Area Family Rescues Animals Year-Round

SPRING VALLEY — November’s first significant snowstorm of the season resulted in a fairly unique distress call to Cory Carroll – not a stranded motorist or other person caught in the storm, instead it was an injured juvenile bald eagle in the woods near Spring Valley.

While rescuing eagles is not typically part of the routine, rescuing animals is.

The rural Austin resident has been at it since 2013 when he and his wife, Melissa Bassett-Carroll, formed The Rescue Connection, a nonprofit, all-volunteer, foster-based rescue. They started out rescuing dogs but have expanded to raptors and other wildlife.

Eagle showed odd behavior

The young eagle Carroll recently rescued was discovered Nov. 30 by Aaron Kolling in the woods behind his home west of Spring Valley. Kolling went out in the snowstorm to check on his deer camera when an eagle flew near him.

“This eagle kind of flew really low in front of me, and I thought, ‘Well, that was weird that it didn’t fly away,’” he said.

He started to leave, but then he thought about it some more and headed back to the eagle, which sort of limped away. That was when Kolling knew the eagle was definitely injured.

He didn’t know where to go from there, so he contacted the National Eagle Center in Wabasha first. The center doesn’t do rescues, so it referred him to the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, which said it would contact a volunteer in the area.

“Cory came with a blanket in a box, and I took him back there, and literally in 20 minutes, he had it caught,” said Kolling.

“I would say from the time I saw that eagle until it was in the box and en route out of my place was about 90 minutes. The speed of it was impressive because the roads weren’t the best that day.”

The process was a lot longer for Carroll because once he left Kolling’s place, he had to get the eagle to the Raptor Center in the Twin Cities on those snowy roads since he only rescues animals and isn’t involved in the rehabilitation. He said he spent about seven hours from receiving the call to arriving back home.

In an earlier rescue, Melissa Bassett-Carroll is pictured here with a juvenile eagle that took two weeks to retrieve. In those two weeks, it travelled eight miles and was finally found in a field with a broken wing. (Photo courtesy of The Rescue Connection)

Interest in helping dogs expands to wildlife

Carroll and his wife originally became involved with helping animals through a local humane society. One time, the facility had a call for an injured hawk at the time they were volunteering. Nobody there knew what to do.

“So, we started making some phone calls to try to find out what to do with this hawk, how we could get it help, and ended up finding the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, but they didn’t have anybody in the area to catch it and transport it,” said Carroll.

“We went out and caught it and took it up there and we got set up with them as an area capture and transport team.”

They had to go through a one-day course before getting regular calls for help. At the time, they were doing it just to help the humane society, but eventually, they decided to open their own rescue.

The Rescue Connection’s Allie Bassett with a juvenile red-tailed hawk found on the ground in a cow’s paddock, still moving but not flying away. Upon triage, nothing was found wrong with it, and its parents could be seen flying around, calling for it. It was placed back in a low tree 100 yards out, and the finders later reported seeing the parents caring for it again. (Photo courtesy of The Rescue Connection)

Then they started thinking about how they could help various animals besides raptors. They contacted the Minnesota Herpetological Society, which is a group that deals with snakes, reptiles and lizards; and the Wildlife Rehabilitation center in Roseville, which works with just about any type of animal.

Carroll’s work with dogs, which was their primary focus at the start, eventually gave way to mostly wild animal rescues.

Some of the area wildlife rehab facilities they work with include Aspyn Acres in Albert Lea; Gypsy and Cricket across the Iowa border from Emmons; Wildlife Rehabilitation and Release outside the Twin Cities and Foxfeather Zenkova in Mantorville.

The family responded to a Facebook post about an injured great horned owl. The owl was in a tree that Cory climbed using a ladder while his wife and daughter on the ground were able to catch it. From left, are Alexandra Bassett, Melissa Bassett-Carroll and Cory Carroll. (Photo courtesy of The Rescue Connection)

If those facilities can’t handle the rehabilitation, they will give Carroll referrals for other agencies. About the only animal no facility can help is an injured adult deer because they get so stressed, it often gives them a heart attack, said Carroll.

“If it’s an animal that can be helped, we will do our best to catch it and get it to somewhere that can help it,” he said.

Their rescue is a family affair as their daughter, Alexandra “Allie” Bassett, has been involved in the operation since she was young. When she turned 18, she took training to help with the rescues.

Now, all three of them are part of a group text so when a request comes in, whoever is available can respond.

Love of animals drives their efforts

Not all rescues go as smoothly as the recent one in Spring Valley. In Iowa, they rescued an adult bald eagle, which took five people to corral it. During the pursuit, the eagle took them back and forth across a creek several times in below-freezing temperatures, soaking their feet.

One of the more unusual rescues they performed was a screech owl that was stuck in a chimney. Cory went up on the roof to try to pass something down through the chimney while Melissa waited at the fireplace to catch it.

They took the owl to the Raptor Center, which, after rehabilitation, decided it would be best to release it in the same area because the owl is territorial, so the couple went back to the center two weeks later to retrieve the bird.

This eagle was called in by a jogger who spotted it on a Mower County farm near Sargeant. Melissa Bassett-Carroll and Allie Bassett rode as passengers on a tractor to reach the eagle but it hopped into the water to escape them. Using a very long branch to guide the eagle to the bank, they were able to grab him. He later tried to escape the box in the back of the Jeep while being transported for care. (Photo courtesy of The Rescue Connection)

Generally, the winters are a little slower for rescues, although they did rescue a goose near Silver Lake in Rochester about two weeks before the Spring Valley eagle rescue. That one went to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

Spring is their busiest time with “a lot of babies that are injured or abandoned and we end up getting them help,” he said.

Although they still work with dogs, which they enjoy since they are “animal lovers,” said Carroll, their priority is wildlife now since it is more uncommon and it is something they can do around their jobs as they aren’t involved in the actual rehabilitation.

This baby raccoon was found on the side of the road. The mother had been hit by a car. (Photo courtesy of The Rescue Connection)

“We enjoy being able to help the animals, especially animals that most people don’t even think about helping. In fact,” he said, “most often, if you call the DNR about an injured animal, they tell you to let nature take its course. We hate the thought of an animal out there suffering.”

Not all rescues have happy endings. The juvenile eagle from Spring Valley had to be euthanized because it was unable to recover from its injuries.

“Even in the cases where they end up getting euthanized, which is, unfortunately, too often, at least we know it’s no longer suffering,” said Carroll.