Rehab: A Birdy Love Story, in Pictures

Photographer Annie Marie Musselman was leaving a Seattle Supersonics game on a rainy fall night in 2003 when she saw a pigeon on the street that was barely able to walk. Musselman wanted to help the bird, but she didn't know what to do. So she called 911.

A sympathetic operator reached out to a rehabilitation center. Soon, a sleepy-sounding man from the center returned Musselman's call, and said he'd come pick up the bird. "I was like, whoa, that's pretty amazing—for a pigeon," she says. When the man arrived about an hour later, Musselman asked if the center needed volunteers; she could possibly work some hours between her freelance gigs taking photos for newspapers and magazines, she told him.

Within a week the 30-year-old was holding a bucket and a rag with instructions to go clean the center's bird room. "There was poop everywhere," she remembers. "I had to hold my breath." Still, she stuck with it, returning to the center most Thursdays to scrub cages that housed a revolving cast of injured beasts—owls, hawks, eagles, possums, raccoons, squirrels, cottontail rabbits, you name it. If there was room at the inn, the center accepted almost any animal.

As she mopped and bleached that first year, Musselman contemplated what she wanted to do with her life, a nagging question made more acute by the recent loss of her mother, who had died from Parkinson's disease at 71. "I was really struggling with the idea of death," she says. "Being around animals was helping me heal." Finally she decided to use her photography to inspire other people to care about wildlife. "I wanted to capture the soul of those creatures, so people could see how beautiful they are."

First she had to overcome some obstacles. Like getting the center workers to trust her. And she would have to bring in her own lamps, and take advantage of daylight streaming through windows, to escape the ugly green fluorescent glare ("not exactly ideal for photography").

For the next four years Musselman snapped photos between cage cleanings and animal feedings. But it wasn't until she met one unusual Common Raven that the idea for her book Finding Trust took hold. "You've got a new one back here," Musselman remembers her boss, Sue McGowan, calling out one morning. "You're going to really like her." The photographer didn't think much of it as she went about her duties, but then she heard a smoky, mannish voice scream, "Angel!" The new arrival had introduced herself. "It was really scary," Musselman says. "Sue almost peed her pants when she first heard it."

Angel, the victim of an abusive owner, suffered from severe leg injuries. If not for her speaking skills, the raven might have been euthanized on arrival. But the center tried to save her, and Musselman formed a magical bond. "I made my best pictures then," she says. "It was like she was my muse."When Angel's health declined drastically two years later, the center decided that the time had come. On the appointed day, the photographer remembers, Angel, who had disliked the medical room, jumped onto the operating table on her own. "I was so relieved," says Musselman, who saw it as a signal that her friend was ready to go.

When Musselman looks at her completed book now, she thinks of Angel’s influence. And after a seven-year stint as a wildlife rehab volunteer, Musselman went on to photograph orangutans in Borneo, a tree-planting project in Uganda, and wolves at a rescue center in her home state. She remains true to her goal: taking photographs that “get people to care more for animals—so we aren’t just eating them all the time, and moving into their territory, and misunderstanding them. I want people to love them more. To have empathy.”    

[gallery:227501|align:left|caption:GALLERY See Musselman's photos.]