WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE SAVED

John and Carolyn Watkins, a 19-year-old daughter, seven dogs and two cats have just moved to this 180-acre farm lush with woods, grasslands, ponds and a spring. This farm is where most of the injured, sickly or undeveloped wildlife discovered in Southeast Missouri will be brought to be nurtured back into the sky and forest.

This retreat for themselves and for these wounded and defenseless animals is the Watkinses' dream come true. "I couldn't have gone out and found a better place," John says, lovingly playing his eyes over the landscape.

The Watkinses have been taking in wild animals wounded birds of prey, baby raccoons and newborn fawns, bobcats, coyotes and even an alligator for more than 20 years. Until now they cared for them in cages at their home in Cape Girardeau.

Most of the animals have been brought in by the Missouri Department of Conservation, although many others apparently are aware of the Watkinses work.

"Often we would come home and there would be a box on the front porch, and we would have no idea where it came from," John said.

Four raccoons, six fawns, a great horned owl, a red-shouldered hawk and a young coyote currently are inhabiting the farm with them. They are fed mostly wild food often road kill preserved as-is in a freezer and are handled as little as possible.

Once the animals have healed or are adult enough, they are released back into the wild. In the case of the alligator, which was being kept as evidence in a poaching case, the next stop was the St. Louis Zoo.

All this started the day John discovered a wounded hawk while out hunting. At the time, such animals had no place to go to be rehabilitated. They simply were destroyed. Because of John's medical background, a friend with the Department of Conservation invited him to care for the bird.

Over the years, husband and wife have learned much about caring for and releasing wild animals over the years. Among their strongest convictions is that attempting to make a pet of a wild animal does it damage.

They often get calls from people whose pet raccoon suddenly seems to have turned mean, which usually means it isn't cute and cuddly anymore.

Such an animal often has been fed table scraps, and to reintroduce it to the wild requires teaching it a whole new diet.

John stressed that state or federal licenses are required before anyone legally can keep a wild animal.

The Watkineses are not paid for the work they do. They do it out of love for the animals, though John never would describe himself as an animal rights activist.

A beautiful white swan, one of the patients that didn't survive, stands mounted in their family room. But the huge bird, supposedly mistaken for a diminutive snow goose by an inexperienced hunter, is a mute symbol of the kind of hunting John deplores.

"I have respect for wildlife. I don't have a problem if a person goes out and kills an animal for food. They need to be harvested," he says.

"But I'm totally against someone going out and killing an animal for fun."

Some of those animals hunted for fun, many of which are protected, end up with the Watkinses.

An animal that has been wounded probably requires surgery. John, who is a first assistant to Cape Girardeau heart surgeons Drs. Bridget and Louis Ostrow, assists Dr. Karen Bangert of Skyview Animal Clinic in her operations on the injured wild animals brought in.

At home, John tends to the bigger animals and the birds. Carolyn takes care of the babies. She has bottle-fed the six fawns, which readily allow strangers to pet them.

Except for a bobcat named Buzzsaw, released with great difficulty at Mingo Wildlife Refuge, and a raccoon named Chubbs, who's currently hanging out in the barn, they ordinarily don't name the wild things.

"We try not to make pets of the animals," John said. "But when you bottle-feed them they automatically imprint on you."

Chubbs was bottle-fed from infancy and is very friendly, especially with the Watkinses' golden retriever, Abby. But Chubbs might not be so nice when he gets older, and gradually they're weaning him back into the wild.

"He may spend the winter here," John says, "but by next February his hormones will tell him it's time. He'll go get a mate."

An estimated 75 animals per year are brought to the Watkinses for rehabilitation. He says about 70 percent make it through to be returned to the wild. Those animals have included eagles, hawks, peregrin falcons, spotted and striped skunks, blue herons and swans.

Many of the hawks and eagles are shot by people who think they are harmful, John says. But he insists that birds of prey and other predators are essential to the wildlife system.

"Man is the worst predator: man wants the trophy buck to hang over the mantle," he said."

Until their recent move, the Watkinses released the animals at Trail of Tears or Mingo. Now that they can let the animals go at the new farm, they can do it gradually and won't have to keep them caged as long.

"We're able to `hack them back' to the wild," John said. "If they're not doing too well they will come back."

The animals let them know when they're healed and ready to be released, John says. "When it's time to go back into the wild they will start pacing their cages."

He watched one hawk, which had a shattered shoulder and appeared to have no chance of ever flying again, retrain itself in a small flight cage by graduating to higher and higher T-bars.

He smiles when he recalls releasing the hawk at Mingo. "He flew out over a cornfield. That was a challenge, but the bird had spirit."

John says releasing the animals isn't hard for him. But Carolyn relates a story about a fawn that was brought in last year. "It still had its umbilical cord."

As sometimes happens, when the time came, the bottle-fed fawn didn't want to be released. "He came running out after me and he would lick my hand," she said.

Finally they honked horns to scare the deer back into the woods. John says the bottle-fed deer never will fear humans but will join and follow herds that do run away.

Eventually, John plans to run cattle on the farm. He says he wants it to be a model of the way farmers and wild animals can co-exist.

"We want man and wildlife to live together.... There is a way we can all live together if we just understand."