IT'S A WILD LIFE

By Barbara Snyder Witner

Daily Herald Staff Writer

Monday, August 14, 1989

 It was one of the saddest things Garon Fyffe ever saw in all his years of rescuing and relocating wildlife.

 A family of raccoons, Mama and babies, had taken refuge in a chimney from the choke of suburban development. The homeowner had started a roaring fire in the fireplace to rid himself of the "pests."

 By the time Fyffe was called in to clean up the debacle, the masked creature's eyes were burned down to the sockets from her fierce attempts to come down through the flames to rescue her babies. The babies were burned and half-alive.

 And Fyffe, 45, naturalist and director of ABC Humane Wildlife Rescue and Relocation, with headquarters in Arlington Heights and a branch in DuPage County's Woodridge, was profoundly sad.

 "I was ashamed," said the 45-year-old, thick-set, muscular animal humanitarian, "that the species chosen by God to rule the earth would burn up an animal family alive. It was the perfect example of the animal's level of love and the human's level of cruelty."

 In one way or another, Garon Fyffe, a 1972 environmental studies graduate of the University of Illinois has been trying to scoop up critters and sweep them to safety all his natural life.

 He grew up in – of all places – the teeming near North Side of Chicago at a time of great political activism.

 His head in the clouds, he'd dream of the mountain men who came to America when the handprint of the Creator was still fresh on the earth. He'd scarf up information on survivalists and explorers. He'd fill his pockets with bugs, organize neighborhood expeditions to vacant lots to catch bumblebees and swing from ropes like a monkey off the tops of garage roofs.

 The winters he spent at the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Chicago Academy of Sciences; the summers he spent with his mother's kin, a large pioneer family with homesteads and farms all over the Midwest. They taught him to track animals and "read" the water to find the deep holes where the fish swam and how to know a stream by the underbelly of its water plants.

 He would get up before the sun rose, pack a lunch and spend hours frozen in place watching snakes slithering through the grass and deer taking nourishment from a watering hole.

 "I took pride that I watched and didn't interfere," he said, explaining a philosophy that still guides his wildlife rescue efforts.

 And each fall, he'd return to Chicago through the steel mills of Gary, Ind., sure that civilization was destroying everything on earth.

 Except he didn't' trade his dreams for a seat on the Stock Exchange.

 Instead, he got a job in 1976 at the River Trail Nature Center near Prospect Heights. He was pretty much in charge of the injured animals people would bring in.

 Sometimes folks would come in empty-handed but full of questions about what to do about the skunks under the porch, the raccoons in the chimney or the baby bird that fell out of the nest in their back yard.

 He'd teach them his policy of non-interference: Nature knows what it's doing. Take the baby deer and give it back to its mother. Don't shoot the hawk; don't kill the snake; don't pick up baby animals unless the mother is surely dead; don't pour ammonia down the chimney to get rid of the raccoons.

 Before he knew it, he was leaving work and spending the better part of every evening rescuing owls caught in kite string and bringing them back to the nest of their young, or retrieving raccoons from chimneys and driving them 35 miles away from suburban development to the trunk of a hollow tree where they could make a new den.

 During that time, Fyffe developed the three principles that were to guide his business: capture mother and babies together, get them away from the urban sprawl, relocate them to a place where they can live wild and free.

 By 1979, Fyffe had spent three years of his own time, money and energy rescuing animals. One morning, after he hadn't showered in three days and hadn't had one day off in two months, his wife issued this ultimatum:

 "Do you want to teach people about nature or do you want to go out and save it?" she asked. "Make up your mind. You can't do both."

 And so, with no money in the bank and a newborn baby at home, ABC Humane Wildlife Rescue was born. Its headquarters was the back of a used station wagon.

 Today the first private, commercial firm to do wildlife rescue in Illinois has lots of competitors, two offices and a staff of 22, including an on-staff naturalist and carpenter.

 Through the growth, Fyffe has remained true to his original principles: "We either hand capture or live trap an animal," he said. "But we capture it live and unhurt. And we return them to a pre-selected habitat in which they can flourish and live. For example, to release squirrels I require 100 acres of a mix of fruit and nut trees, a permanent water supply, and, of course, permission to release. I take great pride in that."

 Fyffe cringes when he speaks of pest controllers and animal rescuers who are really exterminators: they burn or shoot animals, or capture them, only to let them out at the edge of town so they are caught in the same cycle all over again.

 He also is wary of homeowners who try to do the job themselves.

 "So many times they'll poison an animal, who will get down into a hole in the wall and die," he said. "Not only does it stink, but the whole house becomes filled with flies like a horror movie. Then it can cost them thousands of dollars to get the mess out of there."

 While Fyffe is serious about his work, he is not a humorless man and, his work isn't without its lighter moments.

 He's fond of telling the story of the homeowner who asked:  "You got the skunks out from under the porch, but what about the skunk eggs?" Or the lady who called to report the 30-foot snake on her roof who had eaten a burglar and was about to eat the mailman. Then there was the 5½- foot Caymen, a mean and nasty alligator from South America in a factory in Des Plaines.

 "This was somebody's exotic pet and he kept it in a cattle watering trough at work," said Fyffe, laughing, "except he retired and left it there as a company mascot. A new guy buys the factory and he wants this thing out of there. It took four guys and several dollies to lift it out, not to mention the phone bill we ran up trying to find a zoo that would take it."

 Let's see. There's the one about the 7½- foot hungry python who had escaped from its cage and was about to eat the family cat...

 The snapping turtle that was swallowing from the depths the $450-apiece baby swans swimming in the private lake of a half-a-million-dollar house...

 The Rupperts Griffin vulture that escaped from Lincoln Park zoo and had to be rescued from a tree at Lake Forest High School via a tranquilizing gun with special darts designed to puncture thin-skinned animals...

 All kinds of wildlife make their way into the human sphere of suburbia, and Fyffe, who opened the DuPage County branch in November 1988, is worried what the county's over-development is doing to the collision of man and beast.

 "There's a lot of open land here and a lot of it still hasn't been destroyed," he said. " As DuPage develops, I wish it would take the animals into account."

 He speaks fondly of Kraft Corp., which hired him to capture and relocate all wildlife on the land before it built its national headquarters in Glenview.

 "It's funny," he added softly. "When we go out and destroy a work of man it's called vandalism. When we go out and destroy the work of God we call it development."