As the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico reaches the 100-day mark, at least one group in the Valley is trying to improve the care for animals impacted by the spill.

Ed Clark, president of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, has been to the Gulf region twice recently. He hopes he can have an impact on the crisis playing out 1,000 miles away.

"The extent of this spill is beyond our imagination. It is beyond anything that we have seen. We have no real response mechanisms that honestly are adequate to deal with a disaster of this magnitude," says Clark.

He says, even months after the spill began, the facts about the true scope of the damage aren't getting out there.

"There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of animals, impacted by this oil," says Clark.

He updated a Website during his first trip to the Gulf. He later went to the Florida Keys to see how wildlife centers there were preparing for oil to reach their shores.

"The oil that's getting into the marshes and wetlands and into the ecosystem is going to have a detrimental effect for many years, perhaps even decades to come," says Clark.

He says a key thing people are looking at is understanding the vitals of healthy animals to see what impacts the oil may have beyond coating their skin.

"They are finding pelicans, as an example, quite severely sickened by the oil when babies have never actually been in the water at all. So, they've never come into direct contact with the oil, but they've been fed contaminated food," says Clark.

Clark says he and other people at the Wildlife Center are now focused on trying to get in touch with people in Washington through letters, phone calls and visits to try to improve the response to the spill.

He doesn't know if he'll go back to the Gulf, or if doing so would really make much of a difference.

"My skills are needed in Washington, where the decisions are being made about the response. Right now the response where wildlife is concerned is entirely inadequate," says Clark.

A chief concern Clark has is what will happen this fall when millions more birds are expected to migrate to the area impacted by the spill.