Wild Serve -
Urban Biodiversity
Conservation
"Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live." - Emperor Marcus Aurelius
adapt . enhance
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
FIRST "Urban Biodiversity Stewards"...
FIRST Internationally Certified Urban Environmental Education Experts...
FIRST Human-Wildlife Coexistence Specialists...
FIRST to dispatch Emergency Response...
FIRST to share a Pledge with our beneficiaries...
FIRST to advocate for and facilitate Joint Responsibility in funding...
...in SA
The UNIVERSAL Call.
The structure and behavior of an animal are tightly connected and can reveal a lot about its ecological role. Structure shapes what an animal can do, and behaviour shows how it chooses to use that ability. No matter how similar some animal's role or function may look it always has a niche. So what then is a human's role; OUR niche? In the animal kingdom, the most useful structures a human has are its brain and hands. Humans should be solving problems where there is an imbalance and other animals can't adjust it. This is the true definition of "dominion": ʿāvad ve-shāmar (cultivate and keep) or... stewardship.
The call WE answered.
Helpful people answer calls.
At the heart of Wild Serve’s founding was a shared value among its members: humility. That humility made us instinctively helpful - and in being helpful within the wildlife rehabilitation sector, we found ourselves constantly filling gaps. Over time, those "missing pieces" formed a picture none of us had fully seen before. And that picture looked like this:
Call 1:
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We can't rehabilitate an animal we can't get.
Response 1:
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We became a ready, capable, and skilled wildlife rescue service - more like firefighter paramedics than nurses.
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We respond to emergencies, reach animals others can’t, and stabilise them before care can even begin.
Call 2:
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High numbers of admissions aren't a point of pride - they reflect suffering.
Response 2:
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We work to reduce admissions by addressing the root causes.
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That means tackling artificial risks and preventing human-wildlife conflict through education, design, and advocacy. True human-wildlife coexistence reduces suffering and elevates care standards.
Call 3:
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There’s nowhere left to release urban-adapted wildlife safely, within their natural range.
Response 3:
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We prioritise habitat restoration and protection.
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We’re rebuilding and defending the very ecosystems that wildlife needs to survive post-rehabilitation.
No one else was doing this. So we helped - simple.
Wild Serve has grown into a comprehensive, integrated support service for wildlife rehabilitation - shifting the sector from a reactive, welfare-driven model into a proactive, conservation-centered cooperative. We’re not just treating wild animals. We’re reshaping the systems that failed them in the first place.
Our vision and history.
"Facilitate the Natural Adaptation of all Life to Environmental Change."
Our first eight members migrated from the busiest wildlife rehab centre in Africa at the time to a new vehicle in 2016 - A Wild Species Education and Rehabilitation Venture or WiSe for short. Our backgrounds, combined with our collective experiences, motivated us to explore what was only spoken about in Europe among progressive IUCN member scientists: urban-specific biodiversity conservation. The brave new frontier that puts humans IN ecosystems IN their dominated environments and begs the questions: what is our role here and, more broadly, if nature is everywhere then can we find our purpose therein? This contradicts the "bush conservation" outlook of us just being observers, tourists or benefiting solely economically. These questions suited a mixed group of analytical business people and young ecologists from the University of the Witwatersrand with a deep understanding of urban environmental education. It wasn't long before the institutions that mattered started to pay attention to the new pivot between vets, academics, the government, the informal welfare sector and the public.
After spending two years around our (literal) round table, reflecting on our sector's past shortcomings and weaving together old and new global concepts, we finally put pen to paper. Every effort to address past problems, uphold sound ecological principles, and integrate data-supported revelations was integrated into systems and formalised in policies. Beyond establishing a solid foundation, we had crafted a unique culture - one that revealed a void behind us, more pronounced than the transcendence of moving forward into unknown territory. Every affirmation made it clear that our work was coming to life and calling us—now, it was drawing us in. Our identity evolved, and our language changed. As we tested everything to failure, it just kept passing. Once the technical matters were resolved, we took a break to focus on creative work and developed our 'expression': Grey for the City, Chartreuse (yellow-green) to symbolize new growth. As a mascot, we identified with the hedgehog—navigating the urban landscape as a quiet guardian of nature, foraging tirelessly for vulnerable wildlife while remaining inconspicuous. The world often overlooked its presence (the same two years that confused our peers when we didn’t touch an animal). Much like the hedgehog’s spines (eight representing the founders), we raise protective barriers around our work, shielding conservation efforts from external demands to borrow our work without understanding how to integrate it. We carry the weight of the artificial environment, enduring the challenges of city life as we strive to make amends for our own species. Then, three years in, something surprised us: Validation - while working on prefixes for our records and documents numbering system the acronym "WiSe" came in to use to distinguish between internal and external forms. It encapsulated who and what we had become!
Our partners.
Wild Serve is proud to partner with organisations and individuals who share our commitment to urban wildlife conservation. Together, we work towards a common goal of protecting and preserving urban wildlife and promoting human-wildlife coexistence. These partnerships take the form of collaborations allowing us to bilaterally share expertise, resources and growth.
