Debbie Sykes

speaker

340 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Debbie Sykes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Animal Training Academy: Making Ripples · Shifting Perspectives in Wildlife Rehabilitation with Debbie Sykes [Episode 73] · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

learn well, right?

So I'd go in and just throw up a bunch of information at people about how cool these animals are and all the reasons that they're dying and how people need to change everything.

But thankfully, I had another incredible mentor, Dr. Amanda Healan, come into the picture.

And she really helped us dive into science communication.

So she showed us how to take these complex conservation challenges and turn them into simple, practical,

that empowered people instead of overwhelming them.

She called them CTAs or calls to action, which I love.

And conservation became so much more powerful when we had these simple CTAs like mow at the highest setting to prevent running over, you know, box turtles or bunnies or leave them alone, you know, simple things like that.

to help really shape human behaviors.

And we were seeing, we started to see a lot of successfully reunited or injuries being prevented before they happened, those kinds of behaviors, which was really exciting for us.

And people would call us and tell us those things.

You know, I mowed at the highest setting today and oh my gosh, I mowed over a nest of baby bunnies, but they were all okay because of that.

So thanks for sharing that information, that kind of stuff.

And that to me was just as rewarding as releasing a patient back into the wild.

So eventually we in 2020, Nashville Wildlife Conservation opened its own wildlife hospital and we had the opportunity to really focus on quality of care, particularly for reptiles, small mammals and songbirds.

Because we were smaller, we could spend time reviewing video, measuring welfare, evaluating behavior, and continually asking, what is this animal telling us?

Instead of assuming we already knew the answer when it came to caring for them.

So with this knowledge, I really wanted to help spread what I had learned.

So I was speaking at conferences like the National Wildlife Rehabilitation Association and teaching for the International Wildlife Rehab Council.

coming into, and even to this day, I keep coming into kind of this, something that really surprised me, which is that so many rehabilitators are and were struggling with the exact same questions I had been asking years earlier.

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