Bali Wildlife Rescue Center: community

A major part of what we do at all our project sites is help others learn about conservation and its importance. For a group of wildlife conservation students from Japan, a trip to our Bali Wildlife Rescue Center was a defining moment.

“The visit to the center in Tabanan was the turning point of the tour,” said Stefan Ottomanski, the group’s tour leader. “From that point they finally began to understand wildlife rehabilitation, and that it is not so much the objective but a tool or stepping stone in the larger scheme of things.”

Assisted by one of their teachers and three Indonesian volunteers, the students from the Tokyo College of the Environment spent two days helping us clean, repair and paint some of our large bird enclosures. “We were grateful for the chance to make a contribution, however small,” Mr Ottomanski said.

The highlight of their time at the rescue center was the insight they gained into FNPF’s work and the complexities of wildlife rehabilitation, he added.

The rescue center, one of seven such facilities in Indonesia, cares for, rehabilitates and returns endangered animals to the wild where possible. The birds living in the enclosures the students helped repair had come from Indonesia’s Moluccas islands.