Blogs from the Field
A healthy future for wildlife, people, and planet.
March 02, 2026
by
Victoria Priester
The phone rings. There are 3,500 shorebirds suspected to be affected by the crude oil spill. This was a fictional but realistic scenario I faced on my first day at the 2025 Wildlife Disease Association Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada....
February 20, 2026
This past summer, I traveled to Australia to serve as a veterinary student extern at the Taronga Wildlife Hospital located in Taronga Zoo Sydney....
February 03, 2026
As a young girl, I was captivated by the majestic animals and wild landscapes I saw on television—so different from the concrete jungle that surrounded me. They seemed magical, distant, and almost unreachable from my urban home in Queens, New York....
January 26, 2026
I had the amazing opportunity to complete a veterinary externship at the Hawaiʻi Wildlife Center on the island of Hawaiʻi...
December 02, 2025
This past spring, I had the opportunity to travel to Gulfport, Mississippi, where I served as a veterinary student extern at the Mississippi Aquarium. It was my first time working at an aquarium, and I loved it....
November 24, 2025
Veterinary medicine offers a wide range of career paths and options, and one of the most interesting and often overlooked is that of a state wildlife veterinarian....
October 23, 2025
On the recommendation of Cornell’s Dr. Martin Gilbert, I reached out to Dr. Ashley Reeves, the research veterinarian for the East Foundation, a private nonprofit focused on land stewardship...
August 26, 2025
What does it mean to care for 1,376 wild animals over the course of a summer? This past summer, I found out firsthand as a hospital extern at WildCare...
June 05, 2025
As a young child, an eager zoo camper, and later a teen volunteer at the Maryland Zoo in my hometown of Baltimore, I was always drawn to the lemurs in the zoo’s collection...