Integrating Conservation and Veterinary Medicine at a Wildlife Rehabilitation and Breeding Center

Wildlife Conservation in Bulgaria 

This blog was originally written by Olivia Dungan, Summer 2025 intern, and is shared here with permission from the author.

Two days after I landed in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, I stepped into the door for my first day of my internship, filled with something between excitement and fear. I rounded the corner that began the great long hallway of rehabilitation wards and peeked into the treatment room. Inside was a woman who introduced herself as Dr. Stefka, and who, over the next ten weeks, would become one of my most influential mentors. She had corralled six baby storks onto the exam table and beckoned me to come and assist. She handed me a toothbrush and told me to brush off their dander. And so began my first day – grooming baby storks with a toothbrush. The day then progressed to preparing the patients’ meals, cleaning enclosures, and heading back to the clinic to triage patients.

I had never touched a wild bird for more than a few seconds before Isla connected me with this opportunity. By the end of my time there, I had spent hundreds of hours handling, treating, and raising birds across 56 different species, from tiny house martins to enormous cinereous vultures.

The beauty of wildlife medicine is its dynamic nature. Everyday is different. Every patient is different. Each patient comes through the door in a box, or some other receptacle, and there is a thrill each time I open them to reveal who is inside. Sometimes it was a baby swallow, a grounded swift, a stork tangled in wire. Other times it is a vulture with a wingspan as long as I am tall, or an infant owl that has fallen from its nest.

I quickly became partial to the songbirds and swifts. I was immediately enamored by their small sizes, and by contrast, their vibrant personalities. It was there that I carved out my niche as an excellent bird mother. From the second week on, I would begin and end every day in the songbird room, tending to the fledglings and nestlings, spending countless hours feeding them worms and seeds until they grew large enough to fly.

In the clinic, I learned to splint wings and legs, give antiparasitic and fluids. I learned how to provide lifesaving stabilization to the critically ill and injured, and how to euthanize those who were beyond our help. Wildlife medicine is heartbreaking at times, and others, beautiful. Some of our cases were the victims of the worst of humanity, but it was contrasted by the intense compassion and empathy of the veterinarians and my fellow interns. To know that my actions help save lives of patients that are so often the victims of human interference was very inspiring.

As such, one of my favorite parts of the job were the patient releases. We would drive hours away at times to release our patients in protected wildlife refuges or national parks. There is tremendous joy at watching a bird, who had arrived broken and on death’s door, take to the skies or sea again. Even releasing our fledged babies was a moment of great pride for myself. Many of them arrived cold and starving, covered in down and pin feathers. Over their weeks in care, I watch their feathers grown in, their flight muscles develop. They want so quickly from sleepy nestlings to flapping about their cage, ready for what awaited them outside.

Above all, my time in Stara Zagora showed that it is possible to marry my passion for wildlife conservation and my path towards veterinary medicine. The clinic’s captive breeding of endangered raptors has been a critical step toward the conservation of species like the imperial eagle, bearded vulture, and lesser kestrel. Without veterinarians and conservationists, these programs cannot exist. Veterinary medicine has a crucial role in the protection and reinstitution of the world’s threatened species.

The defining part of my time as an Isla intern was not in the work itself, but rather in the self-discovery that happened in the background. This internship woke my love for birds that had long been waiting in the wings, allowed me to apply it to my lifelong dream of becoming a veterinarian. I am tremendously grateful to Isla and my internship for the time I was able to spend learning from brilliantly passionate people who showed me the kind of work I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I joke that the birds healed me as much as I did them, but there is much truth to that statement. To find your calling is cathartic, and I recommend everyone searching for theirs to go out into the world and do something beyond what is comfortable. Do something crazy-- something that scares you-- because if someone had told me at the beginning of my college career that I would travel alone, across the world, to spend months working with birds in a place I could not read or speak the language, I would have laughed and brushed them off. But I think that is the beauty of life and of studying abroad.

Life is like is box of birds: you never know what you’re going to get.