Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation in Lancaster County is the only wildlife rehabilitation facility in the state of Pennsylvania that specializes in squirrels, rabbits, and groundhogs, according to its founder Betsy Shank. And almost 40% of the wildlife rehabilitation facility’s rescues come from Lebanon County.
Shank first moved to Lebanon County — to Spring Hill Acres in Cornwall, in particular — with her family in the spring of 1980 as she was finishing first grade. She then moved to Mount Gretna and, after her parents’ divorce, moved to West Cornwall near Philhaven. After graduating from Cedar Crest High School in 1992, Shank moved to Lebanon city, where she lived for two years until marriage moved her to Lancaster County.
Career-wise, Shank was pursuing a degree in business management while working for various companies, including Armstrong and Hershey Foods. “Then, I went into accounting. And then, I found a baby squirrel (on April 16, 2010) and found my calling in life,” she said.
Pennsylvania requires wildlife rehabilitators to go through the process of obtaining a permit. While Shank weighed the pros and cons of becoming a permitted wildlife rehabilitator, she started a business that sold sewn bedding for small, caged animals.
This business venture allowed Shank to meet with wildlife rehabilitators at conferences as far north as Canada, south as Florida, and west as the Mississippi, hear their stories, and understand why they rehabilitate the animals they do. Through networking at these conferences, Shank said she also “created some lifelong friendships and mentors.”
“And then, when the pandemic came along, I decided to make my dream come true,” Shank said. “You know, it was a time of reflection, and it’s like, ‘You know what? What am I doing sitting here only doing it halfway? I’m going to go do this.'”
Using her skills as a seamstress and businesswoman, Shank made and sold face masks at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. She ended up making a profit.
“It wasn’t okay for me to profit off of COVID-19. I know many people did, but I wasn’t comfortable with it,” Shank said. “So, I took that profit and hired an attorney to open a nonprofit so that I could give back to my community in a long-term, meaningful way.”
Shank became a permitted wildlife rehabilitator, and Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation officially came to be on Sept. 1, 2020. The nonprofit introduced itself to the public on Jan. 1, 2021, and started to accept animals on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2021.
On Nov. 9, 2024, Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation opened its new commercial wildlife rehabilitation and education center in Lancaster County. The nonprofit was prompted to move because it was previously rehabilitating almost 300 animals per year out of Shank’s dining room.
Specifically, the nonprofit rehabilitated 271 animals in 2023 and 216 in 2024. They continued raising a handful of baby squirrels but stopped accepting animals in the last five months of last year to focus on renovating the new facility and moving in to be ready for spring baby season, which starts in February.
The new facility at 2100 Stone Mill Road, Lancaster, is almost 2,000 square feet, which is larger than Shank’s residence. It opens with a lobby with a small shopping area. The building also features a treatment room equipped with an X-ray machine and fluoroscope, rooms designated for the nonprofit’s four primary species: squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, and Virginia opossums, as well as a kitchen and laundry facilities.
Its state-of-the-art education room, which houses tables and chairs, children’s carpet squares, smart TVs and iPads, and a touch table, allows the nonprofit to offer on-site educational programming to local organizations, such as homeschool co-ops.
“People have asked me if I would consider opening a satellite office in Lebanon so they didn’t have to drive all the way down into Lancaster,” Shank said. “It is not out of the scope of possibility. It is not in my immediate plans.”
She added that the nonprofit is still settling into its new facility and the prospect of a satellite office would involve finding an appropriate space and obtaining permits from the state and federal governments, among other logistics.
Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation is 100% donation-driven and does not receive any funding from local, state, or federal government agencies. It receives donations from its community and generates revenue from its shopping area and educational programming.
The nonprofit is also 100% volunteer-run. Its board of directors, which currently has four open positions, does not do animal care. An additional 35 volunteers come to the facility on a day-to-day basis to care for the animals.
In addition to squirrels, rabbits, and groundhogs, Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation rehabilitates southern flying squirrels, chipmunks, moles, voles, shrews, mice, rats, Virginia opossums, and other common backyard prey animals.
“Opossums aren’t considered prey. They’re kind of opportunistic. But they’re not going to hunt my prey animals,” Shank said. “So, I will rehabilitate. … We need our opossums.”
When people come across a sick or injured animal, they often seek out the next steps online. Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation appears on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn and is registered with the Animal Help Now app, a national network connecting injured animals with local wildlife rehabilitators. Others find the nonprofit through word of mouth.
“Kids are our biggest advocates,” Shank said. The nonprofit teaches children through its educational programming for schools and school groups about what they should do if they or someone they know finds themselves in the same situation.
A key feature of the nonprofit’s educational programming for nurseries, daycares, preschools, grade schools, 4-H groups, colleges, churches, assisted living adult communities, and other groups is Ambassador Animals.
These are animals that the nonprofit rehabilitated and trained to be ambassadors after they were deemed unreleasable for a variety of reasons. These animals are assessed for their tolerance of humans and highly stimulating environments.
When a sick or injured animal is brought to Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation, the nonprofit places the animal in a treatment room.
“In treatment, we can figure out what’s going on,” Shank said. “We can get fluids started. We can put splints on broken bones. We get that animal to a point of being stable. Then, we’ll take them into the squirrel [or designated species] room.”
After quarantine, the nonprofit places these animals in a room designated to its species to lower the risk of contamination across species, including contamination from the animal to the nonprofit’s volunteers.
Then, there are two main types of releases. Some animals only need a few days of treatment at Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation before being returned to their original habitat to be released. For these cases, Shank does a hard release, which means she releases them and leaves.
“You want to make sure that they have ample food and water and they know what the dangers are of the area and they know where safety is,” Shank said. “And an adult is going to know that in its own territory. So, I’m going to take the adult back to the territory.”
Other animals, such as baby animals, are not quite as established or require more extensive treatment at Acorn Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation. For these situations, Shank does her version of a soft release, which means she makes them familiar with the habitat before releasing them and leaving.
The nonprofit places these animals in cages that are about six to eight feet tall and four to five feet wide and house tree branches and other elements of nature.
“They learn about daytime, nighttime, wind, rain, all the different smells, the sounds and the smells of their predators,” Shank said. “So, they are in a safe place. They cannot be attacked by their predators. But they’re going to be able to kind of experience them.”
This step in the process removes the animals a degree from the nonprofit’s volunteers. The volunteers visit them once per day to drop off food and ensure they have fresh water.
“By the time we get to this point, these animals, they don’t come running to us anymore,” Shank said. “They are fearful of us, and they all run into their boxes and hide.”
Shank said that one day, she places a piece of wood over the doors of their nest boxes. She then transports the boxes to outdoor areas, such as Fort Indiantown Gap or Lancaster County Central Park. When she finds the proper place, she climbs a tree, hangs the boxes, removes the pieces of wood, and then “get[s] down off that ladder very quickly,” she said.
Although Shank does not have the ability to do these kinds of releases on her own property due to her neighbors’ proximity, there are also people who have contacted the nonprofit and given them permission to soft-release animals on their properties due to having ample acreage.
“It’s not truly, truly a soft release, which is where the animal would have the ability to come back and forth and move themselves out of the cage,” Shank clarified. “Like one day, they just simply don’t come home anymore, and that means that they’re established out in the wild.”
Along the way, the stories of animals like the pregnant, paralyzed squirrel from Palmyra in 2024, affectionately known as “Momma,” whose legacy lives on with her biological daughter, two biological sons, and adopted son, have stolen the heart of the nonprofit’s volunteers and community members alike. And those four squirrels are set to be released this spring.
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