Wildlife volunteers around the province put in 300,000 hours every year counting animals such as sheep, deer and elk, counting spawning salmon, or carrying out riparian restorations
As he clung riverside to a mossy rock on Remembrance Day weekend, the tendon that’s meant to attach his thigh muscles to his knee having ruptured, Nat Cicuto thought about a lot of things.
Was there more he could’ve and should’ve done while planning for the day’s hike, for instance, as pain seared through his body.
“I felt some mild shakes start and wiggled to move and create heat, but not too much because of the pain.”
There was no cell reception in the ravine and it took Cicuto seemingly forever to painfully inch his way up the steep bank.
When paramedics and fire rescue arrived about an hour after his fall, it took all six of them to retrieve Cicuto for delivery to Langley Memorial Hospital. Doctors told him he had completely torn his quadriceps, the large group of muscles of the front thigh, from his right knee.
He wasn’t out of the woods, figuratively speaking. Surgeons couldn’t operate right away because of swelling — his knee was the size of a watermelon — but nor could they wait too long or there was the likelihood that Cicuto would become lame for life.
“The longer you wait … if you can’t be connected after, like, two months, I would have been permanently disabled, for the rest of my life,” he said.
Surgery was eventually performed on Nov. 26, and Cicuto, who has been carrying out his project-management work from home, will return to the office on Jan. 27.
Cicuto is one of 41,000 members of the B.C. Wildlife Federation, and the Yorkson society one of more than 100 member clubs.
Together, wildlife volunteers around the province put in 300,000 hours every year counting animals such as sheep, deer and elk, counting spawning salmon, or carrying out riparian restorations, according to B.C. Wildlife Federation estimates.
“The number of volunteers (contributing) to the environmental world is huge,” Neil Fletcher said.
Fletcher is the wildlife federation’s director of conservation stewardship. He said environmental efforts are hugely underfunded in B.C., especially compared with states to the south of us.
“Volunteers do it for different reasons,” Fletcher said. “A lot of them just are super-passionate and recognize that if they don’t do it, it’s not going to get done, that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done and that it falls on the back of volunteers, and we’re grateful for the work they do.”
He shared a quick calculation he had just made: 300,000 annual volunteer hours, valued at $25 an hour?
“What does it look like? That’s $7.5 million a year in services, pretty incredible.”
Because the groups under its umbrella are so decentralized, the federation has no data on the overall number of accidents that occur yearly. The severity of Cicuto’s injury is probably an outlier or the federation would have heard of similar accidents.
The next biggest injury as far as severity Fletcher could think of was a wildlife staff member getting stuck in the mud and injuring their hip when they tried to pull themselves out. That injury took a week to heal.
“Fortunately, serious accidents are rare,” Fletcher said.
But the organization is well-aware that danger lurks everywhere in nature.
The wildlife federation has a massive safety manual, two inches thick, that’s grown over the years in an effort to protect all those enthusiastic volunteers in the field.
“You’ve probably heard the term ‘cumulative impacts’ before, but what about cumulative benefits?” Fletcher said. “We’ve got all these people doing really great things, putting that energy together and making a real difference.”
Cicuto turns 55 this year. It’s his 25th year of volunteering, and he’s spent a lifetime hunting and fishing. He knows his way around the wild.
On Nov. 9, he and his fellow volunteer began the day going through their checklist in the morning drizzle: Chest waders, solid walking boots, gloves, flash light, waterproof paper and pencil, two-foot machete, bear bangers, cellphones, snacks, water and waterproof clothes.
Cutting through the dense blackberry brambles along the banks of Yorkson Creek is always a nightmare, Cicuto said, but once creekside the way gets easier.
Because of the sharp pain, he knew instantly he was “totally screwed” and yet knowing everything that followed — the physical agony, the long hours of rehab, the weeks of immobility — Cicuto said he would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
“I hope decades from now our local streams and surrounding oceans are teeming with salmon, and our society then looks back upon the work we did now to get the ball rolling in that direction,” he said. “We can only work as hard as we can now, then hope others carry this torch forward.”