On Sunday, September 4, the public is invited to the fourth annual Adirondack Habitat Awareness Day at the Adirondack Wildlife Refuge & Rehabilitation Center, in Wilmington.

Visitors can meet timber wolves, coyote, fox, bobcat, and opossum up close, along with owls, hawks, osprey and falcons. Naturalists will show how wildlife interact with each other and with the natural environment. The event starts at 11 a.m. and ends at 4 p.m. There is no admission charge, although donations are welcome.

Steve and Wendy Hall own and operate the Adirondack Wildlife Refuge & Rehabilitation Center under state and federal permits for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education. They are able to help injured creatures with the help of community donations.

Wendy feels it is important to offer residents and visitors the opportunity to learn about the wildlife that shares our habitat. “I want to create an awareness of indicator species, and an understanding of what a wonderful benefit they are to us, in our efforts to read the health of our environment,” she says.“One of our current initiatives is to start dialogue and collaboration with organic farmers to repopulate American farmlands with barn owls and kestrels, a more efficient and less expensive natural alternative to the rodenticides which poison wildlife indiscriminately, including the predators that eat rodents.”

What do the Adirondack loon and the bald eagle tell us about the effects of pollutants and poisons in our environment? What are keystone predators and trophic cascades? What controls stinging insects like mosquitoes? What’s the number-one cause of the decline of songbirds? How did the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone help trout? Why are we overrun with deer, while some other useful species teeter on the brink of extinction? How do honeybees help feed the world, and why are their numbers in decline?

Representatives from The Nature Conservancy, Audubon Society, Food Forest Food, Ausable River Association, Eastern Coyote Research, reptile specialist Beyond Human, North Country Wild Care, and more, will be present to share their knowledge.

Adirondack Wildlife Refuge & Rehabilitation Center is located at 977 Springfield Road in Wilmington. For more information, contact Wendy Hall at 855-WolfMan (855-965-3626).

Barn owls by John James Audubon