe, the crash-land did not result in any long-term damage! With a clean bill of health from our wildlife vets, she was able to be released back to the wild so she can continue her migration south.

It's time for another ! These lobed, dinosaur-like feet belong to a bird species we ALWAYS get at this time of year. If...
10/18/2026

It's time for another !

These lobed, dinosaur-like feet belong to a bird species we ALWAYS get at this time of year. If you don't know right away who it is, what can you determine about its life from the foot shape?

- Does this bird live on dry land, in water, or the in trees?
- What could the lobed toes be an adaptation for?

Follow us here and on our IG () to find out the answer tomorrow!

Who is that poking around in the wildflowers? Baby Opossums, of course! 🌷🌼🌷 The last of this season's orphaned Virginia...
10/17/2026

Who is that poking around in the wildflowers?

Baby Opossums, of course! 🌷🌼🌷

The last of this season's orphaned Virginia Opossum joeys are back home in the wild! These iconic native marsupials disperse as soon as they're released, living the solo nomadic life. They may make a cozy den to return to for a few nights in a row, and may even share a space with other young Opossums for short periods. As a rule of thumb, though, they usually go it on their own!

There are many ways to success in wildlife rehab, and some permitted rehabbers prefer to keep their orphaned joeys to larger sizes than we do. Others release at smaller sizes than we do. For us, we release ours at around 400g, after they've had a little extra time to put on size.

The thought behind it is that they haven't had the advantage of learning their home turf by traveling with mom like they would in the wild. To help make up for this, we keep them for a little longer so they are larger, and therefore a little less vulnerable to predation than they would after dropping off of mom.

Despite looking very small (and adorable), they are equipped with everything they need to survive in the wild! 💖

Need some extra serotonin to get you through to the weekend? ⛽ These orphaned Bobkittens being messy eaters are here to ...
10/16/2026

Need some extra serotonin to get you through to the weekend? ⛽

These orphaned Bobkittens being messy eaters are here to help. 💕

If you aren't in the know, these two orphaned Bobcats arrived at our wildlife hospital in late September! Construction work destroyed their tree root den, and their mother didn't return after they were discovered. They have been growing steadily in our care ever since!

The ultimate goal, as always, is to keep these adorable kittens WILD like they're meant to be by minimizing human contact. They will be with us until about 10 months of age, at which point they'll be ready for release to the wild!

Did you know you can help orphaned or injured native wildlife by shopping online? 🐾🦅🐢💕We are 100% funded by community do...
10/15/2026

Did you know you can help orphaned or injured native wildlife by shopping online?
🐾🦅🐢💕

We are 100% funded by community donations, and medication for native wildlife isn't cheap. We're often asked what items we need to care for our patients and wild ambassadors' food and enrichment, too, and that is a constantly evolving question!

Luckily, our wishlists are updated with what we need most right now! If you'd like to help support our work, please consider looking through a wishlist linked below to help us help our thousands of yearly patients!

https://linktr.ee/swvawildlifecenter

10/14/2026

We dream of a day where more jurisdictions ban the sale or use of glue traps for pest control. ✨ But sadly, today is not yet that day.

In fact, this is the 3rd baby ratsnake we've received from the same (name undisclosed) administrative building this year! The employee who has been advocating against these diligently checks the traps and brings trapped wildlife to us. Their pleas to stop their usage falls on deaf ears due to her low rank, but we appreciate her deeply.

This little ratsnake is lucky to have been spotted before its degloving injury got worse. Dehydrated, exhausted, stressed, and injured, this harmless animal would have taken days, or perhaps a week or more to actually expire on this glue trap. Tales of humans caught in similar circumstances are the stuff of horror stories, and yet we hire pest management companies to lay these out in our homes without a second thought. They go unattended, and the expired animals--and occasionally still-living animals--are tossed in the trash just as thoughtlessly.

There ARE more humane and effective pest management solutions if we choose to use them! Prevention is a huge part of that.

It can be easy to throw our hands in the air and say, "Humans ARE the problem, HUMANS are invasive (we're not) and bad (sometimes)!" and go about our day. But that's depressing, AND it ignores the fact that humans are fantastic problem-solvers!

Some people will insist on using them, BUT we can educate the people around them. Speak to lawmakers, share this video with people you know, and help spread awareness. Talk to your neighbors and local shop owners who sell these. If glue traps stop selling as well as they do, shop keepers won't stock them.

Luckily for this tiny patient, he recovered beautifully. His degloving wound closed without resulting in infection, he shed successfully, and he is back in his wild home--hopefully avoiding that building in the future!

10/13/2026

The answer to yesterday's : Tiny BOBCATS! 🐾

These Bobkittens became orphans when their tree root den was destroyed by construction work. The workers discovered the kittens inside, thankfully unharmed by the den's upheaval! When mom didn't return for her kittens, they contacted our wildlife hospital.

It's not unheard of for Bobkittens to appear in Fall, but it was certainly a surprise to us when they arrived on September 28th! At just around 300g in weight and eyes still closed, this boy and girl were around 10 days old on arrival. The videos taken about 4 days later, just when their eyes were starting to peek open!

This Spring's pair of female Bobkittens are currently outdoors, meaning that we have our work cut out for us in caring for 2 different cohorts of Bobcats! 🐱🐱🐱🐱

If you want to watch our older Bobcats grow up on the WSLS SkyCam, check out the link below and scroll down to the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center Cam!

https://www.wsls.com/weather/skycams/

For the itty bitty Bobs, though, make sure you give us a Follow on Facebook and Instagram () so you don't miss any updates on the newest kittens! 💕

Address

5985 Coleman Road
Roanoke, VA
24018

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm
Saturday 10am - 4pm
Sunday 10am - 4pm

Telephone

+15407989836

Website

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