Injured Animals Get Help from an App

Wildlife rehabbers armed with a new app dubbed RECOVER can snap a picture of an injured animal, geotag it, and notify the nearest appropriate rehabilitation center. Creator Jonathan Lustgarten came up with the idea when he was in vet school at the University of Pennsylvania. There he met members of a Delaware-based group called Tri-State Bird Rescue, some of whom had recently returned from a months-long deployment to the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “I wanted to create a program that could make future rescue efforts a little easier,” he says. Certified rehabbers can learn about getting RECOVER at recover.totalvet.net. Next June Lustgarten hopes to roll out a free public version of the app that will allow users to photograph and pinpoint wildlife on a world map.