As the area’s only licensed wildlife rehabilitator, Jane Thomas cares each year for 600 to 800 battered, bloodied and needy animals that otherwise wouldn’t have a prayer.

Hawks that slam into 18-wheelers. Deer tangled in shredders. Pelicans shot by children given a gun for Christmas.

For the past 32 years, the 54-year-old Thomas has spent her days wrapping broken limbs, cleaning foul-smelling cages and chopping up meat and vegetables to feed a variety of animals — from bobcats and deer to baby rabbits and roadrunners.

She says she saves about 85 percent of the wildlife. Although she’s the go-to person for animal shelters in McLennan County and its surrounding counties, Thomas does not get paid.

“I always say I don’t want to do it anymore,” said Thomas, who lives in Robinson with her husband, Dennis. “But who else is going to do it?

“I get people all the time who come to me and say, ‘Oh, I just love animals’. Then, I tell them to clean one of the crates, and I never see them again.”

Karen Froehlich, director of the Waco Humane Society, said good Samaritans consistently bring wildlife to her organization at 2032 Circle Road.

“Oh, gosh, you name it, and they bring it in,” Froehlich said. “Wild rabbits, squirrels, cranes, bobcats. A lot of birds. Especially this time of year — people start mowing their lawns and mow over all sorts of critters.”

When a woman in Limestone County on Monday found an injured great horned owl in her driveway, she called the county’s game warden, who brought the bird to the society’s animal shelter.

The owl sat in the group’s conference room until Dennis Thomas picked it up and brought it home.

Wearing a pair of elbow-high gloves, Jane Thomas cradled the bird in her arms and examined his swollen and wounded talon.

In a shelter next to her house, permeated with pungent odors and deafening screeches of about a dozen birds of various species, Thomas cared for the owl with peroxide and a smiley-face bandage wrap.

She then placed it in one of her dozens of cages.

“Does that hurt, baby?” she said to the bird as she put it in an empty cage.

A self-proclaimed tomboy, Thomas downplays her volunteer work with animals. She shrugged her shoulders when asked why she has given so much of her life to wildlife.

Thomas grew up in rural Ohio as the youngest of five children. She said her family was so poor, she had no shoes. Her mother made her save her only pair for church.

Because the nearest children her age were miles away and her brothers and sisters were older, she befriended critters in her backyard.

Every time she would bring them home, her parents would yell at her.

With anger in her voice, she would say to her mother: “You wait. One day, I’m going to have every animal you can imagine. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

After dropping out of school and marrying at age 15, she completed her General Equivalency Diploma.

She and her two children moved 10 years later to Waco, where she married again and continued to take in injured wildlife.

Now a grandmother, Thomas worked at Target for a while and held various waitressing positions. But she felt most comfortable around animals.

Thomas was long dubbed “The Bird Lady of Live Oak” when she lived in Waco near the old Hillcrest Hospital.

“At one point. I had 250 to 300 birds,” she said. “Birds intrigue me because they look so soft and beautiful, but you can’t touch them.”

She is a licensed as a wildlife rehabilitator by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Thomas said she learned how to care for, doctor and feed animals in need from studying hundreds of library books.

Her passion hasn’t come without pain. A red-tailed hawk she was caring for reached its talons into her abdomen and wouldn’t let go. She ran into her house with the bird still clinging to her waist. Her husband had to pry it from her bleeding stomach.

Thomas also has been infected twice with hepatitis from cleaning out raccoons’ cages, she said.

She has known heartache, too. Her favorite stray was a baby beaver that she and her daughter had named Teddy, “because he looked just like a teddy bear,” she said.

The Thomases kept it in a small stock tank in the backyard. She cleaned the water daily, which increased her water bill by $25 a month. But it was worth it. Teddy was family.

After two years, Thomas said she found Teddy one morning drowned in a bucket of feces.

“When I found him, I fell to the ground like he was my own son,” said Thomas, apologizing for and surprised by her sudden tears. “I was just in hysterics.”

She admits she lets herself get attached to each animal that is brought to her.

Thomas and her husband also take in men and women recovering from alcohol and drug abuse, she said.

“To some extent, we’re all healers,” she said. “Everyone could do this stuff. They just don’t want to.”

With such a high success rate, Thomas has become accustomed to returning animals back to the wild.

Asked how she knows when the wildlife is ready to leave her, she said: “You just know. They kind of tell you.”

equinn@wacotrib.com

757-5748