WEATHERFORD — Like any other mother, Donna Robinson has pictures of her “babies” on her phone.

“Let me show you,” she said eagerly. “I’ve got lots of pictures of the kids.”

She scrolls through the photos — there’s one of a squirrel with milk on its mouth after a feeding. Oh, there’s a cute one of two tiny possums looking over her shoulder as she feeds another “baby.” Aww, there’s the group of four raccoons named after the Beatles: Ringo, Paul, George and John.

Ok. She’s not your “ordinary” mom.

Robinson has been rehabilitating wildlife for four years. It’s not something to take lightly, she notes.

She got a call a few months back from a woman who wanted to “trade in” a “mean raccoon” for a “nice raccoon,” Robinson recalls with a look of bemusement.

“She asked what she needed to do to get it to be a pet,” Robinson said.

Robinson told her that raccoons were not pets, but that the woman could work under Robinson’s license as a rehabilitator if she so chose.

It’s not actually all that shocking that Robinson received that call. She worked with 49 raccoons last “season” — a season usually starts in the spring when wildlife start having babies and ends about September when they start to slow down and bundle up for the winter. A couple of those raccoons were brought in as tamed pets. It’s her job as a volunteer to rehabilitate the wildlife so they can be integrated back into their natural environments.

To do so, she first must think of safety. The group with which she works, Texas Metro Wildlife Rehabilitators, provides some help with that. Following a couple of successful yard sales, the 3-year-old group has raised enough funds to start reimbursing rehabilitators expenses at 70 percent, Robinson said. There are shots to be given — vaccines, mainly, which can cost about $16 an animal — and the animals usually need to be de-wormed. When a new animal comes in, Robinson has to quarantine it for 10 days, so she has separate facilities for those animals.

Then, there is the food — that can be as little as $10 a season for squirrels, but up to a couple of hundred dollars a season for raccoons. And, the raccoons are potty-trained to make for easier cage clean-up, so she keeps litter boxes with cedar chips in their cages.

Though she started out with a small set-up in her kitchen, Robinson now has a cage for squirrels, a cage for skunks, a cage for raccoons and a cage further out on her property that is bigger and more isolated. The animals who are about to be released are sent to the isolated cage to wean them off human contact and prepare them for the great outdoors.

She recalls how, when she first started, it was new not only to her, but to her husband.

“I’ve turned him into an animal lover,” she said, adding that when he would “draw the line” at certain animals — possums, skunks — he just kept falling in love with the little babies so in need of help as much as she did.

Helping animals has always been something she wanted to do. She will sit in her office all night if she has to in order to help nurse a baby who needs to feed every three hours.

However, she needs a hip operation soon and will need more help from people who can work under her guidance and state permit.

The need has been especially dire in the past year, she said, likely due to the drought.

“Last year, we had possums coming out our ears,” she said.

She’s seen more malnourished and desperate animals seeking refuge in populated areas that they’ll usually avoid. When the animals are released, Robinson said, the rehabilitators set them free in a place that has a water source and food sources. This helps increase their likelihood of continued survival.

Robinson stresses that her group is not the one to call when people have wild animals trapped accidentally in their homes. Animal control or exterminators are the ones to call for those cases, she said. However, for people who find, say, a baby squirrel accidentally kicked out of the nest, the group can help. They are not veterinarians, she said, so any extreme injuries cannot be addressed by the group — they don’t set broken bones. But, they do nurse animals back to health and get them fattened up again in order to give them a fighting chance at life.