By Mimi E.B. Steadman
Photos by Dave Rowson
From our July 1981 issue
Jerry Elwell, Sherman Station’s best-known citizen, sits atop a stool in her home on the edge of the North Woods, 80 miles north of Bangor. As she chats, a commotion erupts in the other room and Cricket, a black toy poodle, begins to race about, barking frantically. “It’s just Falina having one of her running sessions,” Jerry explains as she quiets the dog. “It’s good for her heart and lungs.”
Jerry, her hair tied in an ever-present bandanna, has taken a break from cleaning the raccoon cage in the bathroom and sweeping sunflower seeds from the kitchen stove. “My white-footed woods mouse comes in every day for lunch — he leaves a trail of muddy little pawprints all along the counter here. I always put a snack out for him next to the stove, but he insists on hiding the sunflower seeds under the burners.”
Falina has now settled down in the other room. She is a sleek yearling deer who has wintered with the Elwells on their enclosed porch, which Jerry and her husband, John, have plans to convert to a den. “I even have the floor tiles and the Venetian blinds for the windows,” Jerry laments. But renovations have come to a halt because of the need for a deer pen.
Falina is one in a long parade of injured and foundling wild animals that have known Jerry’s gentle touch over the past 48 years. Ever since she was 11, when she was growing up in nearby Patten, she has sheltered woodland animals for “raising, repairs, rehabilitation, and release.” Her mother, she remembers, “used to complain that I never brought home a cute, fluffy kitten like the other children — just the mangy, sore-eyed ones. Things have sort of snowballed since then.” Indeed they have. She and John have taken in more than 3,000 animals in the past 17 years, bedding them down in every corner of their modest hilltop home and its surrounding small outbuildings. Among their boarders have been more than 160 raccoons, dozens of foxes and deer, a pine marten, a weasel, uncounted red and gray squirrels, hawks, and assorted owls, crows, and songbirds.
The roll call tumbles from Jerry’s lips, each name evoking a smile and an anecdote about a creature’s particular idiosyncrasies. There was Brandy, the squirrel who kept a supply of peanuts in the teakettle and hid Jerry’s eyeglasses (she’s never found them); Zorro, the raccoon who stole a visitor’s cigarettes from her handbag; Fragrance, the skunk, and Waddles, a raccoon, who became fast friends and denned together; Crazy Wings, the starling who was mended and released, only to return to the Elwells’ every night for eight years, “until she finally found a mate, a male much younger than she was. But he left her for a ‘younger woman’ and she just drooped around the yard,” according to Jerry. “Then one day, she never returned. We think she was ‘hawked.’”
Jerry accepts such savage events as nature’s way, but she does what she can to prevent similar fates from befalling her houseguests. There was the evening, for example, when she was making fudge and suddenly heard the raccoons escaping from their cage outside the bathroom window. Knowing they would go right for the partridge in the cage above them, she dashed to the bathroom, fudge pan in hand, and yelled for John to come help. He came running, and found her with one foot in the bathtub and one foot out the window holding the raccoon cage closed while she continued to stir her fudge. Together they managed to save the day, “and I didn’t even ruin the fudge.”
On another occasion, in the middle of the night, Jerry climbed up into the eaves under the tin roof in an effort to save nesting birds from marauding raccoons. When she fired a blank from her shotgun to scare the bandits away, she only managed to deafen herself temporarily (“It was just like putting your head into a metal drum and firing a gun,” she remembers.). Shining the flashlight in again, she saw the raccoons, totally unperturbed, sitting in the corner placidly patting their paws together as if in applause.
Fudge, a goose named for its fondness for Jerry’s candy, once came out the loser in a battle with a duck, and by the time Jerry arrived on the scene, the goose was floating on the pond with its head submerged up to the eyeballs. She scooped up the bird and laid it aside, presuming it dead. Then she saw a leg move, and the eyes opened. “I immediately began giving it mouth-to-beak
resuscitation,” she says. “Just then a woman drove up with an animal she wanted to leave with me. She wasn’t at all sure about what she saw me doing, so she left her car running and the door open. But then she got involved and ended up staying 45 minutes. Together, we brought that goose around.”
John Elwell, a quiet, snowy-haired man, smiles and nods in recollection as his wife rattles off incident after incident in their life with the animals. He, too, has a special respect for wildlife, generously sharing, for example, his woodworking shop with a young family of squirrels last spring.
Currently, the couple’s boarders also include a bantam rooster with bumblefoot (a crippling caused by nutritional deficiencies), which Jerry is treating with vitamin supplements, and a crow which, Jerry says, has flunked three test flights. “He flies sideways, like a crab. We tried releasing him last summer, and he flew right into the side of the henhouse and knocked himself unconscious,” she adds, imitating his misdirected flying technique.
The list goes on. There’s a part-mallard, part-white duck named Shucks who was peeled prematurely from his shell by a curious little boy. Placed in a box with a day-old peachick, Shucks grew up thinking he was a peacock. “He’d run around the yard with the young peacocks, his little legs going like an eggbeater as he tried to keep up. While the other ducks splashed in the pond, Shucks fluffed in the dust with the peacocks. He fell in love with a peahen and even fought off the other peacocks to win her affection,” Jerry recalls. “But she developed a sinus infection, and went the way of all sick peacocks. Shucks moped around for days. Now he’s got a new love, another peahen, and I don’t know what will happen this time.”
The peafowl flock, now more than a dozen strong, began when a breeder in Oakfield who raised exotic poultry told Jerry about destroying a peacock that was born with crooked toes. “I said, ‘Now don’t do that again, will you?’ so he brought me the next one who was hatched that way. I made a splint from a plastic charge card, and the toes straightened out fine.” That first peacock, named Mohawk, seemed lonely so Jerry and John got him a mate, and then along came little peacocks and peahens. “We have all we want now, so we don’t let the eggs hatch anymore,” Jerry says.
She keeps the peafowl and domestic ducks as pets, but she releases every native woodland animal as soon as it has mended or matured and can fend for itself. Those that are permanently crippled and can never be freed spend their lives in cages only if they appear content to do so. “If a bird doesn’t sing and seem happy in a cage, I won’t keep it,” she says. Among her long-term avian tenants, in addition to the kamikaze crow, are a number of one-winged birds, including an evening grosbeak, a hermit thrush, and an English sparrow, all of whom have been with the Elwells for eight or nine years, far beyond their normal life expectancy in the wild.
Because the law prohibits the confinement of wild animals, Jerry must have special “salvage and rehabilitation” permits from both the federal and state governments, and must make annual reports to the wildlife officials in Washington and Augusta, listing each animal she has treated and detailing its ultimate disposition. If she must destroy an animal, she is required to record the method used and certify whether or not the remains went to the University of Maine for study.
Most of the animals in Jerry’s care are brought to her by state wardens. Others arrive with Boy Scouts who have spotted them by the side of the road, victims of traffic, and still others come from families who have mistakenly attempted to make a pet out of a wild raccoon, fox, or other woodland creature. Neighbors bring animals to Jerry, and people from across the state and beyond show up at her door with sick, injured, abandoned, or simply no-longer-wanted wild animals. In short, everyone brings animals to her. A little boy once arrived with a dead robin, and when John pointed out that the bird was beyond help, the youngster shook his head in disagreement. “Jerry can fix anything,” he declared.
Some people argue that Jerry Elwell is meddling with the laws of survival. “Trappers claim I’m interfering with nature. Of course, they don’t think they are — they’re ‘saving animals from starvation’ by trapping them. But I don’t think what I’m doing goes against natural selection because most of the animals I’m helping come to me as the result of the acts of man, not nature. They’re victims of bullets, cars, traps, chemicals, and people who wrongly try to make pets of wild animals. The newborns,” she adds, “have usually lost their mothers because of something man has done.”
Jerry has clashed with the state’s trapping interests more than once, and when she expressed her antitrapping views in her weekly column in the Dexter Gazette, she received letters demanding an apology and a retraction. “I took my response right from the lips of Archie Bunker,” she says. “I spelled it ‘Blfftt,’ and I haven’t heard anything from them since.”
Jerry describes her late father, a lumberman and Maine Guide who awakened her concern for animals by bringing them home for her to nurse and study when she was little, as a reformed trapper. “We converted two more last summer. They’d never seen a live raccoon up close before.” When they did, they swore off trapping. A group from a Patten nursing home that came to visit last year included some “tough old trappers,” she recalls. “And there they were, arguing over who was going to hold the baby raccoon.” She realizes that as long as there is a market for pelts, there will be trappers, but she hasn’t given up. “When the kids come over and see the animals here,” she says, “it gives them a new perspective on both animals and trapping. It just might change their minds.”
Jerry has a more forceful way of changing the minds of hunters who venture onto her property. Although she doesn’t consider herself antihunting — “not as long as I continue to eat beef” — she does not, for obvious reasons, welcome hunters to her 77 acres of woods. “When I hear the shooting, I fire a shotgun into the air to scare them away. Once I spotted a hunter crouched behind a tree, so I walked up with my gun and said, ‘Don’t move or you’ll be strainin’ daylight.’ He said, ‘Let’s talk!’ and I told him I was done talking. He left in a hurry,” she recalls, laughing. “I guess I watch too many Western movies.”
The hundreds of visitors who arrive on Jerry’s remote doorstep to see the menagerie receive a far warmer welcome. She and John preside over what seems like an ongoing open house, for hardly a day passes without someone — a friend, a friend of a friend, a devoted reader of Jerry’s column, a group of wide-eyed children, or a truck driver on his way up nearby Route 95 — dropping by. Even foul weather doesn’t deter the determined. “I can remember times when we’ve had blizzards and John and I think we’ll have a quiet day and get some work done. Then we’ll look out the window and see someone coming up the driveway. One day, an 80-year-old man from town waded up the hill through the snow to visit. Another time, a whole troop of Boy Scouts came snowshoeing over the rise with all their banners flying. They really made an outing of it!”
On clement days, there is no limit to the number of visitors likely to show up. One fine summer Saturday, Jerry and John counted 87 unexpected guests before the deer and raccoons received their last affectionate pats. Many of the drop-ins are repeat visitors, especially in the spring and summer when the Elwell’s home is overrun with tiny foundlings.
In recent years, the number of newborns brought to her door has all but overwhelmed Jerry. In 1979, the tally topped the 200 mark, and there is no indication that the flood will subside. Meeting the needs of all these wild creatures is more than a full-time commitment, and Jerry often finds herself going without her usual meager four hours of sleep. Young mammals must be given their bottles of milk and egg yolk every two hours, and tiny birds, before they are fledged, should be fed as often as every 15 minutes, dawn to dusk. “When they’re a little older,” explains Jerry, “they can go for half an hour between feedings. I’ve found I just have time to go out and pick a pint of strawberries before it’s mealtime again.”
Most of the orphans respond quickly to Jerry’s care and are released as soon as they are old enough, usually in Baxter State Park (about 60 miles away), where their trust of humans is not so likely to be their undoing. In the continuous stream of animals, one masked raccoon or bright-eyed squirrel replaces another in the Elwells’ home and in their memories. “But not Cuddles,” Jerry says with a wistful smile. “No one has ever taken her place.”
Longtime followers of Jerry’s column, which originally ran in the Bangor Daily News, well remember Cuddles, the woodchuck Jerry raised from a tiny newborn but who, unlike her littermates, refused to revert to her wild instincts. For four years, she was an important part of the Elwell household, venturing into the outdoors to scamper at Jerry’s feet as she did her chores, but always returning to the safety of her indoor nest by the heating register. So popular and widely known did Cuddles become that on her demise, letters poured in from all over Maine and beyond. In 1972, when Jerry recorded the unusual life of this endearing creature in Cuddles: The True Story of a Befuddled Maine Woodchuck, she sold 1,500 copies to visitors within three weeks of publication, and her publisher filled orders for thousands more.
The current mascot of the Elwells’ home, who is on his way to winning the hearts of as many people as Cuddles did, is Fonzie, a 3-year-old buck deer who happily slurps any hand offered him. In fact, so friendly is he that when a man driving an out-of-state car spied him browsing on the hillside and excitedly stopped to take a picture of a “wild” deer, Fonzie trotted over and licked the man’s arm before he could focus. “He was so stunned, he forgot to take the picture,” Jerry says. “He just got into his car and drove off in a daze.”
Fonzie has not, however, endeared himself to the lady in whose swimming pool he has twice decided to cool off on hot summer afternoons, and Jerry admits that the neighbor has stopped speaking to her. To prevent the calamity from happening a third time, Fonzie no longer has the run of the property. There are no leash laws for deer, but Jerry has realized that not everyone enjoys having a tame deer in the front yard — or the backyard swimming pool.
Visitors frequently ask Jerry how she became so knowledgeable about the care of wild animals, and her answer is always the same: experience. She has no formal veterinary training, although, of course, she does consult a number of books she keeps on hand for reference. “But you know,” she points out, “those books aren’t always right. We’ve proven them wrong lots of times.”
She has, on occasion, sought the help of veterinarians in the area, as well as other animal-care experts, and all have endorsed her methods. A nearby falconer, for example, suggested it would be a waste of time to treat a red-tailed hawk whose wing tips and legs were curled up by a calcium deficiency. Undaunted, Jerry continued administering calcium and bone meal to the crippled bird, and Thunder, as he came to be called, soon recovered. The falconer was surprised and more than a little impressed.
But while Jerry has never felt lacking in the knowledge and understanding required to treat the animals, she and John have in recent years felt the effects of severely limited funds. Their weekly feed bill during the past winter averaged $93, and it has soared far higher with the influx of spring newborns. John, a retired mechanic who for 40 years ran an automobile-transmission garage in town, spends long hours in his woodworking shop turning out decorative butter churns and birdhouses which Jerry paints with flowers, chickadees, and other birds and sells to visitors. A few years ago, when the Elwells were looking after 23 nursing raccoons, they were forced to borrow $500 on a life-insurance policy to finance the daily menu of eight gallons of milk and two loaves of bread. Contributions from friends both in Maine and out of state have greatly helped keep them in the black, if barely. “Without two ladies in particular,” Jerry says, “we’d have never made it through last winter.” The costs of 100-pound bags of dog chow (moistened and fed to young birds) and deer feed continue to escalate, while the proceeds from the woodworking products have declined slightly because, Jerry thinks, “people just aren’t feeling as flush these days.”
This spring, Jerry and John seriously considered closing the door on the newborns they knew would be arriving in unprecedented numbers, but found they simply couldn’t say no. Instead, they are taking steps to incorporate their shelter as the Feathers ’N Fur Waystation, acquiring a nonprofit status they hope will attract tax-free contributions from many new supporters.
“I can’t imagine not looking after the animals,” Jerry says. “It’s a part of my life.” Looking back over the years, she explains. “When someone brings you that bony, stiff little body that’s so cold you wonder if it has any life left in it, and then four months later you watch it take off into the woods, all healed, it’s worth every bit of the trouble.” Her many fans concur. Just the other day, a round-eyed little boy looked up at Jerry and declared, “When I grow up, I’m going to be whatever you are.”
Jerry Elwell continued to rehabilitate wildlife at her home until her death, in 1996.
