This paper looks at citizen rescue and rehabilitation practices for “ordinary” urban wildlife in Montreal: squirrels, skunks, groundhogs, hares, raccoons, foxes, birds and more. While most city dwellers believe that these animals have to fend for themselves, some people - mostly women - consider that humans have a responsibility towards them and seek to improve their living conditions, especially when confronted with animal distress. These citizen wildlife rescue and rehabilitation practices emerge from an institutional vacuum in urban animal management. When they report animals in distress, citizens are confronted with the inaction of the authorities: municipal administrations are disengaged, the shelters mandated for urban animal management do not take in wild animals, and the rare specialized resources are saturated. The provincial Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks (MFFP), the Quebec authority with jurisdiction over wildlife, adopts a non-interventionist stance and recommends “letting nature take its course”, even when the distress is caused by human activity. Faced with these insufficiencies and in the absence of an alternative, these citizens choose to take on the rescue and rehabilitation of the animals themselves. The feeling of responsibility and the weight of the burden can, however, become heavy to bear. In the absence of institutional support and with limited resources, they nonetheless pursue their actions, motivated by animal welfare and empathy. The emergence of this “DIY wildlife conservation” raises ethical, political and practical questions. Drawn from qualitative doctoral research on the phenomenon of interspecies care in Montreal, the empirical findings presented are based on the analysis of semi-directed interviews with people involved in animal rescue and rehabilitation, either autonomously or within non-profit organizations. Analyzed through an ecofeminist theoretical framework, these “DIY wildlife conservation practices” reveal gendered and speciesist power relations.