Thunstrom a friend of animals since childhood

Liz Thunstrom started her career as a protector of animals at age five.

It was then, while living in Battle, a market-town in Sussex, England, that she watched carefully as her mother and grandmother nursed back to health a squirrel dragged in by the family cat.

By age 14, then living with her grandparents in New Westminster after her father, a doctor in the Royal Navy, was killed in action, she raised her first orphaned baby bird by feeding the sparrow a mixture of egg yolk and dog food.

As an only child, she was always out and about in nature exploring and longed to move to a farm where she could be surrounded by animals.

And while she never lived on a farm — she switched out of the agriculture program at UBC because animals were treated too much like "objects" — Thunstrom has certainly spent her life surrounded by the wildlife she has always held so dear.

She is perhaps best known for her work heading up the annual heron counts at Colony Farm Regional Park, but is also a longtime volunteer with the Wildlife Rescue Association of B.C. (WRA), which provides leadership in the care and rehabilitation of injured, orphaned and pollution-damaged wildlife.

She began there in 1980, after taking a robin hurt by a crow in her backyard to a nature house operated by the rescue association and finding that many volunteers offered their homes up for animal rehab. She decided to do the same, and designated a "special room" in her basement to care for all kinds of creatures, including raccoons, squirrels and possums.

A bachelor of science degree with a speciality in animal/plant physiology afforded her the know-how she needed and further social work training fostered her understanding of and ability to work with people. By 1984, she took a part-time position with the Wildlife Rescue Association, which had just begun to operate year-round, where she remained until retiring in 2000.

Two years before her retirement, however, she joined the Colony Farm Park Association, an organization working with Metro Vancouver to preserve the habitat that was often used by WRA as a release site for rehabilitated animals. Thunstrom became chair of the park association's wildlife committee and headed up its annual heron counting initiative, whereby 25 or so volunteers take turns visiting the park once a week for two hours, from October to April, to record how many herons are using the 262-hectare sanctuary.

The count information helps Metro Vancouver with future planning by ensuring areas heavily used by herons are kept free of people and their pets. Colony Farm is a very important winter habitat for herons, especially young ones whose fishing skills haven't developed yet so they feed on voles better exposed on the hard, winter ground. This year, there were 80 nests in a rookery there — one of the largest in B.C. — meaning 160 adult birds called the park home. (Over summer, the herons spread out much more as they feed on fish along the river.)

"It's very important to have a voice for the animals, the birds, the plants, because there's so much development," Thunstrom says.

Also a member and past board member of the Burke Mountain Naturalists, she is a regular participant in the annual Christmas Bird Count, which the stewardship group organizes locally, and is a volunteer master bird bander with the BC Purple Martin Stewardship and Recovery Program.

She is also co-president of the Wildlife Rehabilitators Network of B.C. (WRNBC), which shares education with others and fosters co-operation with provincial, federal and international agencies. With WRNBC, Thunstrom helped put together protocol for allowing bear cubs to be rehabilitated in the Lower Mainland, which meant cubs weren't left to fend for themselves if their mother was killed.

While retirement means life has slowed for Thunstrom — who is traveling more, taking Spanish lessons, and spending more time with her family — she also continues to volunteer with the WRA (she helped rehabilitate ducks frozen on Como Lake this past winter) and is an avid letter writer for issues and campaigns she believes in.

Her passion for and work towards protecting animals will never change. She didn't become an animal advocate, after all. She always was one.

lgerrits@tricitynews.com