A Squirrel’s Best Friend: An Interview with Coast & Canyon Wildlife’s Marcia Rybak

Q: What does Coast & Canyon Wildlife do?
A: Coast & Canyon Wildlife rescues, rehabilitates and releases small native California wildlife back into their native habitat. Most of our work deals with orphans, so that means picking up babies from shelters or the public, feeding the orphans until they are old enough to be released and putting them back up in people’s back yards. I hold the permit from California Fish & Game to rehabilitate native California mammals but we limit ourselves to small mammals such as squirrels, opossums, skunks, and other small rodents. We do not take in raccoons or rabbits. I hold the wildlife permit and have 8 satellites or people who work under my permit. We are all home care volunteers.
Q: What’s your background? How long have you been doing this? How’d you get started?
A: Professionally, I was a computer consultant, programmer and systems analyst but I’ve always had a love of animals. Prior to working with wildlife, I spent 20 years working with and breeding lizards. I am even a past president of the Chicago Herpetological Society.
I’ve been working with wildlife for about 10 years. I started as a volunteer with California Wildlife Center hoping to work with birds, however, I found that I didn’t have that natural feel for birds, but I did for the mammals. It was natural to start caring for the many orphans that come in twice a year for the squirrels and year long for opossums. During this time, I also volunteered and was on the board of the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro but had to quit those activities as the squirrels started coming in.
Q: What advice can you give Brentwood residents about interacting with wildlife?
A: There are 2 seasons for the tree squirrels in Brentwood – spring, which is late January through April; and fall which is July through October. People will hold off trimming trees in the spring because of bird nests but don’t realize that the same holds true for squirrel nests in the fall. We get many more squirrels in the fall than in the spring due to a large part to tree trimming.
If you find any wildlife the rule is “warm, dark and quiet.†Please don’t feed it anything as you will probably do more harm than good. Both Coast & Canyon Wildlife and California Wildlife Center pick up from the West LA Shelter on Pico Blvd. when wildlife is brought in so you can always take your wildlife there. The city shelters are open 24/7 for the intake of animals.
Q: Anything else?
A: We have an informative web site at www.coastandcanyonwildlife.org
where people can view 2 live cams set up 24/7 on baby animals. Our Facebook page also has many photos and videos of the wildlife here.