Fall volunteer training opens for October

Every autumn, young raccoons born in spring leave their mothers and strike out on their own. They cross roads they have never crossed, at night, in the rain. From mid-October through December our hotline takes more vehicle-strike calls than in the rest of the year combined. Last year that meant 41 admissions in eleven weeks.

The bottleneck is never the clinic. It is getting the animal to the clinic. So this cohort is weighted toward the two roles that shorten response time: transport drivers, who collect crated animals from responders and bring them to campus, and evening dispatchers, who take hotline calls from 6 p.m. to midnight and decide who goes where.

What Tier 1 covers

• How raccoons behave when frightened, hurt, or cornered, and how to keep yourself and the animal safe.
• Crate handling, vehicle setup, and the transport log.
• Biosecurity: what to wear, what to wash, and why we take raccoon roundworm seriously.
• The hotline script and the dispatch board, with two hours of supervised live calls on Sunday afternoon.
• What we do not do, including why we do not keep raccoons as ambassadors and why healthy kits go back to their mothers.

You do not need animal experience. You need a driving license, evenings or weekends free through December, and a willingness to follow protocol when a raccoon is screaming at you.

After the weekend

Graduates are paired with a mentor for their first six shifts. Most people give one four-hour shift a week. Tier 2 (animal care and enclosure work) and Tier 3 (capture and community speaking) open to anyone who has completed 20 Tier 1 shifts. Of the 62 people who trained in 2025, 48 were still active twelve months later.