Cindy Parker Driscoll, DVM, is busy these days. Very busy. The former contractual employee at DNR’s Cooperative Oxford Laboratory and veterinary medical officer with the National Marine Fisheries Service is now the Director of DNR’s Fish and Wildlife Health Program and its State Wildlife Veterinarian. Which means she’s the final word on any condition affecting Maryland’s fin, fur and feather populations. When in doubt, she’s your authority.

Cindy wasn’t raised on a farm, but like many kids who grow up to be vets, she did have her fair share of pets. However, as a high school senior in Salisbury, her guidance counselor discouraged her from pursuing a career as a veterinarian. She was told she should stick with a more conventional career in teaching or nursing. (Cindy, who had two siblings who were history teachers, had other ideas.)

Following graduation from Salisbury State University with a degree in health education, she married her high school sweetheart and supported him as he moved around the country in pursuit of advanced degrees in psychology. It was while they were living down in Mississippi that Cindy decided to consult another guidance counselor about getting into the field of veterinary sciences. This time she wasn’t deterred; the counselor, binder in hand, sat down and earmarked pages describing careers working with animals. She was on her way.

Realizing her chances of getting into a veterinary school would be better if she had some actual experience working with animals, Cindy took jobs at a dairy farm, an animal hospital and a large animal clinic, all the while gaining the confidence that would prove essential to her preparation. Still, it was not until she volunteered at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, where she worked for two years while doing pre-veterinary class work through the University of Maryland, that she became truly inspired.

Not only was Cindy the first volunteer the center’s endangered species branch had ever had, she was their first female employee as well. And her beginnings were humble, to say the least - she was first tasked with cleaning droppings out of quail pans. Unfazed, she rose through the ranks and became a biological technician, caring for captive endangered species such as bald eagles, Andean condors and whooping cranes. Eventually her work came to include rearing crane chicks, and she was responsible for producing the largest crop of chicks successfully raised at the center up to that time.

After graduating with a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine in Blacksburg, Cindy went to work at an internationally recognized wildlife/avian facility in Easton where she supervised its daily operations. When the facility entered into aquatic research she sought fish pathology training at nearby Oxford Lab, where she was later offered a contract to address fisheries health issues and dolphin strandings. The mid-Atlantic was hit hard by a bottlenose dolphin die-off in the late 1980s, and there had been no one at Oxford Lab with the expertise to examine them. While there, she developed and implemented DNR’s first Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Stranding Network Program, which is still in use today.

Cindy’s first experience in marine mammal strandings occurred in October 1990 when a 300-pound female bottlenose dolphin was found dead in small tributary in Tuckahoe State Park. Although common in the Choptank River during the spring and summer months, the dolphin obviously became disoriented, heading further and further upstream as the rest of her pod retreated back down the Bay toward the warmer ocean waters. The monstrous dolphin was so heavy it had to be sawed up into thirds to get it out of the water and back to the lab for examination.

Not long afterward she responded to her first whale stranding, a 65-foot fin whale that had been pushed into Baltimore Harbor on the bow of an ocean-going tanker ship and deposited in Curtis Bay. Not sure what to do with it, local authorities had taken the whale to a nearby landfill and it was there that the response team had to perform their examination. At the end of the day, Cindy and a few exhausted volunteers piled into her husband’s brand new Honda for the trip back to the Eastern Shore. The car would prove to serve the family well for 12 more years but never quite lose that smell of decomposing whale blubber.

Never one to shy away from new experiences, Cindy even took some time off to travel to Fairbanks, Alaska, to provide much-needed veterinary care for the sled dogs during the Yukon Quest, an international, long-distance sled dog race.

Today Cindy’s back at DNR, coordinating fish and wildlife health programs among her other vast responsibilities. She is involved in most of DNR’s monitoring programs and has worked closely with state and federal agencies to monitor West Nile Virus in wildlife. This past fall she worked with DNR deer biologists to implement Maryland’s first Chronic Wasting Disease sampling project. One of her primary career goals is to create a database to follow reports of suspicious illnesses occurring in wildlife populations (similar to those being developed in cities around the country to track outbreaks of human illness) that could be attributed to bioterrorism.

Good thing Cindy Driscoll didn’t take that high school guidance counselor seriously. Or maybe she was just plain stubborn. Either way, Maryland’s fish and wildlife resources are all the better for it.