Volunteer Profile: Joe Pollick
By Susan Schulter
Volunteers for the Wildlife Center often work directly with animals. But they also contribute in other creative, indispensable ways. Joe Pollick is one such volunteer, a man who combines expert technical and handy-man skills with a humbly deep respect for wildlife, and the kinship that exists between human beings and other animals.
“People need animals in their lives,” Joe says. We need wildness. A silent spring with no birds like the one Rachel Carson wrote about would be a very sad thing to endure.… too often when man and animals cross paths, it’s the animals that lose. I like to think that the Wildlife Center gives the animals a better chance. The Center tries to help animals carry on the next generation of their respective species.”
When Joe retired from his career as an electrician at Silicon Valley Power in 2001, he began looking for ways to make animals an nature a more integral part of his life. One day in March of 2003, he was walking in Penetencia Creek Park and saw a sign for the Wildlife Center. “I went in and asked the person at the desk, who turned out to be Janet Alexander, if I could volunteer. She said that it just so happened there was an orientation for new volunteers scheduled for the upcoming Saturday.”
Joe went to that orientation and has been volunteering his time on Thursday mornings ever since. Some of his projects include repairing the Center’s water heater, fixing an electrical panel that malfunctioned, and re-engineering the doors on squirrel cages to open outward rather than inward, thus eliminating the problem of the cage doors getting stuck in gravel. Joe has also enjoyed hands-on experiences with the animals. Recently, he helped care for an opossum who had been brought into the Center with serious puncture wounds. Joe worried that the animal might not recover, but one week later when he returned to the Center he found the opossum much improved, even displaying spunky behavior.
Asked what advice he would offer new volunteers, Joe said, “Observe the animals. They will teach you what their needs are. A baby animal in an incubator for instance, wants food. It wants food from you, an utterly different species! That’s the wonder! Animals are more honest than we are. Observe them: They will teach you.”
