Herrick woman helps injured animals

HERRICK — All creatures great and small, Anne Eddings saves them all.

She is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator with the state of Illinois, empowered to accept Mother Nature's flotsam and jetsam, those injured or suddenly orphaned critters that won't stand much chance without human intervention.

So police and civilians out on the highways and byways bring her a steady stream of parentless and only hours-old bunnies, along with crippled young raccoons and even week-old deer fawns who stand on long matchstick legs in a pen in her barn, peering out at a world largely indifferent to their survival. Indifferent that is except for Eddings, 61, and her husband and trusted assistant, Ron, who has helped turn their 20-acre spread in the rolling country near Herrick into a triage unit for our wild America.

“She's an animal nut,” says Ron Eddings, 69, a retired truck driver busy feeding a mouse-size baby rabbit at the dining table with goat's milk from an eye-dropper. “But she's just got a way with animals, and they really adapt to her very quickly. I just go with the flow.”

The flow has included red foxes, the occasional overcome-with-cold hummingbird, and currently includes a cuddly ground-hog his wife has named Daisy and some opossums, whose naked tails and ratty faces will never qualify as anything remotely bright and beautiful.

But Anne Eddings, who was born in England not far from Sherwood Forest where wildlife like Robin Hood is said to have prowled, loves them all. She carefully looks after this assorted fauna in all its broken variety, tends its wounds and raises it to the point where it can gradually be reintroduced back to nature and let go. Those patients that can't go home again, such as raccoons called Sally and Taz whose back legs don't work right, will live out their days in comfort as permanent Eddings guests.

“But only if the animals can't survive on their own will they stay,” she emphasizes firmly. “Otherwise, everything goes back out into the wild.”

A dyed -in-the-wool critter lover, she got into wildlife rehabilitation in the 1970s when she lived in Missouri and got back into it after moving to Illinois 15 years ago. It's an unpaid, round-the-clock and, thanks to the cost of food and supplies, expensive undertaking that she loves with the passion of all those who have found their true calling in life.

Eddings believes we owe the wild things about us some respect and care, and that if we collectively took more time to stop and stare and appreciate their natural world, we might do our own species a favor. “I think as a civilization we are angrier people because we don't care,” she adds. “As humans, we need to find our hearts again. If we cared and didn't do things like speeding down roads quite as badly as we do, a lot of these animals would not be hurt or killed.”

Loved and mended and sent on their way, it would be easy to imagine the affection Eddings shows the wild bunch washing up on her doorstep would not be reciprocated or remembered. But don't be so sure.

She tells the story of a raccoon she had raised and called “Bear” who had a thing for fried chicken. He was sent off back into the wild and was gone for three years until, known by his markings, he suddenly turned up in her garage one day, anxious for some chicken and the chance to see his two-legged savior one more time.

“Bear was ill,” says Eddings with a faint smile. “And he came home to die.”