Interview with Jamie Proctor

We spoke with Jamie about his role at Speaking of Wildlife, his various interests and passion for animals!

Hi Jamie, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today!

• I understand that you have found some work that you love – with animals! Can you tell us about your position at Speaking of Wildlife?

It is a wonderful combination of consistent and varied work: many tasks, all different, all needing to be done and redone.  It keeps me from getting bored or feeling like I’m rolling the same boulder up the same hill all day long. 

I prep food and prepare meals for each animal, which varies during the week. Once a week I scrub the turtle water filters – and the turtles. Other than that, I’ve also helped gather greenery and replace substrate for enclosures (adding sand or wood chips), ridden along on wildlife pickup calls, and lent a very clumsy hand with construction and repair work. 

Finally, I’ve done some minor editing work on our enclosure signs and written bimonthly articles on our animals. Basically, the one thing that I haven’t been doing is show work. I don’t handle the animals as much.

•  Which animals do you most enjoy working with?

I hate to sound self-absorbed, but I really like Maverick, our wolf, simply because I’m a mildly special person to him. Maverick is obsessed with playing tag up and down his enclosure fence, and after I spent a lot of my first summer doing that he has decided that I’m the “fun guy”.

I deeply appreciate our beavers. One of them had a tooth infection and was indoors all last winter, which taught me both of how soft and fuzzy they are and of how much of a mess they make. I had to clean her enclosure daily, and I started leaving a bread crumb trail of apple slices for her so she’d get out of the way of the mop bucket instead of trying to challenge it to a fight..

Atticus is our sandhill crane. Generally speaking he has the run of the building for the winter (except for the office) since as a migratory bird he can’t very well overwinter outside. He usually wanders around and supervises by attempting to poke the buttons off your jeans, the string off your hoodie, and the lining out of your rain boots. He is very much a “people person.”

Really, the thing that makes it difficult to name a small number of our animals as favourites is that all of them are noteworthy in their own way. We are a home for animals that cannot possibly be released, so all of them are either over-acclimatized to humans or have physical issues that would prevent them from survival in the wild, and that produces a wide variety of entertaining personalities to work with.

• As someone who works to provide support to animals requiring sanctuary, what do you think people need to know about sharing our environment with these species?

Frankly the advice needed would vary by species, but in general: people need to learn to appreciate them and ideally remove misconceptions. 

People should be aware of the effects that they have on their environment and how that in turn affects the animals in it.

• You’ve recently written a column focusing on sharing information about one of the animals at Speaking of Wildlife! What motivated you to write this article?

I’ve written about 6 of them and they’re bi-monthly.

My mother operates a local online publication called North Simcoe Life so I write up a bi-monthly article about one of our resident animals, covering the species, the individual animal in our centre and a small personal account of the relationship that I might have with it. I really do like telling people about the animals.

• Outside of work, what are your main interests and the types of activities  you like to do in your spare time for fun?

If I get restless, I go for runs, or walks if I’ve been working. I also have a couple other part-time jobs on the side (data entry and custodian shifts). Other than that I spend a lot of time reading web comics, watching videos, and a fair amount of gaming. Too much internet time, to be honest. 

• How do you balance working, finding time for your interests and taking care of your own needs and your apartment?

I may have three jobs but they’re all extremely part-time so that allows me to have a consistent amount of space in the week for other things. One thing I do struggle with is my weekly apartment clean of all things – what helps is to make myself do it while my laundry load is running, since I’ve already resigned myself to waiting around for half an hour.  

Thanks for sharing your experiences and perspective Jamie. Congratulations on all of your amazing accomplishments!

To learn more about Speaking of Wildlife, visit their website at: speakingofwildlife.ca.

To read Jamie’s recent article in North Simcoe Life click here.