WELL, what a year that was! At Roger’s Wildlife Rescue based in Woodingdean we had our busiest year ever, with the largest numbers of birds and animals needing our help brought to us.

With everyone in lockdown and, I suppose, more time to come across creatures in need, the doorbell never stopped ringing.

In order to keep ourselves safe from this evil disease we had to stop visitors from coming through our gate, and met each of you with a patient with the gate between us.

If we were not available we left carry boxes outside our gate for people to leave their birds in and this worked very well with only a handful of people breaking our rules and coming through into our garden.

During the year we handled well over 2,100 wild birds and animals and all the while our telephone rang continuously during the summer, with over 100 calls a day for weeks.

We were also able to return more wild birds and animals back to the wild where they belong.

Our releases comprised 844 birds, 40 hedgehogs, 34 wood mice, 12 foxes and other mammals from wild rabbits to badgers.

This part of our work is the most rewarding and particularly so when you are able to release birds like a cuckoo, little egret, kestrel, buzzard and all the really sick creatures that responded to our nursing and made it back to the wild.

Of course, much of our work would not be possible without the help from our wonderful volunteers and we never under-estimate the help they give us.

Also a big thank you to the public who bring injured wildlife to us and also for their generous donations which is such a help all year round.

Yes, 2020 was such a trial for us but what an amazing summer for weather.

We hope this year will see an end to this awful disease.

Roger, Fleur and Rebecca and our volunteers send you all our good wishes for good health in the coming year and let us all treat this planet of ours with more respect and give more thought to how we must co-exist with our wild creatures in our gardens and worldwide.

Happy New Year!

Roger Musselle

Roger’s Wildlife Rescue

Downs Valley Road,

Woodingdean, Brighton,