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07/03/2018 08:00 AMMaybe the problem is a dog running loose through local lawns; maybe it’s a horse that got out of the fence; maybe it’s a snake in the grass (no, not as the old saying has it, a tricky person, but a real snake slithering through the grass).
Whatever the problem, in Essex, Chester and Deep River, there is one solution: Jae Wolf, the Animal Control Officer for the three towns.
“I’ve had all kinds of animals; dogs, horses, pigs, donkeys, goats,” he says. And an emergency can happen at any time. Jae is on duty for the three towns 24-hours a day, seven days a week.
“I respond to every call” with “no vacations,” he adds. The position demands more than a fondness for animals. The State of Connecticut requires that all animal control officers successfully complete an 80-hour training course.
Talk to the Animals
Now, about those snakes. On a recent visit, Jae was trying to place a rat snake with a local nature center after he captured it on an animal control call. At first, he had let the snake go in the woods on his own property in Deep River but the snake, a cold-blooded creature, liked the heat of the asphalt and crawled out on the road. Jae took him back to the woods; the snake returned to the road.
“If I had left it there, that snake was going to get killed,” he said. Instead, Jae put him in a carrier and is looking for an appropriate wildlife facility.
“This man is a treasure,” noted Caitlin Calder of Chester after Jae recently removed two six-foot rat snakes from her chicken coop. The reptiles were “waiting patiently for our eggs. I jumped a mile and ran screaming from the coop,” Calder recalled. “Jae is an animal lover and really cares about this area’s wildlife.”
Most calls, however, are not snakes, but dogs. “They get out accidently sometimes; people are not paying attention, and they are running in the neighbors’ lawns and some people are afraid of dogs,” he says.
In those situations, what Jae tries to do is talk with owners about what their responsibilities.
“I like to talk to people; I like meeting them,” he says. “Don’t get upset; educate people.”
As a dog owner himself, Jae has an American Bulldog named Chance.
“He’s not a pit bull but I am an advocate for pit bulls,” Jae says. “Some are trained to be mean. That is very wrong.” Chance took little time before confirming Jae’s description of gentle temperament, greeting a visitor with a canine snuggle, his paws on the visitor’s lap.
When Jae finds a dog running loose, with no tags to identify the owner, the animal goes to the pound, located on Dump Road in Essex, which serves as a shelter for the three towns.
“It’s a no-kill shelter,” Jae says. Working with local rescue agencies, he finds homes for the animals in his charge. He recalls one particularly challenging dog, “very hyper.” It took a year, but he was able to place the animal.
“There is a person for every dog,” he says.
In 2016, Jae got an anonymous tip about two maltreated and starving dogs. With a local state trooper, Jae removed the abused animals from the home, finally placing them in a local shelter, Animal House, for rehabilitation.
The two dogs were adopted by Suzy and Ed Burke of Deep River, and are now thriving. Suzy Burke already knew Jae. She first met him when she found an injured bird on the road and called him for help to save it.
“He is absolutely fabulous with animals, all kinds of animals,” Suzy says.
Wildlife rescue is something Jae has been doing for some 20 years, long before he became an Animal Control Officer. He recalls the time many years ago he got a call about an opossum struck by a car in Westbrook. Four babies were still alive, so Jae took them but wasn’t sure what to do next. He called Hope Douglas, who ran Wind Over Wings in Clinton, an eagle rescue facility (Douglas relocated to Maine in 2011.)
“She told me there was good news and bad news. I could keep them alive but I would have to keep them warm on my belly or on a hot water bottle all night. I didn’t have a hot water bottle so I kept them on my belly,” he recalls.
Art and Music in the Woods
From an introduction of saving baby opossums, Jae then became involved as an eagle handler with Douglas’s rescue program. He not only rescues eagles; he carves them. Jae did the signs for the Griswold Inn and for its gift shop, both of which feature carved eagles. In some cases, he has made his figures from roots he finds, using the curves and gnarls of the material as elements of the design.
“The eagle emerges from the knotted wood,” he explains, but enlarging his observation to cover a larger slice of life. “Every life has knots,” he says.
No one taught Jae how to carve; he just learned on his own. Not that his first carving was necessarily successfully. He tried to carve a fish from a piece of two-by-four wood.
“You know what it looked like when it was done?” he asks. “A piece of two by four.”
Now he also fashions intricately carved lids for boxes, many of them with eagle motifs. For a time he also carved bird feathers that could be worn on a string or chain around the neck out of cow bones. First, he gave the feathers as presents.
“They began to ask for more. I got into a little catalog, hawk feathers, eagle feathers,” he recalls. “I had a good run with that.”
Jae is also an accomplished self-taught guitarist. He composes his own music, using nature as his inspiration.
“I find music in the woods, in the trees,” he says. He also plays with a group, the Convertible Trio, that will be performing this summer both at Bill’s Seafood in Westbrook on Wednesday, July 25 and Thursday, Aug. 30 from 7 to 10 p.m., and at the Brushmill by the Waterfall in Chester on Sunday, July 8 from 4 to 7 p.m.
Jae does not only play for human audiences. He has played his guitar to calm eagles at Wind over Wings and also for the dogs in the animal shelters.
“People ask me how I do all the things I do,” he says. “I tell them they are all interconnected. One thing brings me to another.”
Jay would like more time for his music and his art, which in addition to carving includes sketching and painting. Summer, however, is a busy time for an animal control officer. And twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, means Jae is always ready.