An Animal Attraction

SPRING IS THE BUSY SEASON FOR AN EDMONDS MAN WHOSE MISSION IS RESCUING CRITTERS FROM OWLS TO RACCOONS TO SQUIRRELS TO FAWNS - THIS, THAT AND THE OCCASIONAL OTTER. BOB JONES SPENDS HIS DAYS ANSWERING THE CALL OF THE INJURED WILD, DRIVING `THE ONLY ANIMAL AMBULANCE IN THE PUGET SOUND BASIN.'

If Crazy Bob Jones was a German shepherd, his ears would be standing straight up. A strained voice on his cell phone is telling him a baby otter needs assistance in Mountlake Terrace.

Jones pulls his rig off the road and turns around. That bird or raccoon stuck in the fireplace in Carnation will have to wait.

Jones drives "the only animal ambulance in the Puget Sound basin," and spring is his busy season.

In the past few days, he has brought barn owls, raccoons, ducks, geese, squirrels and fawns - all either injured or "in imminent danger" - to the Sarvey Regional Wildlife Center near Arlington, where volunteers patch them up, if possible, and release them into the wild.

What would a river otter be doing in Mountlake Terrace, nowhere near water?

Jones thinks it must be a weasel. He fires up a Marlboro and puts on a tooth-proof glove as he drives. Excited and tense, he snipes at the caller whose directions to the site are imprecise. Soon, she's yelling back.

But minutes later, all is forgiven.

Jones has found the place, and within seconds plucked from the ivy - well, he'll be damned! - a baby river otter, with sleek, brown fur and tiny, sharp teeth.

Jones deftly transfers the squirming creature from a net to a small, plastic kennel.

"He's so cute!" coo the two women who, on the way to lunch, saw the animal and started making calls for its rescue. It took six calls and 45 minutes, they say, before they found anyone who'd come.

"We called Mountlake Terrace police, but they said there was no animal-control officer available today," said Kristen Fey, rolling her eyes in disgust. Now Jones is her hero.

There are heartfelt thank-yous all around. Jones explains the little otter must have been separated from its mother and somehow made its way to the nature trail, where the women saw it running.

Jones can't wait to call his associates at the Sarvey Center and give them the news.

This makes two baby otters in only a week or so. Now "Mitch," as they've named the other otter, will have a friend. "What a kick!" he says. "Definitely a break from a bird in a box."

Jones has rescued thousands of downed birds, bedraggled bats, stranded raccoons, motherless fawns and the occasional opossum during the four years he has been manning the ambulance - actually a succession of donated vans.

The current van is burgundy, mounted with light bars and decorated with huge pictures of a bobcat, named Grandpa, and an eagle. Four months old, it has 37,000 miles on it.

No animal life is too small or meaningless for Jones to try to capture or the volunteers at Sarvey to nurse.

If a sparrow falls in Tukwila, Jones will drive from Arlington to fetch it.

His most high-profile rescue was in 1997, when a coyote got in an elevator at the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building in downtown Seattle.

How did a coyote get into an elevator in the Federal Building?

"He turned left at the door and turned right at the hallway," Jones says. Ba-da-bing!

Seriously, the coyote, which Jones says was probably from a den down by the waterfront, had no doubt stayed out hunting too long and was being chased by crows in the morning when it ran toward the Federal Building and activated the sensors of an automatic sliding door. It loped inside, causing much consternation. When it ran into an elevator, a building worker locked it inside.

Soon, Seattle Animal Control officers and Jones arrived. Jones said he decided he could get the coyote out by joining it in the elevator.

"I talked to him. I petted him. He lay down. I picked him up and brought him out."

After that, his associates gave him a baseball cap emblazoned with the words, "Crazy Bob." Two years later, it looks like it has never seen the inside of a washer. Jones never leaves home without it.

On-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Jones spends most of his time in the van, oblivious to its gamy smell and drifts of dog hair.

When he's not in the van, Jones, 55, lives in Edmonds with his mother and her "six to 10 Chihuahuas." The numbers have changed during the years, Jones said, and the little dogs stay mostly in his mother's bedroom, though once he found a Chihuahua and a baby opossum he was keeping overnight sleeping together in the dog's bed.

And then there's Billie. Billie rides with him day in and day out, and can easily find animals about whose whereabouts Jones hasn't a clue.

She's a bright, affectionate collie mix with sweet brown eyes and only one fault: seasonal shedding.

As a boy, Jones lived in Alaska, then moved with his parents to Washington. He's vague about what he lives on - Sarvey pays him no salary and he buys his own gas, he says. He says he was once an aircraft mechanic, private pilot and aeronautical researcher.

He has always hated working a job. "A job is where you've got to be there at 7 and you look forward to 5 as soon as you punch in," he says.

He has always preferred the company of animals.

"Animals are a lot more honest, a lot more straightforward, and a lot more dignified," he says.

He has a special fondness for raccoons (honestly aggressive), coyotes (like dogs) and opossums. "Opossums are not aesthetically pleasing, but they've got tremendous personalities," he says.

"Those are my favorites. But every time I get a call, it's a life in trouble."

In spring, Jones' life gets especially hectic. Babies are beginning to emerge from nests and dens, and all does not go well.

They fall from nests or their mothers are hit by cars, or other animals attack. Last week, Jones went to Kent in rush-hour traffic for a fuzzy, yellow duckling whose tiny leg had been broken by an 8-year-old boy.

Jones views his work as helping ease the suffering of animals, but it does something similar for the psyches of the humans who call him.

Last week, a nurse at the University of Washington Medical Center called about a goose with a mangled wing.

She'd already been refused help by local veterinarians and, she said, Seattle Animal Control seemed unenthused about a speedy response. "They said, `Yeah, maybe,' " Holly Snyder said.

But there was Jones, armed with a net and goose chow, luring the bird to shore, quickly snaring it, calming it down and putting it in a cage in the van. "I couldn't stand to see that poor thing suffer," Snyder said.

"I'll sleep better tonight, knowing he can be helped. Or she."

Some people ask why anyone should bother about a hurt goose, or worse, a crow or starling. Isn't that what nature intended?

"There is no nature anymore. Man has interfered so much," answers Kaye Baxter, director of the Sarvey Center and the woman Jones credits with three things: teaching him to understand animals, giving his life a purpose and turning him into "an adrenaline junkie."

But does Jones think he's maybe a little bit eccentric?

"Howard Hughes was eccentric because he was rich," Jones says. "I'm not. I'm just weird."

Nancy Montgomery's phone-message number is 425-745-7803. Her e-mail address is nmontgomery@seattletimes.com