Welcome to Fourth Crossing Wildlife
(November 2023)
Fourth Crossing Wildlife has been created to provide high quality wildlife care information
that will assist all carers to maintain Australian native animals in good health, and well-being.
check out my For the Wildlife video
To Care, or not to Care?
Many wildlife organisations play no active role in the provision of care information to non registered carers despite the fact that the provision of such information might assist in ensuring the general health and well being of an Australian native animal.
The aim of these organisations is to have native animals held by non registered carers surrendered.
However, non registered carers do hold Australian native animals and a purpose of this site - undoubtedly the most important reason - is to provide quality care information that will assist all carers to maintain a native animal in good health and well-being before it is returned to the wild.
There is simply nothing more disheartening than to receive a native animal that has been handed over by a carer who - despite all good intentions - simply did not have access to basic information that would have ensured the health and well-being of the animal they held. In many cases, but not all, these animals are received in a condition of health that is beyond remedy.
My aim is to help those carers who are abandoned by the system to become better carers so that even more animals can be rehabilitated successfully and released back into the wild.
Success and Failure
While I have enjoyed many successes in my experience, some of the stories in this website have unhappy endings.... it would be wrong to present a website that does not acknowledge the capacity for humans to make mistakes. And even well educated carers make mistakes... it is fiction to suggest that they don't.
What about Habitat?
Many voluntary wildlife organisations play no active part in the fight to conserve habitat and instead focus their respective efforts on the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of surrendered, injured, and orphaned native animals. This is an important focus without doubt - but it is also very small part of the overall picture, for what is the point of expending so much effort, time, and money on caring for an Australian native animal if there is no appropriate, safe, habitat to return it to?
In many respects, the preservation and re-establishment of habitat is clearly more important than caring for individual animals.
Along with organisations that focus their efforts on habitat preservation and conservation, there are, of course, thousands of individuals who are also concerned with the conservation of Australian wildlife and wildlife habitat.
In all states of Australia landowners can join a program coordinated by Humane Society International, the Wildlife Land Trust. By joining WLT you will be helping to preserve and protect our vital native habitats and the animals that depend on them, and you will become a vital cog in a network of sanctuaries both throughout the country and internationally.
Fourth Crossing is a WLT refuge, and we protect valuable habitat for animals that include eagles, hawks, echidnas, bandicoots, kangaroos, potoroos, wallabies, possums, gliders, more than 100 species of native bird, and numerous reptiles.
What wildlife habitat could your property provide? I encourage to you contact the Widlife Land Trust and establish your property as refuge.
Move forward......
Please do not confine your reading to this website, there is available an extensive wealth of information on the web about care of Australian native animals that is both greater in detail and even superior to what I have provided on this website.
So that you might be able to provide high quality care to an Australian native animal - I encourage you to use it all.
Cheers,
Web site, all photography and resources are protected by copyright
On the WWW since 4th May 2003
On the WWW since 4th May 2003