Call of the Wild

After a career spent prosecuting organized crime, Barbara Miller ’75 is spending her retirement rescuing wild animals.

By Shannon Eblen | Photos by Caroline Bittenbender

Barbara Miller ’75 poses with her favorite net.

Barbara Miller ’75 sits in a Panera Bread near her home in Allentown, Pennsylvania, going through voicemails and writing notes on a folded piece of paper as the egg sandwich in front of her grows cold.

The first message came in around midnight, from a man who is requesting help with an animal in his home he describes as looking like a wolf, but with a long nose, that can chew through concrete.

“That sounds like a possum, but possums can’t chew through concrete,” Miller muses. “A rat? Rats can chew through concrete.”

Barbara Miller ’75 on the phone in Panera

As a volunteer with Wildlife in Need Emergency Response of Pennsylvania, Miller is trained to work with all kinds of native species, but she’s not going to do anything about the wolf-rat without more information. She requests a photo and continues through her messages.

“My phone number is just what I want it to be, it’s a 24–7 emergency number,” she says.

She reviews calls about a trapped fawn (“Usually, fawns are not actually trapped. If they got in there, mommy put them in there, and mommy can get them out.”) and a fox with mange. Some of the reports have been languishing since last week. “There are hundreds of unclaimed calls,” she says. “There are just too few volunteers.”

Wildlife in Need has 64 volunteers for the entire state, many of whom have jobs and families. She’s lucky, Miller says, because she is retired with a pension, so she can answer more calls.

Miller puts more than 40,000 miles per year on her Toyota Rav4 hybrid stuffed with boxes, cages, and nets. She has two pigeons — Birdie and Vernie Sanders — her “colleagues” that act as bait to help her trap raptors stuck in big box stores and warehouses.

What I hated most in the world was a feeling of helplessness.

Barbara Miller ’75

In 2024, she rescued 1,462 animals. She knows this lifestyle isn’t sustainable. There are other things she would like to focus on, like learning Irish and visiting Ireland again. “Everything else in life is on hold, and I’m 72 years old,” she says.

Miller retired from the United States Department of Justice in 2006, having worked as a prosecutor since the Carter administration. With more time on her hands, she began volunteering for rescue organizations, eventually training to do capture and transport.

“What I hated most in the world was a feeling of helplessness,” she says.

A call comes in from a woman nearby who has garter snakes in the well outside her basement window. Miller packs up her sandwich and heads across town, where she climbs into the window well and catches a small snake. A few miles away, at the edge of a stream, she attempts to shake it out as it coils in the bottom of the net. “I’m dumping you towards freedom,” she says, “come on now.”

Her phone rings again. There is a raccoon outside a house in Prospect Park, south of Philadelphia, that appears to be having seizures. This is an emergency. When she gets there, she finds it curled forlornly under a tree where — quick as a flash — she scoops it into her net and lowers it into a plastic storage container. It’s probably dying, she says, so she wants to get it to AARK Wildlife Rehab, an hour north, as fast as possible.

Rescues don’t always have a happy ending. “Very quickly you learn to focus away from the suffering that has happened and be hyper-focused on every step you have to take next to get it relief or the care that may fix it,” she says.

When AARK Director Leah Stallings sees the raccoon, it is alert, so she recommends further evaluation — but AARK doesn’t have the cage space. It will have to continue on to Pocono Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education Center in Stroudsburg. “There are so few wildlife rehabilitators in the state; people have to drive hours to get help,” Stallings says.

“She’s the queen. She puts skunks in her car with her.”

Between 5,000 and 7,000 animals are brought to AARK each year, often by the people who find them. But volunteers like Miller are essential, Stallings says, because they are trained, which helps keep other people safe.

“She’s the queen,” Gary Croke, another Wildlife in Need volunteer, says about Miller as they cross paths at AARK. “She puts skunks in her car with her.”

Speaking of car passengers, the raccoon is getting restless. But there’s another call, about a hawk that appears injured. If Miller can catch it, she can take both animals to Pocono.

By the time Miller gets to the house off a winding road in Coopersburg, the hawk is on a low tree branch. She tries to sneak up on it, but it catches sight of her and swoops across the yard, with Miller in hot pursuit. She catches it at the edge of an embankment, less than 20 feet from the road, and bundles it in a sheet. She holds the hawk, pulling the sheet back from its face.

“Oh my gosh, you are beautiful,” Emma Noreika, who made the call, says to it. Noreika says her mom suggested calling Miller. “She said, ‘Yeah, she’s great, she captured James Taylor’s hawk.’”

Yes, that James Taylor. In June 2022, Miller got a call about a young kestrel trapped in a tractor trailer outside the PPL Center in Allentown. The bird was so concussed it couldn’t even see her as she netted it and placed it in a box. Miller handed the box down to a tall man before climbing out of the trailer. She asked the people gathered what the event was and was told it was a James Taylor concert — he had called everything to a halt until the bird was saved.

“I look at the guy who just took the box from me, and it’s James Taylor,” Miller says. Taylor asked her what was going to happen to the kestrel, and she assured him that in 20 minutes, it would be at a nearby rehab getting care. He then asked to hold her net as they posed for a photo he later posted to Instagram.

“He did offer me a ticket to the concert, and I said, ‘There is nothing more I would love,’” she recalls. But, she told him, “The fact of the matter is, my phone has been buzzing while I was in there, and I will have calls all night.”

Getting the animals the care they need is the culmination of what she does, Miller says, as she gets back into her car to drive the raccoon and hawk 40 miles to Pocono. The physical challenges, long drives, and unpredictable days are all a part of that.

“You just rock and roll with it; that’s what you do.”