Go on beautiful, get out of here,” Emmy Minor says to a brown pelican, its pouch heavy with a load of fresh fish. “Time to fly.”
It’s feeding time at the Sanctuary on Sapelo (SOS), Emmy and Al Minor’s bird rehabilitation center on the Georgia Coast: time to thaw 125 pounds of fish (today it’s thread herring), split the frozen rat carcasses (leftovers from a zoo), and dice up donated beef hearts.
Retirement is not supposed to be like this.
Emmy and an osprey.
Photo: Gail Krueger.
“I’ve got myself into something I can’t get out of,” Emmy says. There’s no end in sight to the birds that need her help, and so Emmy continues to do what she has been doing for 18 years: mending wings, healing gunshot wounds, and slipping antibiotics down unwilling avian throats.
Emmy’s adventures in bird rehabilitation began in 1983, when she and her husband Al turned a good part of their 10 acres of wooded land into a bird sanctuary along the banks of the Sapelo River in rural McIntosh County, the heart of coastal Georgia. McIntosh used to be one of... Read more
