LOCAL

Boyle column: Candler couple's love of 'possums, other critters,' leads to Hall of Fame

John Boyle
The Citizen-Times

In my book, if you love opossums, you have got to be an animal lover.

And Ed and Mary Weiss positively light up when they talk about the nocturnal marsupials that look like giant rats to some folks. 

Ed tells a story about taking care of baby possums that weighed just 17 grams, three grams below the standard threshold at which they can live. He just beams when talking about it, making a gesture of clutching one of the tiny critters to his heart.

"Oh, I just love them," he says, and you know it's absolutely true. "I love them, because they put their lives in my hands."

He explained that with baby opossums, you have to use a tiny tube and carefully measure their bodies to make sure the tube won’t perforate their stomachs during multiple feedings per day.

It's that kind of deep devotion to wildlife that resulted in a major accolade for the Candler couple: In January they were honored at a Raleigh dinner as the first inductees of the Wildlife Rehabilitators of North Carolina Inc. Hall of Fame.

Candler residents Ed and Mary Weiss were recently honored as the first inductees into the Wildlife Rehabilitators of North Carolina Hall of Fame. They've been married for 53 years and have rehabilitated hundreds of wild animals together.

"That is the cherry on top of all those years of effort," Ed said. "We were so taken over that the people we worked with for so long would make us the first inductees."

The couple richly deserve the award, said Linda Bergman-Althouse, a WRNC board member and the person who wrote the nominations for Ed and Mary.

"They were like the founding mother and father of the WRNC,"  Bergman-Althouse said. "They held classes for other people, in their home, and they not only held classes to teach these people, but they'd also fed them. And they had special holiday events for people. It was pretty amazing, just the care they had."

North Carolina has hundreds of wildlife rehabilitators, who have to receive certification and a license from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. WRNC, founded nearly two decades ago, is a separate, nonprofit entity formed to help support and educate its roughly 200 members.

Often, wildlife rehabilitators specialize in one species, but the Weisses were known for handling a wide variety of mammals, including deer, rabbits, squirrels, and the aforementioned opossums, a marsupial.

Mary's Hall of Fame induction plaque summarizes her talents nicely: "Mary’s selflessness, dedication, passion, tenacity and commitment remain evident, because after all these years, WRNC is thriving, and the number of wildlife rehabilitators and educational opportunities in the field have increased, which provides more assistance to wildlife in distress."

Ed Weiss was the first certified fawn rehabilitator in the state, and he became a specialist in opossums, teaching classes on how to keep them alive and even writing a Virginia opossums training manual for a rehabilitation network in Canada.

Opossum babies are high-maintenance animals, and the Weisses would get a lot of them, as they developed a reputation for success and caring. Ed says baby opossums were the most difficult animals they cared for, in part because they're the only ones you have to tube feed from birth.

"Because they hook on to their mother and stay," Mary added. "They don’t let loose."

Female opossums often have 23 babies but only have 13 teats to feed them, so the babies often can't make it. Also, they're notorious for getting hit by cars, and the babies are then left helpless.

"They usually find the mother and wouldn’t know where to look (for the babies)," Mary said. "We’d tell them to look in the pouch. They usually stay attached to the teat."

Wildlife rehabilitator Mary Weiss, along with her husband, Ed, have brought back to health and released about 90 deer over the years.

For the record, opossums come in two varieties, white and black. White opossums are fairly docile, but the black ones, called "black jacks" aren't so sweet.

"Even when they're babies they’ll bite the heck out of you," Mary said.

"They're destructive," Ed added, about the harshest thing he'll say about his beloved marsupials.

While they don’t rehabilitate mice, the Weisses made an exception about 10 years back for a little girl who came to their door and plaintively told them she’d found a mouse that was in bad shape.

“What're you going to do, tell her you you don’t do mice?” Ed said, adding that they had to devise a technique where they fed the mouse with milk droplets lowered into its mouth via a small thread. “It survived, and we told the little girl a few months later the mouse had survived.”

Through the years, they’ve handled hundreds of animals, and Mary raised prize-winning St. Bernards on the side, so they’re used to a busy household. But back in 2004, when two hurricanes hit the mountains within two weeks, the Weisses found themselves caring for 30 suddenly homeless squirrels.

“Oh, that was hectic,” Ed said. “We had pens all over the house.”

“He’d take a group, and I’d take a group,” Mary recalled. “He’d be warming milk while I’d be feeding another group.”

Mostly, their avocation has brought them endless love and satisfaction from boosting animals’ health and then watching as the critters venture out on their own. But at times it’s also brought heartache.

One year they took in a piebald baby deer, a white fawn that they raised into an adult and turned loose on the mountain. When young, the deer required intensive care, including braces on its rear legs they had to remove every day and clean.

A few days after releasing the grown deer, tragedy struck.

"It walked down the hill, and, well, somebody hit her," Ed said, still emotional at the thought. "She got all the way..."

"...To right here on the mountain," Mary said, finishing the thought.

"She got all the way up to where you just turned in, and she died," Ed added. "I guess we both cried on that one."

As a wildlife rehabilitator, Ed Weiss specialized in opossums, with some of the babies weighing as little as 17 grams.

They rehabilitated fawns for six years, utilizing a pen behind their house where they employed opaque black fencing so the animals wouldn't imprint on them and become unfit for life in the wild. On average, they'd turn loose about 15 deer a year "up the hill" on their 44-acre property atop a mountain off Pisgah View Highway.

Ed Weiss is a former postal worker who retired in 1992. Before the couple moved to Candler in 1983, they lived in Florida, where Mary worked in retail and as a licensed practical nurse, a skill that has frequently come in handy with tiny animals that need intravenous hydration or even an oxygen supplement.

Both were married previously, but they've been married to each other for 53 years. They had eight children (a boy died at 9 months of age, and another son died in Operation Desert Storm). When they moved to North Carolina, Mary "retired" from full-time work, opting to raise her family.

They now have 23 grandchildren and "7 or 8" great-grandchildren (it's hard to keep count, they said with a laugh).

"We started our own country," Mary joked.

While the Weisses are still licensed for rehabilitation, they've pretty much retired. Ed, an avid swimmer and former marathoner, is 77 now, and Mary is 80.

The physical demands of caring for vulnerable wild animals can take its toll.

"There's a lot of getting up at 2, 3 in the morning," Ed said.

Sometimes, the little critters are in really bad shape when they come, so the Weisses made contacts with local veterinarians for care. 

“Some of them would come in here with maggots,” Ed said. “You’d have to get a pair a tweezers and pick the maggots off. It was a dirty job sometimes.”

Another impediment to continuing on with large scale rehabilitation is the expense. In their heyday, the couple could easily spend $75 a month on milk alone, with each species requiring a different formula.

So now, they dote on their three cats — formerly feral felines who have made themselves at home at the Weiss house — and two Chihuahuas, mother and son team Kanga and Joey. While they miss their menagerie of creatures, the couple take comfort in knowing they've educated and supported a whole new generation of rehabilitators.

“I’d say it takes a special breed of people to do this, animal rehabilitation,” Ed said.

This is the opinion of John Boyle. Contact him at 828-232-5847 or jboyle@citizentimes.com.

Over the course of nearly two decades, Ed and Mary Weiss rehabilitated about 90 deer, often taking in injured or orphaned fawns.