Fern Wildlife Refuge

Our sanctuary is located on the top of a mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  We are lucky to live in an area of great beauty, and plentiful wildlife.

Unfortunately, with the encroachment of human living developments, there is ever less space for the wildlife inhabitants, and those that do survive often pay the penalty of sustaining injuries -- through accident or design.

We endeavour to help them to recover and return to the wild to live out their natural lives.

Fern Wildlife Refuge was founded in 1993 in Winchester, Virginia, by Gretl Learned, and is incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit charity. It provides rescue, rehabilitation, and release of orphaned, injured, and displaced wildlife for Winchester and all surrounding counties, but from time-to-time has dealt with animals from all areas of Virginia.

The Refuge provides a safe sanctuary for most types of wildlife, but predominantly caters to birds and small mammals.  Many of the animals brought into our care have suffered injury from car accidents, or from flying into obstacles.  Still others have been the victim of attacks by domestic animals: primarily cats and dogs.  And, of course, there are always the ones who have been orphaned: left alone when their mother was killed.

No matter what type of animal we are brought, we will always do whatever we can to help it to recover.  Every year we look after skunks, opossums, fox cubs, squirrels and groundhogs, as well as hundreds of birds, representing many of the 500 local species.  Most of them we keep in the refuge, but some of the larger birds, such as hawks, require flying cages of over 100 feet, and we cannot accommodate those.  In such cases, we perform emergency triage, and then arrange for a chain of volunteers to drive the injured bird to a specialist raptor center.

We are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  We rely totally on donations and work done by our volunteers, and are always grateful for offers of help.  If you think you would like to work with us, please email us at the address on our contact page.  But we should warn you: it is not glamorous work, and it  includes very little handling of the animals.  For them to survive in the wild, it is important that they do not imprint on humans, so we touch them as little as possible, and work quietly around them, keeping conversation to a minimum.

Every year our case load increases, as urban sprawl takes over more natural habitat, displacing hundreds of animals.  The increase in houses also brings with it more traffic, and that leads to more accidents and injuries.  We try never to turn an animal away, but pressure on our limited funds sometimes makes that difficult.  If you can help with a donation, no matter how small, we would be very grateful.