Meet Zapata wildlife rehabilitator
Nancy Cowing Umphres

By María Eugenia Guerra

Were the passage to heaven earned in the saving of the lives of little wounded birds, Zapata wildlife rehabilitator Nancy Cowing Umphres has secured her ticket and that of everyone she must take with her, the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds.
Umphres, operator of the non-profit Zapata Wildlife Center, has built a life around her family and the nurturing of injured wildlife that remains in her care until it is released back into the wild.
I hesitate to call her an extraordinary woman, for she would blanch at that and ask what, after all, is an extraordinary woman? And so I call her an immensely compassionate woman who is an environmentalist, the mother of James, the wife of Robert, the answered prayer of many an abused bobcat and injured wild animal that makes its way to her via game wardens, repentant wild game captors, and those who come across wounded animals on ranches or on the roadside.
I've known Nancy over the last decade, both as a friend and as a writer for the Zapata Weekly Express and for LareDOS. Before a recent tour of the wildlife rescue facility, I caught up with Nancy and James, a junior psychology major at Texas A&M in Corpus Christi, over breakfast at the Holiday Restaurant in Zapata.
LareDOS: What is a wildlife rescue?
Umphres: It is a center that takes in native injured wild animals, rehabilitates them, and tries to get them back to the wild.
LareDOS: How is that accomplished?
Umphres: First, we take care of injuries. If they are orphaned, I try to keep them as wild as possible, feeding them with as little contact as possible and using foster parents.
LareDOS: And those foster parents can be of the same species or not, which is what I have read in the column you write for LareDOS.
Umphres: Yes. We have a javelina that has raised deer, feral hogs, and other javelina.
LareDOS: What is the most common animal brought to you to save and return to the wild?
Umphres: They are for the most part birds -- raptors, great horned owls, all species of injured fowl. Most of them have been hit by cars. Some of them were injured as they hit powerlines, which is usually the case when we get great horned owls. The mammals we take in are deer, bobcats, javelina, beaver.
LareDOS: Describe the menagerie you have now in your care.
Umphres: Right now we have two caracara waiting for placement in a zoo. Both are amputees missing their full wings. One is mature, one immature. We have a young Swainson hawk that was held captive and hand-raised. She was brought to me by game wardens who found her to be so tame that she couldn't fend for herself. She would approach people for food. She may not have a chance at being back out in the wild. It's sad to think that a bird of prey becomes prey.
We've had one great horned owl for 17 years. She has a permanent beak injury. We have two barn owls that are on the mend and pending release. We have two bobcats -- one, Eva Luna, is a foster mother, and the juvenile, Peter, has had rickets as a result of poor nourishment in captivity. He's pretty defenseless because of the condition of its hind legs. His cruel captors had also cut off the tips of his ears. Eva Luna was a captive kitten. She was brought to me with us knowing she would be a permanent resident. She might have reverted to the point that she could hunt, but she would always look for humans, which could lead her to being shot.
We have one blind beaver that we've had eight or nine years. We have three white wing doves pending release. And four javelinas, three releasable, and one foster father, Rambo, whom we have had for 13 years.
The injured animals are seasonal. Right now we get injured migratory fowl such as Swainson's hawks, injured falcons, ducks, and geese. We are licensed for birds and mammals with the temporary exception of coyotes, racoons, and fox.
LareDOS: How long have you been doing this?
Umphres: Seventeen years. It started with Nova the great horned owl. She came from the White House restaurant in Zapata, the surviving baby from a pair that had been knocked from their nest. She was a month old. We released her and she hit a power line. A neighbor found her sitting below the power lines. That caused her to lose part of her beak. We brought her back and this has been her home.
LareDOS: How do you manage to keep doing this? It's pretty clear that this is a labor of love, but how do you manage the costs of veterinary care for injured animals and for the feeding of them?
Umphres: Sam Bottenfield does all the veterinary work for free and provides the medications at cost. Everything we do is donation-driven. We are not subsidized in any way.
LareDOS: Who have been your major donors?
Umphres: There are many over the years and we are grateful to each and every one. On the whole it is the kindness of individuals that has kept us going, but in the summer of 2001 a Conoco crew built the shell of our steel building and hauled away the old structure. We still need to build an office area and a treatment area, but we now have this wonderful structure so that we can be out of the weather for treatment and storage. Donations got the place wired and plumbed. We seldom get donations from people who leave an animal here. Sometimes they have been the captors and just want to be done with the animal.
LareDOS: If we were rounding up donations for you in Laredo, what would be the items we should gather up?
Umphres: We always need chicken scratch, cracked corn, sweet potatoes, apples, dog food, cat food, chicken and turkey drum sticks, hay for bedding, and new tarps. And certainly we can use cash donations to buy medications.
LareDOS: What is the most rare animal that has come your way?
Umphres: It was a Red Billed tropic bird that flew in on a storm from Baja California and landed in a yard in Zapata in 1988. It's a sea bird with tiny feet. It didn't make it. It had an infection and we knew it wouldn't survive. They never do in captivity.
The strangest animal brought to us was a Nile Monitor Lizard which had been abandoned by someone in San Antonio and brought to me by my nephew. It weighed about six or seven pounds and looked like a small dinosaur or a small Komodo dragon. I had to wear welding gloves to tend to it. It ended up in a breeding program back in San Antonio.
In 1987 a US Fish and Wildlife officer brought us two great horned owls that had been kept by a curandera in a town near here. They had been starved and tormented, basicially tortured in captivity. One made it, one died.
LareDOS: How many animals come through your rescue and rehab operation in a year?
Umphres: It can be anywhere from 100 to 200 wild animals a year. Baby bird season begins in May and June. If the range conditions were bountiful that year, we have more of them. If there are high winds, there are more nestlings blown out of their nests. It really is best to try to put them back or to build a new nest nearby -- the parents will find them and try to continue feeding them.
Unfortunately, many of the animals that end up in our care were abused or injured by humans. We get lots of shot animals. We got a Harris Hawk that was shot through the wing. He made it fine and upon his release he opted to live in the neighborhood where he flies from one of four nests to another. He feeds the female who is sitting on a nest. He's wild, but he comes here for food if things are tight where he's living.
U.S. Customs has brought us a baby doe confiscated at the border and on another occasion a gray fox that had been trapped in Mexico and had lost its leg. Its captors were trying to smuggle it over. It survived and was re-released into the wild.
LareDOS: Where do you release animals back into the wild?
Umphres: I won't say specifically, but there are some kind ranchers who are wildlife-friendly and allow us to release on their land. We also release along the river banks.
LareDOS: What is the value of this work for you?
Umphres: That's a difficult question to answer. It is fulfilling to see abused and broken animals become whole and get released back into the wild. The songbirds we release tend to stay in our area. To be able to see and hear them and know that they are reproducing in the wild is really rewarding. There's so much wild animals have to face as far as human encroachment and human ignorance are concerned. I like feeling that I helped them along and increased their chances of survival.
You try to cancel the bad things that have been done. They come in here dehydrated, starved on the wrong diet, abused, and, in the case of Peter the bobcat, mutilated. He had lost his sibling, which was devastating to him. A rancher brought him in when Peter was eight weeks old. He was terrified and old enough to know humans were bad news.
Peter went into intensive care for a couple of months with heating pads and forced feedings of Nutracal and turkey. We introduced egg into his diet, and then the quail I order and stock. He has permanent rickets and can't be released because he can't hunt or run well enough to elude harm.
Peter kept company with a little female named Tessa that had been found orphaned at a ranch. The rancher found care instructions at a library and did all the right things. I met the rancher in Río Grande City and brought Tessa here. I was able to release her into the wild, but Peter stayed here with Eva Luna. If only everyone would understand the damage they are creating when they attempt to keep a wild animal as a pet. It's pretty heartbreaking to see the aftermath of one of those failed attempts. The most wretched of cases happened a few years ago when Dr. Jane Biggerstaff and game warden Johnny Aldridge rescued a bobcat that had been confined in a dog house in Laredo. The dog house had been hammered shut. The bobcat was literally boiling to death inside the structure. He was dehydrated, savage, wild, and very angry. We kept him in a huge cage and got his strength up and then we released him into the wild.
My mother and sister and I rode by dinghy over the lake and into an arroyo. We pulled the cage onto the bank, opened it, and last saw him pouncing along the banks for frogs. He never looked back. It was the happiest thing I had ever seen.
LareDOS: Have people's attitudes changed a bit about leaving animals in the wild?
Umphres: I always think this is the case and then some poor animal shows up victim to what people did to it. I think some attitudes about wildlife have changed. I know many ranchers in Zapata County who hunt with binoculars and cameras rather than rifles. It wasn't long ago that it was misguided and uninformed public policy in Webb and Zapata counties to kill coyotes from the air. Now they drop rabies vaccine.
LareDOS: A question directed to James -- what has this been like for you?
James Umphres: The rescue of wild animals has been our life since I was four years old. I used to wish I had grown up in a normal household, but I understand now that these are experiences that have formed me and made me appreciate nature and all living things.
I don't know how my mother does it. I've thought about this many times. She has a determination and a commitment that is incomprehensible at times.