Help 50 Title 1 Classrooms Meet Wildlife Up-Close!

Hi Friends!

With the weather (finally) cooling down here in North Carolina, we're already filling up our '2022-'2023 program calendar all the way into May of 2023! As we gear up for our busiest school year yet, I'm excited to share a few updates about our efforts to visit Title 1 schools within Wake, Durham and Orange counties.

Over the summer, we got some very exciting news! We received a $5000 grant from the Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's Outdoor Fund! With this fund plus your generation donations, we have already booked 14 programs with Title 1 schools across the Triangle for this school year. Through these 14 programs, we have the potential to reach up to 420 elementary students and 28 teachers and teacher assistants. With Giving Tuesday just around the corner, we hope to visit a total of 20 Title 1 schools within the '22-'23 school year. Will you help us reach our goal?

Aside from the excitement of already having a rapidly filling program calendar this year, we also recently adopted Pickles, the juvenille Virginia opossum. Pickles is our second program opossum we currently have in our care, but she is a bit different from Pepper, her counterpart. Pickles cannot be released back into the wild due to a severe injury to her shoulder blade leaving her gait unfit for long distances. She was deemed a good program ambassador by her rehabbers who spoke very highly of her mild temperment and curiosity. While Pickles is still getting used to her new home at Piedmont Wildlife Center, she has already started to strut her stuff in a few programs and has shown us that she is comfortable with program participants respectfully touching her! This is such a huge win for our programming because Pepper prefers to not be touched so students only get to observe her when we visit classrooms. With Pickles on our team, students will get the chance to learn some of our favorite opossum facts, but will also get to gently and respectfully touch an opossum! We can't wait to share this very unique opportunity with the Title 1 classrooms.

As always, thank you so much for all of your support. Without your support over the past year, we would not have been able to provide the much needed data in order to get the Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's Outdoor Fund grant. We literally couldn't have done it without you!

Links:

• Find out more about Piedmont Wildlife Center