Let me just say as an opener: Kathleen has given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a rattlesnake.
I first met Dr. Kathleen Ramsay the day the veterinarian I had been using couldn’t squeeze my dog in for a serious crisis. Desperate, I called Ramsay’s clinic, and she took him in immediately; his hind leg had to be removed in emergency surgery that day. While I was sitting in a kennel comforting my boy as he was being prepared for the operation, a couple came in to pick up their dog from the kennel next to mine. As Ramsay opened the barred door, the woman gasped, burst into tears, and cried, “She’s back! It’s our girl!”
I gleaned from their conversation that the dog had been shot in the face. Ramsay calmly explained the details of the procedure she had performed. She had actually developed the technique after reconstructing the face of a bear that had been hit in the head with a hatchet and then caught in a trap. I learned later that she had brought that bear into her clinic with the hatchet still embedded, splitting his skull right down the middle. It’s a long story—she has lots of them—but she named that bear Davy Crockett, and when his fur finally grew back, the hair along the slash line grew in pure white.
She told the couple that the sinuses are always the biggest challenge in facial trauma, but that their dog’s surgery had been a total success. To rebuild the structure, she had harvested bone from the dog’s floating rib to reform the sinuses, then fashioned ordinary plastic straws to function as nasal passages until everything healed enough for them to be removed. Not only had she saved this dog’s life, she had reconstructed her face so flawlessly that she looked exactly like her old self.
A miracle, I thought. And it’s true: Dr. Kathleen Ramsay is herself the miracle.
Kathleen describes her childhood this way: “I was born in Los Alamos, which at the time was run by the Atomic Energy Commission. My father was a chemist working on explosive detonation. So, it was a different kind of community. Almost all the adults had master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s, and there wasn’t a lot for kids to do. But I did have a horse. I’d disappear after school and come home at dark, and if Bobbins ever beat me home, Mom knew there was a problem.”
On Bobbins’ back, she explored the vast acres of ancient desert, both high up on the mesa where Los Alamos sits and deep into its surrounding canyons. Born with a keen curiosity and a scientific mind, she studied the proliferating wildlife and the land itself, getting to know and love the fragile ecosystem of the high desert.
At 18, she discovered her first tumor and was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis—a genetic disorder that, according to the Mayo Clinic, causes tumors to form on nerve tissue anywhere in the nervous system, including the brain, spinal cord, and nerves. She still battles the condition today. While she once underwent chemotherapy four times a year, this year, at age 62, she finally saw that routine reduced to two.
Years earlier, during her junior year at New Mexico Tech—then considered one of the best small science and engineering schools in North America—Kathleen and her roommate were discussing their futures. Neither could choose between becoming a veterinarian or a medical doctor, so they decided to apply to both types of schools, agreeing to pursue whichever path accepted them first. As fate would have it, both were accepted into Colorado State University’s Graduate College of Veterinary Medicine. They were officially on their way to becoming veterinarians.
It was during this training that a single event reshaped her life. Someone brought in a golden eagle caught in a trap—flapping, screaming, and in deep distress. Because there were no wildlife veterinary classes or specialized wildlife vets at the time, she realized in that moment that she would have to find a way to offer these birds a second chance.
Driven by this mission, Kathleen, several classmates, and a friend who would later work for the Albuquerque Zoo established an exotic animal club at Colorado State University. Founded in 1977 when they were just freshmen and sophomores, the club marked the early dawn of avian medicine. “So, how did we learn?” she asked, repeating the question with a smile. “We’re still learning.”
After graduating, she initially tried working for a conventional veterinary practice, but her employers grew unhappy when she began sneaking in at night to perform surgery on injured wildlife. Recognizing she needed her own space, Ramsay opened a clinic next door to her home in 1984, naming it the Cottonwood Veterinary Clinic.
The practice openly welcomed wild creatures, and it didn’t take long for her to receive calls from all over the state. It was exactly what she had envisioned—a sanctuary where injured raptors could find dedicated medical care and rehabilitation. However, with a steady influx of domestic cats and dogs alongside the wildlife, her small facility was quickly becoming stretched to its absolute limit.
To address this, she created the Northern New Mexico Raptor Rehabilitation and Education Center on the same land in 1986, beginning the work of repairing and rehabilitating these magnificent birds in earnest. While she addressed their immediate medical needs in the clinic’s operating room, she housed her wild patients for the duration of their recovery in her own backyard.
This outdoor sanctuary consisted mainly of specialized enclosures and flight cages. Flights are structures that give birds the physical space they need to rebuild muscle and stamina as they heal. They are built in varying lengths to accommodate different stages of recovery, starting with a short flight and progressing to longer structures as the birds grow stronger. Because they are highly expensive to construct, Ramsay does not currently have a flight cage large enough for a full-grown eagle. Instead, those birds must go either to the Santa Fe Raptor Center in El Rito or the Desert Willow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Carlsbad, which houses the largest round flight cage in New Mexico. The circular design allows birds to fly naturally without corners, mimicking the open sky. Tellingly, both centers are operated by individuals whom Ramsay personally mentored.
Although Ramsay’s primary interest was initially raptors, an increasing number of mammals began arriving at her doorstep. Her center later morphed into the Wildlife Center and eventually moved to the old Rio Arriba County Fairgrounds as her work expanded. When asked during an interview with National Geographic what prompted her to start treating other species, she replied, “Well, all these mammals kept showing up. What was I supposed to say—’Sorry, I only do birds, so now I have to kill you’?”
Eventually, her dream outgrew her original land. While keeping Cottonwood Veterinary Clinic in place, she and her husband bought seven acres five miles north of Española. Buying the land, putting in a septic system, and securing water was all they could manage financially at the time. For the first ten years, they lived in a trailer on the property, building what they needed only as they could afford it. From those humble beginnings, the property grew organically.
Today, three of those seven acres are dedicated entirely to wildlife rehabilitation. Two tall, locked security fences restrict access, and talking is strictly forbidden beyond them; Ramsay does not want the wild animals becoming accustomed to human voices. This is just one of many strict practices designed to keep the animals untamed. Their enclosures are carefully situated to provide a maximum sense of security. Unlike zoo animals, these patients are never on display and have plenty of places to hide from human sight.
Kathleen is virtually on call 24/7, year in and year out. Her emergency room is always open to wildlife. In the summer, when the outdoor enclosures are full to bursting, the overflow enters her home. It is not uncommon when visiting her and stepping through her front door for her to call out, “Don’t use the downstairs bathroom, I have a hawk in there”—or a bobcat, a raccoon, a fawn, a litter of foxes. They come to her broken, scared, and near death, and she takes them all in.
She is often called to go out across the desert and into the forests to wrangle the animals herself. She patches them up, rehabilitates them, fattens them up, and releases those that can survive back into the wild—often driving 100 miles or more to personally return them to their native habitats.
Her resourcefulness is legendary. She once sculpted a new beak for an eagle—as well as for songbirds and parakeets—using fiberglass epoxy resin. She came up with the idea because she regularly uses the same resin to mend split turtle shells, a common injury when they are struck by cars. Because a turtle’s shell takes a year to grow back, Kathleen successfully pioneered using resin to bridge the gap. She has put pins in raptors’ wings, set broken limbs, fattened malnourished frogs, and even rebuilt the tongue of a toad. The surprises and complications are endless, but she always seems to innovate a solution. Although roughly 45% of the animals are too severely damaged to save, she provides them a humane end, while successfully releasing the remaining 55%.
When there is no money for costly rehabilitation, she either finds a way to raise it or absorbs the cost herself. She works tirelessly to give every salvageable animal a second chance, all while navigating the constant burden of fundraising, which she notes is her biggest hurdle.
Life brought heavy personal challenges as well. At age 55, Kathleen’s husband, Lou, was diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), a progressively debilitating brain disorder, though Kathleen had recognized the symptoms years prior. By the time of his formal diagnosis, he was already seven years into the disease, which advanced to total incapacity by 2011. She managed his care at home for the first twelve months while simultaneously running her veterinary practice.
The strain forced her to step away from the Wildlife Center, which by then was strong enough to function without her. Today, it is known as the New Mexico Wildlife Center and continues to thrive. Eventually, they secured round-the-clock, in-home nursing care funded by Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Lou had worked, and the Department of Energy’s Crisis Management Funds, which sustained them for three years until he passed away. The laboratory maintains a fund for families in the area due to a high incidence of cancers and neurological illnesses; they do this not because a definitive link has been legally proven, but because the question remains open and unproven.
Ramsay’s dedication has often come at a high physical cost. In 2003, she broke her back while rescuing a bobcat cub. She had followed the cub up a cottonwood tree, but the thick branch she was standing on was rotted through the center. It gave way as she reached for the animal, and she fell 20 feet, shattering two vertebrae. “The paramedics were just scared to death of that bobcat,” Ramsay said, her face crinkling into a smile. Her son, who was only seven or eight at the time, darted the cat the next morning and brought it in safely while Kathleen had metal rods surgically placed in her spine.
It was during her long convalescence that she and several friends began debating the wider crisis of wounded wildlife, asking what structural changes were needed next. From those conversations, the core of a new foundation was conceived. On July 15, 2012, she co-founded the Land of Enchantment Wildlife Foundation (LEWF), which received its 501(c)(3) non-profit status from the IRS two years later.
LEWF’s mission is to support New Mexico’s wildlife by providing financial and logistical aid directly to the state’s rehabilitators. The foundation helps these operations build enclosures, secure transportation, fund medical treatments, purchase food, organize volunteers, and provide public wildlife education. There is no room for ego in any of this; Ramsay insists it has never been about her, but always about the animals. Rather than competing with other wildlife organizations, she created the foundation specifically to lift them up alongside her own efforts.
Her human-facing veterinary practice reflects that same selflessness. She consciously chose to open Cottonwood Veterinary Clinic in Española, New Mexico—a lower-income, historically troubled area—simply because there were no veterinary clinics there. It wasn’t where the money was, but it was where the need was greatest. She set her fees significantly lower than the going rates in more prosperous neighboring towns like Santa Fe and Taos.
Over the decades since 1984, she has gently educated a population that did not grow up viewing animals as companion pets, shepherding them into becoming deeply loving pet parents. If a client cannot afford a necessary procedure, she draws from the “Ginger Fund”—a subsidized account she sets money aside for such cases. Witnessing the atmosphere in her waiting room over the last ten years, the profound cultural change is undeniable.
The other quiet education taking place inside her clinic extends to the many interns she welcomes. From that same waiting room, I have watched tough-looking, tattooed young people transform into capable, nurturing, and deeply knowledgeable caregivers. Some have gone on to become veterinarians themselves, including one who now practices alongside Dr. Ramsay at Cottonwood. Every one of them is gaining a second chance at life because Kathleen Ramsay recognized their worth and, just as she does with the animals, became intent on proving it to them.
Ramsay’s wild patients represent an untamed world that humanity is rapidly running out of room for. When they are ready, she takes them deeper into the mountains and forests, back to places where she hopes the sweep of time might forget them and leave them in peace.
Winston Churchill famously said that “success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
And mercifully, Dr. Kathleen Ramsay does just that. She continues.
Love to you all,
Jeane
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