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Toad of Toad Hall, careering about the countryside in his fast motor,
is a character endowed with more poetic justice than the author of Wind
in the Willows probably intended. For if toads could drive, picking off
pedestrians along the way, they’d be only getting their own back. Every
year, thousands of toads peacefully making their way to amorous rendezvous
are squashed under the wheels of speeding cars.

Les Stocker, Sue Stocker and their son Colin take seriously the nonhuman
casualties of our motorised way of life. For years they have nursed back
to health scores of frogs and toads in a makeshift hospital at the bottom
of their garden in Aylesbury. Now they’ve launched what purports to be Europe’s
first wildlife teaching hospital. With purpose-built accommodation for everything
from sparrows to badgers, it rivals the plushest private hospital for humans.
There’s even a 24-hour emergency service, as ‘most of the calls come in
after 11 pm as people drive home from the pub’.

The Stockers are pioneers of a new kind of conservation – ‘wildlife
rehabilitation’. They are intent on treating, rehabilitating and releasing
to the wild animals injured by the modern world.

‘People used to say we are interfering with nature, and that we should
just let the animals die,’ says Les Stocker. ‘But most casualties are not
the weak and elderly or the sick; they are usually individuals in their
prime, injured because of people – by cars, cats and power lines.’

Les Stocker estimates there are five million wildlife casualties in
Britain each year. ‘There is no way we can cope with that number. But the
more we can encourage people, the more that they can be looked after.’

‘We’re trying to redress the balance a bit,’ says Sue Stocker. ‘If we
can teach enough people and swap information, it becomes a conservation
project. The animals that are put back will begin to make a difference.’

They make no distinctions based on status or glamour. The hospital currently
houses a dozen recovering collared doves, a starling and several sparrows
along with hundreds of other patients, including hedgehogs, hares and herons.
Only rats are barred from the hospital, because of the danger that they
could pass on the potentially fatal disease of leptospirosis to the hospital
staff.

‘Britain’s animals are as important as any in the world,’ says Sue Stocker.
‘Take foxes. They are beautiful, intelligent animals, and fabulously clean
– the only animals that come in without any fleas. We should see them as
our magnificent top predator, on a par with the lions of the Serengeti and
the like. But people are brainwashed into thinking of them as vermin.’

Yet the Stockers are not driven by the old-fashioned zoo keepers’ desire
to tame and display wild creatures. They want their charges to go back to
the wild and survive there. So unlike human hospitals, the wildlife hospital
doesn’t just shove its recovered patients out the door. ‘We always try to
release the animals in the habitat that is right for them,’ says Les Stocker.

But what about the failures? Les Stocker rebels against a policy of
blanket euthanasia, and no creature brought to the trust is put down simply
because it can never live in the wild again. The hospital now houses a blind
pheasant who is learning the bounds of her outdoor aviary and several owls,
brain damaged from collisions with cars, who may never hunt naturally again.

The new hospital is remarkably well equipped. Hundreds of firms have
donated money, equipment or building material. Even Rolex gave £20
000 to establish a library, designating Les Stocker as their first British
‘Rolex laureate’. Why all the support?

Les Stocker is not a vet, nor even a biologist. An erstwhile accountant,
he now makes a living writing books about wildlife. His first, The Complete
Hedgehog, was a success; his latest is The Garden Bird. How has a rank amateur
gone so far?

His is a salutary example in these times of specialisation and professionalisation.
Stocker has amassed a wealth of knowledge that is not in any textbook largely
‘by trial and not too much error’, he says. The irony is that no one is
better placed than a layperson to take on the job. ‘Vets don’t know about
wildlife: it is not part of their training, and they have no facilities
for keeping any injured wild animal long enough for it to recover.’ The
same would be true of any professional zoologist.

Sue Stocker, growing up in Chelsea with no interest in the natural world,
is equally impressive. ‘The lesson I think is that everybody doesn’t know
everything. I tell people, use your own eyes and believe your own eyes when
you see it. Isn’t that what science is about? You don’t have to have gone
through a training system. Write it down and publish, publish, publish.’

Relations with the veterinary profession are now amicable, if, one suspects,
difficult in the past. A code of practice published by the trust makes the
demarcations fairly clear. Vets are paid to come in and do operations and
prescribe drugs, but Les Stocker has learnt how to anaesthetise a range
of animals and provide emergency treatment. Indeed, much of the growing
knowledge of how to treat injured wildlife comes from him. Few vets would
know, for instance, that the standard anaesthetic for birds ‘kills buzzards
stone dead’, or that the treatments that work for badgers will also suit
otters.

Stocker hopes to collect physiological data that will prove useful to
future generations of rehabilitation conservationists – information about
blood profiles, parasites and other diseases. ‘At the moment nobody knows
what’s normal,’ he says. There’s a job lot of analytical laboratory equipment
and a volunteer who’s a trained laboratory technician to get things going.

The danger in the Stockers’ approach is that it could feed the illusion
that we can ‘fix’ all the damage we cause, and so have no need to change
our ways. But this is not a trap that the Stockers themselves fall into.
On cats: ‘They do an enormous amount of damage, and it’s got right out of
control.’ On cars: ‘In all the hoo-ha about badger baiting everyone forgets
about cars, which do the real damage.’ But, says Les Stocker, the fact remains:
‘We’ve got to care for these things.’