Walt Cottrell has worked as a wildlife biologist, a domestic animal veterinarian, and since 2005 as a wildlife veterinarian in various locations around the Northeast. Although much of his focus in this role has been on guiding and informing state wildlife departments, he also works with the Kilham Bear Center in Lyme, New Hampshire, and he has taught a course on the ecology of wildlife disease at the University of Vermont. Walt has raised several litters of English setters, his preferred breed of hunting dogs, and for 20 years, he wrote a column on canine health. He and his wife live in Newbury, Vermont, where they maintain two apple orchards, foster wildlife habitat, including early successional forest, and incorporate land management practices benefiting pollinators and grassland nesting birds.
I grew up mostly in Maryland, which at the time was the second most densely populated state. But it didn’t seem like that to a youngster. We were always outside. And through Boy Scouting in particular, we really invested ourselves in the outdoors. We would camp, hike, and my father introduced us to hunting and fishing, and we did those things as often as we could. It’s become a lifelong comfort zone. When I was 12 my family took a New England vacation, and, though I couldn’t articulate it then, I was smitten with its character. I liked everything from the history to the topography to the villages, and I can honestly say I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else.
In 1967, after a year and a half of trying to be a college student, the University of Michigan and I agreed that I didn’t belong there. At that time, someone like me went one of two places: into the service, voluntarily or not, or to college someplace else. I enlisted in the Marine Corps. It wasn’t anything forced on my part. I had always been imbued with the idea of duty and allegiance and stepping up for things. I passed my 21st birthday in what the Marine Corps calls a fighting hole, and what rest of the world calls a fox hole, near the DMZ in Vietnam.
When I left the Marine Corps after 5 years, I thought I’d like to be a veterinarian. We’d always had dogs and cats, and I looked upon that lifestyle and that opportunity of service to a community as a positive thing, and I thought, “I’ll just go be a veterinarian.” Well, it wasn’t that simple, not by a long shot. Having been born in Michigan, I went back to Michigan and enrolled at Michigan State, where there is a veterinary school, and attempted twice, unsuccessfully, to be admitted.
When I left the University of Michigan, I had met with a guidance counselor, and he gave me a little pearl, which was, “You should think of something you can do all day long and then happily get up the next day and do it again.” That required a lot of introspection and testing, but I came up with veterinarian. But when I wasn’t successful in admission to veterinary school, that brought me to wildlife. So, I got a degree in wildlife, and then I was still intrigued to gain more detailed knowledge of wildlife and biology. That was also the time when the master’s degree was becoming the professional degree in the wildlife field, so I got a master’s degree in biological sciences.
My six years as a wildlife biologist took me from my first job in Maryland to Minnesota, where I worked for the Forest Service in the northern Boundary Waters. The Boundary Waters was its own world of great interest and opportunity to learn – and to have an impact on large swaths of habitat. But the Forest Service was not for me, and I learned that fairly quickly. So, I searched around for jobs, and was hired as a biologist in Vermont. At that time, there were only six people, including the chief, in the state’s Wildlife Department. I became the furbearer biologist and regional biologist in Springfield. But the embers of the fire to be a veterinarian had not yet died out.
So, after what would be four applications over the space of 11 years, I entered veterinary school at Cornell University at the tender age of 34 and graduated at 38. At that time, the ideal job was as a mixed animal veterinarian, working with large and small animals. That was consistent with my enjoyment and my attraction to wildlife biology. There wasn’t any one species I wanted to focus on. I certainly wanted to be inside, and outside, work with my hands as well as my head, so it fit. I took a job as a veterinarian in Bradford, and I was there for 6 years. Then I started my own practice and built my own hospital in Newbury, Vermont, and practiced there for 20-plus years.
By that time, our grandchildren were starting to be born in Maryland, so I sold the practice, and we moved to Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Game Commission was on the cusp of hiring their first wildlife veterinarian, so I applied for that job. In some ways, it was an opportunity to bring together my interests and experience, to come full circle. I became the wildlife veterinarian for the state of Pennsylvania, and held that job for 8 years. At that time, there were 23 wildlife veterinarians in the country. Now there are probably over 50 or 60. Some states have 5, but some places, like most of the New England states, don’t have one.
When my wife and I reached retirement age, we moved back to Vermont, and I became involved with the Northeast Wildlife Disease Cooperative, which has now sunsetted. Between 2013 and 2019, I was the wildlife veterinarian for all the states from Delaware to Maine and up to, but not including New York or Pennsylvania, which had their own wildlife veterinarians. The cooperative provided the state wildlife departments with information, education, and access to a veterinarian 24/7. We did a workshop every year for each state. There’s so much ignorance and misunderstanding about wildlife and wildlife disease, and I like to think we helped bring clarity to a lot of that. This was also the time when it was beginning to be more understood that the so-called transborder diseases between humans, domestic animals, and wildlife were important, and increasing.
A domestic animal veterinarian works with, at most, seven or eight species. But there are around 450 species of wildlife in just about any New England state. If you picture a triangle, the wildlife veterinarian concerns themselves with the interactions between the environment, the pathogen, and the host. The vectors and the interactions vary depending on the disease and the three elements. We take individual reports and put those into the context of – is this disease something that’s likely to influence more than this one animal? More than this species? We include the interface with domestic animals. We’ve got avian influenza as a classic example of how a wildlife veterinarian is involved with not just wildlife, but also domestic animals and humans.
The wildlife veterinarian’s emphasis is understanding population-level diseases. The wildlife veterinarian advises those who have the statutory responsibility for the management of North American wildlife. The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation essentially says that the feds take care of the migratory animals and birds, and the states are charged with using science and citizen input to make management decisions about all the ones that don’t migrate. That was the vision of Teddy Roosevelt and others in his circle at the time, including Gifford Pinchot, who was the first head of the Forest Service.
When I was practicing in Newbury, one of the game wardens in Vermont brought me a cub that had been hit by a car. One of its legs was gangrenous, so I amputated the leg, and it went to Ben at the Kilham Bear Center. Eventually the bear was released. He was known as Stumpy, and he lived for a period of years. That was my introduction to Ben Kilham and the work they do at the bear center to rehabilitate wild bears and release them back to the wild.
Having three legs is not an uncommon scenario in wildlife. They have remarkable healing powers. That’s something we don’t fully understand or have a way to mimic. I once did a necropsy in Pennsylvania on a deer. There was a little dimple on the skin of one side of the ribcage. When I opened up the chest, there was an arrow, from one side to the other, with its point stuck in a rib. The lungs could completely inflate, and the heart was unaffected, there were not even any adhesions. That arrow did not kill the deer – it was an incidental finding.
My work with the Kilham Bear Center is between the clinic environment and the wild environment. It’s one species, from whom we stand to learn a tremendous amount that would help us as humans. Bears have attributes which are largely mysteries to us, like what do they do with their waste over the seven months that they don’t eat or drink? How do they all give birth within a 2- to 3-week period? And how have they evolved to have milk that is so rich that a cub can grow from weighing less than a pound to weighing up to 10 pounds within weeks, without the mother eating? How do they avoid bed sores? How do they avoid degeneration from pressure on their muscles? If I had to devolve my career down into one species, this is a wonderful one to have it be.
Rarely, but occasionally, I might do something there like sew up a wound. But I frequently evaluate trauma, because humans and their activities are the reason those bears are over there. And then we have to safely immobilize them in the spring to get them back into a natural environment. They’re all anxious to be bears. And of course, Ben has the emphasis of behavior, which was the driver that really started the whole rehabilitation program. There are people who think you shouldn’t rehabilitate. There are people who wonder whether we are creating animals which will become nuisances, but data suggests exactly the opposite – they disappear.
I’ve been involved with English setters for half a century. I was raised with Irish setters. By the time I got out of the service, the hunting instinct had been bred out of them. English setters were still hunting dogs. They were still wonderful to look at and be around. They still had a brain between their ears.
Ryman setters are a type of English setter, and that’s what we have. They are bred for hunting. That’s what they should do. That’s their job. I do still hunt birds. We have two Ryman setters and are waiting impatiently for one of them to come into heat, and then we’ll have however many she produces. This would be the seventh litter we’ve raised, but most of those litters are from females of friends who take advantage of the fact that I’m a veterinarian and that I’m willing to do it. They bring their pregnant female to me, and my wife and I whelp the puppies, raise them to 8 or 10 weeks, and then they go to their new homes.
I have a heritage apple orchard, and in the spring, starting about now, that takes a lot of time. Pruning and mowing and reacting to insects. I never had a plan for what I was going to do with the apples. Bob Gray at 4 Corners Farm has a cider press, and he loves apples also. So he and I made this sweet cider, called Heritage Blend, and we sell it at 4 Corners. Last year was a poor apple year, but we made just under 40 gallons. I actually have two orchards. One of them is very small, and it’s a remnant orchard that was planted in 1947. The other one has 40 trees in it, and I started that one myself, just because I enjoy everything about apples.
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