SLO LIFE JunJul 2021

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| Q&A Born to be Wild In 1987, Pacific Wildlife Care was founded to deal with the oildrenched pelicans showing up on the beaches around SLO County following the Apex Houston oil spill. Fast-forward to today, the nonprofit organization now boasts over 200 volunteers, a small paid staff, a rehabilitation center, a full-time wildlife veterinarian, and for the first time in its history, an executive director, former Morro Bay City Councilwoman, CHRISTINE JOHNSON, who visited with us the other day. Here is some of what she had to say… We always start with this question, Christine: Where are you from? So I was born in Pennsylvania, on the western part of the state, but grew up on the eastern side, in Bloomsburg. My parents were teachers. I’ve got one brother, he’s younger, and in higher education now. We lived in a rural area and always had wildlife all around us. You learned quickly that you had to share your garden with the rabbits and deer. I had an aunt, actually a great aunt, Aunt Kay. She was an avid birder. We would spend a lot of time with her during the summer. At one point, I remember thinking to myself, “I’m just like my Aunt Kay, I love birds.” Did you go away to school? Yes, college was at Penn State, where I met my husband, Lee, and then I went on to get my master’s in student affairs and higher education. From there, I spent the first five years of my career in Philadelphia. I worked at Peirce College, which was originally established in 1865 to educate Civil War veterans. It’s very diverse and, I’d say, 80% of the students were first-generation college students. It was very empowering to be a part of that, I really loved it. But, my husband, through his job had an opportunity to transfer to the West Coast, to Long Beach, so we did it. That’s when I first got involved working for a nonprofit, the Girl Scout Council. How long were you there? Five years, then we had another opportunity through my husband’s work again, and we decided to do it. He was with an international shipping company, so I had to very much reinvent myself as the trailing spouse. We went briefly to Columbus, Ohio before bouncing around during the next ten years: Santiago, Chile; Korea; Northern New Jersey where our son was born, he’s now sixteen; Panama; Brazil; St. Louis; and then Morro Bay. Back in 1990, when Lee and I graduated from college, we took a trip along the California coast, just like every other tourist from the east does. We camped here for two days and just fell in love with the area, as so often happens with people. We never forgot about it. Okay, so how did you get involved with wildlife rehabilitation? So, first off, everybody here in Morro Bay has seagulls in their neighborhood. And, one day, we found one in our yard that had been injured and unable to fly. I didn’t know what to do, so I asked my neighbors and one of them said, “Oh, you should call these people.” And I did. There was a hotline, and they take these kinds of calls. Somebody came out right away, picked up the gull, rescued it. The whole experience was great, it was so good to know that there was somebody doing that. That was my introduction to Pacific Wildlife Care, or PWC. They’ve been operating for over thirty years, doing this great work in our community rescuing wildlife. The idea is to rehabilitate the animal and get it back out into the wild as soon as possible. Let’s talk about our local wildlife. You know, that’s a big reason why we ended up here on the Central Coast in the first place. We’re so abundant in wildlife here. There’s so much biodiversity here in this county. You just feel like you’re so much a part of the natural world every day, which is so much different than living in a city where you barely see any other living thing except for people. I’d say it’s similar in some ways to where I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, in terms of daily encounters with wildlife, and understanding, too, that our human interactions have an impact on those animals. And so, PWC does a great job in my opinion of helping us balance out important things that we do need to do for people, like more housing and better transportation. But there is sometimes a cost to that, to the natural world. So, I feel happy to be able to play a role in maintaining that balance by helping wild animals as much as we possibly can. SLO LIFE 26 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | JUN/JUL 2021
A Day at the Beach I’m the thinker. Yep ! Did he say “stinker” ? See Karen Helping you hear the things you love, since 1978 Call us today for your consultation 805 541-1790 www.KarenScottAudiology.com JUN/JUL 2021 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | 27
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SLO LIFE JunJul 2021

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