Shortly after her mother died, Annie Marie Musselman started photographing injured animals at the Sarvey Wildlife Care Center, in Arlington, Washington. “Seeing the animals suffer and very often die helped me see that death is a very important process of life,” she said. The center’s patients often include raccoons and barn owls hit by cars, baby possums from abandoned nests, and eastern gray squirrels injured by cats. Musselman has also seen some stranger cases: a South American coatimundi, two overweight brown bears used to transport drugs from Canada, and a red-tailed hawk shot by an arrow.
A bald eagle with two broken wings, sustained after falling eighty feet out of her nest, was brought to the center. After six weeks of round-the-clock care, she was suddenly able to stand up, just as her caretakers were about to make the decision to euthanize her. A volunteer with cancer began to glove-train her, and they quickly became inseparable. After the volunteer learned that his cancer was in remission, he went to see her, “lifted her up onto his glove, and she wrapped her huge wing around his body,” Musselman said. “She had never done that before and she never did it again.”
Annie Marie Musselman’s “Finding Trust” was published by Kehrer Verlag in March.
