All Hart: How a Hampshire wildlife charity is trying to survive coronavirus

For Hart Wildlife Rescue, survival has relied almost solely on donations, but the full impact of the pandemic won’t be known for some time. What will that mean for the animals, asks Mark Drummon

Jupiter and Vesta, two malnourished fox cubs that were rescued, rehabilitated and released back into the wild by HART (Morgane Ristic)

The accommodation cubicles at Hart Wildlife Rescue in Hampshire house a motley crew. There are no pretty felines here, no handsome dogs. The weird and the ugly rule this roost, making strange noises as they poke their noses, snouts and beaks through the grilles of the cages. It’s like a miniaturised motel from a David Lynch film – a refuge for the downtrodden, the oddballs, the little loved.

The guests at the rescue centre have been through a lot. All are lucky to be here… most are lucky to be alive. They’ve been in scrapes, had run-ins, and many have been on the operating tables of the animal hospital at one time or another. And now they are going through the final stage of their stay. They are recuperating, regaining their strength, going through rehab before being released. And once released, they are on their own again. There are no kind families and warm, centrally heated houses waiting for these inmates. And there’ll be no more free meals. Hart is for wild ones, and back into the wild is where they’ll go.

It takes money to treat and feed the down-and-outs that rock up at the centre, to patch them up after whatever mishap they’ve been in and to set them on the road to recovery. And money is particularly hard to come by in the year of coronavirus. All across the country, registered charities are feeling the pinch, as their regular fundraising efforts have been stymied by the pandemic. And in many cases, the situation is dire.

Back in April, The Third Sector, a magazine and website that covers the management of the voluntary and non-profit sectors, observed that only a quarter of all British charities had cash reserves sufficient to see them through three months of lockdown. By June, The Guardian was warning of closures. “One in 10 UK charities are facing bankruptcy by the end of the year as they struggle to cope with a £10bn shortfall caused by soaring demand for their services and lost fundraising income due to the coronavirus pandemic,” wrote the paper’s social policy editor Patrick Butler, who based his findings on analysis by Pro Bono Economics, an independent charity. And soon others were warning of the potential for even more bankruptcies. “A quarter of charities won’t last more than a year without additional support,” said the Charities Aid Foundation, an organisation whose raison d’être is to provide support and assistance to the charitable sector. And at the end of September, a special report by The Independent noted that nearly 6,000 charitable organisations had closed in the year to June, a 19 per cent increase on the previous year.

So far though, Hart has managed to stay afloat, and continues to provide much-needed succour for the wildlife of north Hampshire. But it is struggling. It operates a charity shop that generates income by selling greetings cards and second hand books, toys and clothes. The shop, which brings in up to £6,000 per month, is classified as non-essential and has had to close for the lockdowns. Fundraisers, such as stalls at local fairs and dog shows, and talks for horticultural societies and natural history groups, have been cancelled. On top of that, the cost of PPE, a sine qua non for a wildlife welfare centre with an onsite animal hospital, has risen three-fold during the course of the year.

“We will not know the extent of the damage financially [for some time to come] but we have survived solely due to donations coming into the hospital from people who bring in patients, and we have been quite successful with using our social media to raise funds over this period,” Paul Reynolds, the animal hospital’s manager, tells me. “But of course, how many more lockdowns will there be going into next year now and beyond? Plenty of other wildlife rescue centres and sanctuaries will not make it through this difficult time.”

Pauk Reynolds, the animal hospital’s manager, with a prickly patient (Morgane Ristic)

Like many of the animals that end up at Hart, Reynolds is a bit of a character. He’s charismatic, widely travelled, sports a ZZ Top beard and sometimes dons an Indiana Jones fedora. He speaks passionately about animal welfare, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Originally from Birmingham, he has worked with primates in Cornwall, lions and cheetahs in Ethiopia, jaguars in Costa Rica, and with an array of Scottish fauna in North Ayrshire. And now he’s running the animal hospital on the outskirts of Alton, a market town near the Hampshire-Surrey border. And he is still only 32.

However, Reynolds has help. His longstanding partner Morgane Ristic, a Frenchwoman whom he met in Cornwall and lived with in Costa Rica and Scotland, has also moved to north Hampshire, and is currently a clinical assistant at Hart. There’s volunteer Phoebe McBurnie, a 19-year-old veterinary student at the nearby University of Surrey, who helps out whenever her studies allow. Alice Britton, another young volunteer with colourful hair and dreams of pursuing a career in wildlife welfare, also pitches in when she can. And then there’s Amy Evans, 29, a staff member who’s been with the recue centre for three years and has a background in working for kennels and catteries.

“My passion [for working with animals] has helped to get me through the pandemic as we continue to admit hundreds of patients each month,” says Evans, her face covered by a black cloth mask that matches her short jet-black hair. “Of course wildlife is still in need of help and we’re still very busy caring for the animals daily at the hospital. But Covid has made things a little more complicated. We’ve had to reduce volunteers while taking in more animals this year than any other, making our days much harder.” Admissions to the centre are at record levels for 2020, which Hart puts down to the fact that so many of us are working from home this year. People are punctuating their days with regular walks in the countryside, and consequently are coming across a higher number of injured animals. “We’ve also had to take more precautions,” adds Evans. “For example, we’re not allowing members of the public to enter the building, and are [only] admitting patients outside.” Evans works four days a week at the centre, raising the wild orphans of Hampshire by day before going home to take care of her own young child.

It is early December, the recent lockdown has just ended and the Hart charity shop is open again. Alison is browsing through a rack of donated clothes. A tall and slim lady with short grey hair, she visits once a month and has bought a lot of stuff over the years, often toys for her grandchildren. She purposefully patronises the shop because she appreciates the work the charity does. “I particularly like hedgehogs,” she says. “They certainly do a lot of them at HART,” I reply. She laughs from behind her face covering and nods. Hedgehogs appear to be the centre’s speciality. By the cash register there is a display bin filled with hedgehog soft toys. And this year, nearly 600 have found sanctuary at the animal hospital.

But Alison is a rare case, says Jane Rebut, the shop manager. “Most of our customers are just looking for a bargain. They aren’t here for Hart.” Rebut has been with the organisation since its inception in a small village near the town of Basingstoke, which is where Rebut still lives. She takes me on a tour of the premises and regales me with tales of life at a charity shop. Some of the stories are a little shocking, such as customers complaining about the prices of the merchandise and using the shop to fly tip. “We turned up one morning to find a stained and smelly mattress leaning against the front door,” she tells me. It could have cost £40 to dispose of, but the resourceful Rebut was able to offload it for free. Part of her work is sifting through piles of dirty old clothes, 70 per cent of which aren’t good enough to be sold in the shop. “Most of the stuff just gets recycled or binned,” she says. There’s frustration in her voice. “It’s not a short drive from your home in Basingstoke to Alton; why do you do it?” I ask. “For the animals,” she says. I hear these words a lot. And while the staff and volunteers are obviously the charity’s lifeblood – turning up day after day for little or no pay, manning the shop, cleaning and sterilising the animal hospital and attending to demanding patients – HART isn’t about the people, it’s all about the animals.

It’s the last week of March and the first of a national lockdown. And while life as we know it has ground to a halt for humankind, life goes on, precariously, for the wild animals around us. The sound of crying is coming from a hedgerow at the back of a sheltered housing complex for the elderly in Petersfield. Concerned pensioners make some calls, and Hart turns up to find two emaciated fox cubs cowering in the undergrowth. The malnourished siblings, dubbed Jupiter and Vesta, have been separated from their mother, and each weighs only half of what they should. Initially, the pair spends a couple of hours in an incubator on fluid therapy. Next they are fed diluted food in order to get their stomachs working again. Soon they move on to a diet of puppy food and milk, and before long the brother and sister are fighting over their meals. Within a few weeks the fox cubs are chowing down on dog food and venison, and are well on the way to recovery.

It’s early April, and Waffle is oblivious to the changed world around him. He has problems of his own: namely how to get back into the nest he’s just fallen out of. Instinctively, he seeks shelter under a bush, and waits. Waffle is a tawny owlet, and is desperately thin. He catches a lucky break: a kindly member of the public out for their once-a-day exercise finds him and takes him to a Basingstoke veterinary practice, which outsources him to Hart, which can provide the round-the-clock specialist care the young bird of prey needs at this age. Waffle enters a scruffy urchin and leaves in August a handsome owl.

Someone is using the lockdown to get some gardening done, and is cutting their hedge. But hidden in the hedge is Star’s home. And when his nest is destroyed, Star’s prospects look bleak. He is still inside an egg from which he now may never emerge. But his luck is about to change. Hart will go the extra mile for any animal, even for common-or-garden unhatched starlings, and Star’s egg ends up in an incubator at the animal hospital. After five days Star finally emerges into a strange, sanitised, whitewashed world. And this is when the work really begins. Star is a demanding patient. He requires feeding every 15 minutes from dawn to dusk. Star wants waxworms or bird-rearing formula, and his caregivers had better bring one of these, or else come armed with earplugs, because Star does not take kindly to being kept waiting for his meal. Star is a noisy child; later he sports a mohican and goes through a rebellious phase. Eventually, thankfully, he develops a more grown-up plumage and temperament and is released with 30 of his brethren.

It’s 8 June 2020, National Best Friends Day in the UK, and Spitfire is collapsed in a ditch, severely dehydrated. But Spitfire is about to get a new best friend. A kind woman spots the poorly hoglet on the outskirts of the RAF base in Odiham, pops him in her car and drives him down the B3349 towards Hart. Upon arrival, the 90-gram young hedgehog is hypothermic and needs to be warmed up and given fluids by syringe. Spitfire, who acquired his name because he was found on an air force base that housed Supermarine Spitfires during the Second World War, needs feeding day and night. Ristic takes him home with her every evening and brings him back every morning. As the Frenchwoman steadily becomes sleep deprived, the hedgehog adds 30 grams to his weight and has soon recovered enough of his strength to nip the hands of the kind folk at HART during his daily health checks. Once he reaches 450 grams he is returned to the spot at RAF Odiham whence he came. The woman who rescued him from the ditch lives nearby and puts out food for him every night, providing a safety net while Spitfire adjusts to being in the wild again.

It’s a warm, dry September evening; dusk approaches. At a secret location in the Hampshire countryside, Jupiter, Vesta and two other young foxes are about to be released back into the wild (the location of fox releases is a closely guarded secret, as some members of the public wish to do canids harm). The doors of a temporary enclosure, erected by Reynolds and Evans on the private property of a sympathetic landowner, are opened and the foxes slowly and calmly exit at their leisure. For the next two weeks, food is left out at this spot, so that the transition from living at Fox Hotel Hart (with room service provided free of charge) to being back in the wild is eased. Camera traps are positioned around the area, and for a time the quartet are photographed returning for food. Gradually, though, they stop coming back, preferring to dine elsewhere.

Hart was established in 1996 by June and Bob Gibbs at their home in Overton, a picturesque village eight miles from Basingstoke. It began when an RSPCA officer asked the couple to overwinter some hedgehogs, an operation that soon grew. In the years that followed, aviaries and enclosures were set up in the back garden, and volunteers enlisted to help care for an expanding legion of wounded wildlife. By 2010, the Hampshire Animal Rescue Team, as it was originally named, had outgrown the Gibbs family home, and needed a larger base. It moved to Medstead, just outside Alton, and became known as HART. It provides care for creatures that don’t qualify as cute, who aren’t cuddly, and whom some consider pests. Badgers, foxes, grass snakes, hedgehogs, wood mice, starlings, jays, pigeons, ferrets, and a brown long-eared bat have all been admitted to the animal hospital this year. And all received the care and attention they are unlikely to get elsewhere in the locality.

Hart now claims to be the largest wildlife rescue centre in Hampshire, when measured by the number of admissions. At any one time, the organisation can look after up to 300 animals. Over the course of the first national lockdown, it took in 429 animals. Most years, it admits over 3,000 animals; but it’s not enough. “There is a need for a larger hospital in Hampshire as there are more animals in need of rescue than the capacity that currently exists across the whole county and the surrounding counties,” says Reynolds, his enormous beard sticking out beneath his face covering. Before the coronavirus swept in and turned the world upside-down, the shelter had plans to expand and purchase land to build a bigger facility. That ambition remains, with fundraisers scheduled for next year, HART’s 25th anniversary. But the future remains uncertain.

During the most recent lockdown, there was a plaintive message on the Hart website. It read: “Due to the current Covid-19 pandemic we are in desperate need of your support! Our volunteers are no longer able to help so we are down to a skeleton staff, and with our shop closed and events cancelled our income is extremely limited.” On a shoestring budget and with a scaled-down team, the shelter is doing its best to keep providing care for the injured and ill animals that come its way. It’s holding on until the population gets vaccinated, holding on until restrictions can be lifted and revenue streams can again flow. The vulnerable wild ones of north Hampshire are as much in need of a Covid cure as we humans are.