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Volunteers with a Greensprings wild animal rescue center say dwindling community support could make this summer’s batch of babies its last. Southern Oregon Animal Rehabilitation founder Tiffany Morey says she’s not sure how long she can manage the $6,000 in monthly expenses the center accrues May through September, when it cares for orphaned fawns and other animals until their release into the wild. “Most of our wildlife patients come in at the end of May and beginning of June. Our goal is for all our patients to be released anywhere from late July to mid-September,” Morey says. She says community support increased in recent weeks with social-media posts about the financial woes of the center, which has been the region’s only rescue facility for injured and orphaned fawns since it began in 2013. “We were really feeling like we were probably going to have to close our doors, but just from posting on Facebook and with our fundraisers, we’ve met our June monthly bills and part of July,” says Morey, a retired law enforcement officer who started the center after years of volunteering with Wildlife Images and seeing gaps in local rescue options for wildlife. “We’re trying to finish July and August, and then we’ll start to figure out what will happen next year.” Morey says the focus of the facility is to rehabilitate animals and to educate people who call on a near-daily basis. The state-licensed center is caring for nine fawns this year, and the group also has rehabilitated young squirrels, foxes, raccoons, skunks, fishers, chipmunks, bobcats and a handful of other critters. Morey, who cares for the animals with a team of volunteers and college interns, says most of the animals that show up at SOAR are orphaned because their mothers were hit by a car, shot or otherwise separated from their babies. Sometimes, uneducated do-gooders create a situation. “One of the most common things we deal with is people who think they’ve rescued abandoned fawns. We try to educate the public. Most people who call us don’t realize that mothers will leave their babies for up to 24 hours. People try to save them and take them home and call us,” Morey says. “They call us when they’ve tried to feed it half-and-half or Ensure. … Ninety percent of our calls are cases where we tell people, ‘Well, you just kidnapped this fawn and you should take it back for the mother to find its baby.’” Animal care student intern Maria Cagney of Nevada says the center often sees day-old babies that might have died if returned to the wild. The cost to provide happy endings, however, is high. A single tub of formula costs $500, she says. “We’re nonprofit, so we don’t get any state or federal funding. We really rely on donations from the community almost as much as the baby animals rely on us. This year has been really, really rough for us as far as donations go,” Cagney says. Cagney says the center receives produce to help feed the babies, along with other donations. “We get donations of furs, which babies like to sleep on because it feels like mom, but we really need cash donations to be able to buy things — like the formula for the really young babies — and for medical expenses and enclosures,” she says. Morey says she teaches at Southern Oregon University to help pay the bills at the center. The cost of rescuing a fawn ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, depending on its age when it arrives at SOAR. If she can get a foothold on finances, Morey says she’d like to take in orphaned or injured bears, another service not provided elsewhere. “The babies that we help are in situations where, without coming to SOAR, they would either die of starvation or be euthanized,” Morey says. “There’s a need, because we, as humans, have moved into their area. The babies we get that are truly orphaned are in that situation because we’ve hit the moms with cars. We feel strongly that we need to provide an answer and take care of the situation that we have created. They need us.” For more information or to donate to SOAR, see www.soarwildlife.org or www.facebook.com/soarwildlife.org . Reach Medford freelance writer Buffy Pollock at [email protected] .