All 38 lessons
Every lesson in the NY Wildlife Rehabilitator Exam course, free to read: 38 lessons across 15 units. Read any of them here, or open the course to answer the checks, track progress and quiz each unit.
🪪 Regulations & Licensing
What the license actually lets you do, what it does not, and the reporting that keeps it.
What wildlife rehabilitation is
Almost every judgment call later in this course traces back to one sentence: the goal is a released animal, not a rescued one…
Getting licensed in New York
The requirements are short, specific, and testable. They also tell you something about how the state thinks: character references…
License conditions and the law behind them
License conditions are the part people skim and then get cited for. They are also heavily represented on the exam, because they…
The realities: time, money and death
Many enthusiastic beginners burn out in the first year or two. The material below is the part of the Study Guide most likely to…
☎️ The Public & the Phone
Most of the job is a conversation. Answering well keeps animals wild and keeps you credible.
You are the ambassador
In many cases you are the first contact the public has with the professional wildlife community. What you say on the phone may be…
Education, exhibits and permits
The line between educating the public and exhibiting an animal is a permitting line, and crossing it puts your license at risk.
Who to call when a problem arises
Knowing where to get information is a skill in itself. The exam tests it because in the field it is the difference between a good…
🔎 Species ID & Natural History
If you do not know what it is, you cannot house it, feed it, or decide when to let it go.
Why identification comes first
Accurate identification is not trivia. It determines the caging, the formula, the adult diet, the release criteria, and which…
Birds: anatomy, feeding and defense
Bird anatomy shows up on the exam and, more importantly, in your hands. Knowing which end is dangerous and which structures exist…
Mammals: feeding groups and life histories
Weaning ages and natural history decide whether an animal in front of you is an orphan at all, and when it can go back out.
Reptiles and amphibians
Herps are protected, frequently misidentified, and carry a zoonosis you will meet again in the disease unit.
🧤 Restraint & Physical Exam
Intake, safe handling, and reading an animal's condition without making it worse.
Intake: the questions and the records
The history you take in the first two minutes shapes treatment, and the record you keep is a license condition.
Transport and handling
Most animals, particularly adults, can be severely stressed by transport and handling alone. How you move an animal is treatment…
Reading the animal: the physical exam
Any wild animal a person could catch is almost certainly compromised. The absence of an obvious wound is not evidence of health.
🚑 Triage & First Aid
Deciding what to treat first, and what can safely wait.
Stress is a clinical problem
Stress is the one complication you cause. It suppresses the immune system, stops animals eating, and turns treatable cases into…
Triage and the ABCs
In first aid it is always tempting to treat the most visible injury. The most visible injury is rarely the one that kills first.
Warmth, then fluids, then food
The order matters more than any single step. Feeding a cold or dehydrated animal can kill it.
🧮 Medical & Fluid Math
Dosages, conversions and fluid therapy. The calculations are on the exam and in every treatment.
Units and conversions
Every dosage problem starts with a unit conversion, and most errors happen there rather than in the arithmetic.
Drug dosage in three steps
You will do these calculations on the licensing exam, and doing them right is critical for the survival of your patients.
Assessing dehydration
Fluid therapy is one of the most useful things you can do, and it starts with an estimate you make by hand and eye.
Fluid therapy math
If your animal cannot eat or drink and you only replace the deficit, it falls further behind every single day. This is the…
Giving fluids under the skin
Subcutaneous injection is not difficult, but poor technique or lack of knowledge can kill your animal. Learn it hands-on before…
🏠 Housing & Husbandry
Caging, bedding, temperature, imprinting and the daily craft of keeping wild animals wild.
Designing a cage
There is no such thing as one cage that works for any animal. Cage design is where species knowledge turns into a physical…
Heat, water and daily care
The routine parts of husbandry are where animals are quietly lost: a heat source that cooks, a water dish that drowns, a dish…
Taming, imprinting and raising wild
A tame animal is a dead animal on a delay. This is the part of husbandry where doing less is doing more.
Species notes: mammals
Generic husbandry gets an animal through the week. Species-specific husbandry gets it released.
Species notes: birds and reptiles
Birds are where housing mistakes become permanent: a damaged flight feather or a case of bumblefoot ends a release.
🥣 Nutrition & Feeding
Getting the right food into the right animal, in the right way, at the right time.
Principles of captive diets
The most important thing about a diet is whether the animal will actually eat it. Everything else is downstream of that.
Formula feeding baby mammals
Formula errors are the most common way baby mammals die in rehabilitation, and nearly all of them are arithmetic or pacing errors.
Feeding baby birds
Passerines eat constantly and drown easily. The two facts that keep them alive are counterintuitive.
🧴 Cleanliness & Disinfection
The chemistry and the protocol that keep one sick animal from becoming a facility outbreak.
🦠 Diseases & Zoonoses
What you can catch, what they can catch, and how quarantine actually works.
Zoonoses and protecting yourself
Protection of the public's health requires a licensed rehabilitator to be fully aware of, and knowledgeable about, zoonotic…
Quarantine and the diseases you will see
Quarantine is the single practice that keeps one arrival from emptying your facility, and its length is not arbitrary.
🔬 Parasites & Fecal Analysis
Internal and external parasites, and why one negative fecal proves nothing.
🩹 Wounds & Medical Problems
Fractures, wounds and the line between supportive care and practicing veterinary medicine.
⚠️ Environmental Toxicology
Lead, pesticides, oil and sticky traps. Human chemistry arriving in an animal.
🕊️ Euthanasia & Non-Releasable Animals
The decision, the method, and what happens after.
🌲 Release
The point of the whole exercise, and the step most often rushed.