Is there a point when a gull’s life loses importance?

Posted on September 8, 2019September 8, 2019 by Monte Merrick

A young Western Gull (Larus occidentalis) chick, fallen from the platform above the bay where her parents had built their nest, stands on the rocky shore 70 feet from home. She walks along the edge of the water and rocks, stepping through a copious amount of dog shit, visible to the customers eating on the nearby seafood restaurant’s deck. Her parents circle above her calling a threat to any who would harm their baby, but their threats don’t carry much weight. This chick is in a tight spot. Like so many of us.

There is simply no way to avoid the fact that nestling gulls are absurdly adorable.

Nearly every day we have the opportunity to wonder if our actions are in step with our times. Easily, we can imagine that our efforts don’t strike at the heart of the matter. Children are in cages on our borders. Am I making a difference? I’m busy, but am I busy with the right things? Racist crimes are rising. For the first time in recorded history, there is no sea ice touching land in all of Alaska. The last thing I did today at work was give milk replacer to six tiny orphaned opossums, a late-season litter. None of them weigh more than 60 grams.

I think a lot of us must ask that question of ourselves daily. Why do we rescue and treat wild animals in the first place? It’s an easy answer: we see the need and the need must be filled. Yet, the world is burning. The temperature is rising. A whole living world is in jeopardy while psychotic gunmen are let loose in the commons. There’s no shortage of unfilled and unfillable need.

And yet, there is the gull chick at the water’s edge.

Among the hardest places to work, where things can go the most wrong, where simple rescues are made into treacherous crossings, are artificial breakwaters, made of granite rocks, tossed into the surf so that people can make more land. They call it riprap, as if these rocks were carved by the hand of Mother Earth herself and set just so in each mountain stream and along each industrial port so that our poets might have something to ponder. No. They’re ugly. And slimy. And each rock is almost stable. And if you slip and fall, you are going to get hurt. The only question is if you’ll still be able to walk on your twisted ankle. And if you successfully capture the gull chick, you go back across the rocks holding an injured and terrified patient as well.

Her wariness intact, the growing gull is losing her baby feathers.

I carried a long-handled net and worked my way along the edge of the riprap. At a certain point I had to climb up, or the chick would see me. I set the net down and slid it as quietly as I could up the rocks, climbing behind it until I was at the top of the rock. Staying low, I spotted the gull chick about fifteen feet below me.

She was standing on a small rock. She was looking this way and then looking that way. I was still considering the idea that her parents had this situation under control, that I could leave her there at the water’s edge and her parents would feed her, defend her and teach her to fly.

Her feathers, just a couple weeks old, were starting to break. Her stance seemed a little unsteady. In the binoculars I could see that her eyes were a little sunken, that she was dehydrated. And the obvious sign of feces from dogs, feral cats, no doubt skunks, foxes and raccoons too… This chick didn’t stand a chance. I decided to capture her.

Proving she can evade a net while being captured for a routine exam by one of our invaluable interns.

She was fifteen feet away and the net has a ten foot handle. I just needed to scooch a little closer. I just needed to get the net in position without the chick seeing me do it. I’ve never known a gull who couldn’t calculate the reach of a net in a moment’s glance.

Fortunately a paddle boarder with a boom box and a dog on board paddled by, giving me plenty of distracting cover to make the last few feet down the rock and push the basket of the net into a good position to quickly capture the gull.

The chick’s parents were in an uproar circling and crying out their frustration, wrath and fear. The boombox was playing the Dead’s Franklin Tower and I swung the net, surprising the chick and swooping her up. I folded the net’s opening over so that she couldn’t escape and ginger-quickly made my way across the piled rock as a lone adult pelican glided across the surface of the bay, his wingtips nearly touching his reflection’s. (It’s been a long time since we’ve treated a Brown Pelican.)

A small blood sample yields a lot of information about the general health of our patient

Struggling to keep knowledge alive in the face of calamity isn’t some new fad. We can’t turn the corner without stepping over the bones of those who were forced by conditions to put some small good thing, a shared language, an important heirloom, a lesson that was learned at great cost, into some kind of basket in hopes it would make it past a barrier – whether death or disaster. We make time capsules containing the best of what we have hoping it will be of use to our grandchildren, to help them know how things are, how they were, and what to not do, at least.

Who can’t sense the danger of an imminent break in continuity? When California Brown Pelicans were driven nearly to extinction in the late 1960s, their population had plummeted from millions when gold was found at Sutter’s place, to 5000 pairs in 120 years later. Think of the storehouse of pelican knowledge that died with those millions of pieces of the great pelican all. And think of the impoverishment of the babies who will soon grotesquely outnumber the grandparents. A pelican might live 40 years! Think of how long it would take for a population to regain its balance with the right number of 40 year olds, of thirty year olds, of teens, of chicks.

Pelicans had been thriving in their current form for over thirty million years. Ice ages had come and gone in that time and still millions of pelicans soared up and down the ever changing coast of this continent, but 120 years of industrial civilization was nearly the end of the species.

Terrible ends of eras that had lasted so long they’d seemed immutable are part and parcel of our daily life.

If we want some piece of our amassed knowledge and skills to make it to our descendants, in other words, if we care about the future, then a contingency is needed that sees our work safely across the abyss of disaster and discontinuity. In times such as ours, we are trying to educate our children, rescue all who we can, preserve hard won knowledge, and leave what we have for those who follow us and who will be aided by our work.

The wild world awaits once you step out of the box….

Freedom freshly restored, the young gull surveys her suddenly widened surroundings.

Getting the gull back in her nest would have been the best outcome possible. It would have been easy enough to boat out to the platform and climb up with her, but the danger of disrupting the other siblings was too great. Instead we opted to care for the wayward chick. Once she was able to fly we would return her to her family, where she could learn firsthand the state of the art of gull knowledge of the bay.

One of the most significant tasks in caring for orphaned wildlife is to preserve their wildness. The first step in the preservation of anything is that we love, respect and side with who, or where or what is to be preserved. In the case of young gulls, it is critical that we take the necessary steps to protect the integrity of their wildness. Gulls, from hatching to adulthood, will readily adopt strategies to extract resources from human production – this is a wide ranging problem, often couched in terms of the problem gulls present people, when in fact, it is gulls who suffer. Who’s population is in decline the world over?

So we brought the gull into care. At HWCC we have an aviary purpose-built to accommodate gulls, pelicans, cormorants, and other species who live similarly near the coast – that is, stand around, float some, fly to higher look outs, and eat fish. While the she did not have the immediate company of other gulls, she did have cormorants and egrets as housing mates. Privacy was maintained. Handling was reduced. Fish, supplements and weekly physical examinations kept her on the right track. She grew on schedule.

We’d hoped that once she began to fly it would mean that her siblings back at her nest would also be flighted and that we could reunite her with her family. It was nearly two weeks before she was flying with enough vigor and agility – gull-like! – that we thought we could release her back to her parents’ further care. When we went back to her family’s nest, however, they were gone without a trace. There were no fledgling gulls anywhere. Her family was no longer an option. We’d have to make sure she could fend herself before she could be released.

Birds flying away: is there a sweeter sight than seeing our young take wing?

You can’t build an Earth, or even a coastline. A wild orphaned gull in captivity is missing crucial lessons that we have not been able to replicate. The best piece of our care has to be an orphan’s intact wildness, – a preference for her own kind. The greatest chance of learning what all of us must learn if we are to be wild and free is to have the example of our successful elders. For an orphan to have the teachers she needs, she must accept that she and they belong together. This is something that we can encourage and ensure. We can do everything in our power to keep wild animals wild. It works.

Soon the young gull was as ready as we could help her get. Any more lessons would be learned under the wide sky and above the bay, in the company of her kind.

The future is daunting. The best science of our time tells us that we face a calamity the likes of which industrial society has never known. There have been Pompeiis and Krakatoas in every age, on every shore, but not in the last 65 million years have we known global devastation like that which might loom.

If the human race is severely reduced in numbers and wealth and teeters on the brink of extinction; if we spend our days struggling to protect ourselves, our closest loved ones, feed ourselves; if our lives are consumed by a migration to some livable portion of the north or the south, what we know is that in that time, as in all times, there will be need to provide care for injured and orphaned wild animals, trapped in a destruction not their making, who we encounter along the way. There has never been a time when some people did not dedicate themselves to providing that care, and as long as there are people at all, there always will be.

After circling the area, our former patient finds her place among a mixed flock of other gulls.

I don’t think there is a single wildlife rehabilitator with her feet on the ground who thinks any of us are saving the world from its looming and mounting catastrophes through wildlife care. In fact, we know very well we are not. That knowledge is an ache we all endure, no matter where on the field of love for the wild we find ourselves. For wildcare givers, the Earth upon whom our patients depend is being made barren and still we must do our work. Just as anyone who cares deeply must act when the one for whom they care for is threatened. The day is fraught with the trauma and despair of an environment in chaos and still we must offer this one gull, just as we would offer our sister, a second chance.

photos: Laura Corsiglia/BAX

Bird Ally X Celebrates Seventh Anniversary!

Posted on October 1, 2016October 2, 2016 by Monte Merrick

Seven years ago, six wildlife rehabilitators*, friends and colleagues, began meeting to develop a workshop on aquatic bird care geared toward other rehabilitators. Each had worked extensively with aquatic birds, including providing care for large numbers at once during catastrophic events such as oil spills, harmful algal blooms, and disease outbreaks, such as avian botulism, that can be driven by environmental conditions like drought.

As one of the six, I can tell you that our primary motivation was to help make certain that hard-won knowledge didn’t end with specialization – that life-saving knowledge spread through our profession.

Across our state, our region, our continent and the world, wildlife rehabilitators work, often alone, with whatever species winds up on their doorstep. Knowledge of aquatic bird care at that time was mostly centralized, in the hands of experts – experts who had learned at the cost of many lost wild lives, experts who had access to money provided by oil companies legally bound to pay for damages (wildlife casualties) they’d caused.

We knew first-hand that many rehabilitators didn’t have the experience or the education to provide quality care for aquatic birds. Often rehabilitators sought help, advice and instruction – mostly they were encouraged to transfer their patients to expert with the knowledge, and even more importantly, the facilities to treat these patients with such unique needs.

It wasn’t long before we realized that our goal was much larger than a workshop could accomplish. Even seven years ago, it was easy to see that our future was quite rocky. Climate disruption, conflict with the oil empire, rising disparity in wealth – our world was clearly in turmoil.

It seems easy to imagine that funding for aquatic bird rehabilitation might evaporate, especially as coastal cities would be forced to divert resources toward infrastructure to cope with rising seas, as well as other consequences of our industrial age. In short, if whole oceans are dying, who will pay for the rehabilitation of marine animals such as Common Murres or Brown Pelicans.

On September 22, 2009, Bird Ally X was conceived in turmoil and hatched as a remedy.

Bird Ally X delivered our first workshop in 2010, An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation. Initially, workshop attendees were given a 50-page booklet as part of the course. By 2012, that booklet had been expanded to become our currently available book also titled, An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation. We’ve now delivered the workshop to hundred of rehabilitators around the country. Over the last seven years we’ve produced additional classes and workshops on different components of aquatic bird care, as well as focusing on different species of aquatic birds and their particular needs in care. We’ve developed workshops on the ethics of wildlife rehabilitation, on housing for wild patients, as well as being effective at helping people over the phone resolve perceived conflicts with their wild neighbors peacefully. We’ve produced materials for co-existing with aquatic birds and other wildlife for Federal and State agencies as well as our general community.

Many of our co-founders have served and still do as volunteer board members for state and national professional rehabilitation associations. Being able to work with our colleagues around the state and country to improve wildlife care as well as provide information that rehabilitators need and seek is an important part of our mission.

During this time, we have continued in our daily work of wildlife rehabilitation, either as staff at other organizations, on emergency response efforts around the continent, as well as producing educational and advocacy materials for collaborative efforts with other organizations and government agencies.

In 2014, Bird Ally X launched an online petition aimed at the United States Department of Agriculture’s highly controversial Wildlife Services, a shadowy, unaccountable program that is a sort of secret police against wild animals. The petition received over 175,000 signatures!

However five years ago we added to our mission in a significant way.

In 2011, with 3 of 6 co-founders living in Humboldt County, we were tipped off that young Brown Pelicans were sighted, contaminated, soaking wet and struggling at the public boat launch in Crescent City, about 90 miles north of Humboldt Bay. we investigated and discovered that not only were there young Pelicans in trouble in Crescent city, but all along the North Cast from Shelter Cove into Oregon. Since it was late in the fishing season, the problem soon ended for the year, but not before we’d rescued, cleaned and rehabilitated over 50 Pelicans who’d been contaminated by fish waste.

Fish waste going directly into the ocean at the public boat launch in Shelter Cove, California. Brown Pelicans and other birds were contaminated directly by this unorthodox waste disposal.

In order to meet that challenge, Bird Ally X partnered with the local wildlife care center, who we’d been assisting in small ways for years. With the facility they had in Bayside, we built the necessary infrastructure to take care of aquatic birds in Humboldt County – allowing for the first time in HWCC history for injured aquatic birds to remain in the region to receive care! That partnership led to BAX assuming HWCC as part of our organization, as of 2013. Now HWCC is the largest single aspect of our efforts. We treat over 1200 wild patients each year, and work every day of the year to provide humane conflict resolution for thousands of other neighbors human and wild.

Now, after seven years, we are still seeking new avenues to reach our colleagues and our community to improve the lives and care for injured and orphaned wild animals, to partner with other organizations so that we can prevent injuries in the first place (an ounce of prevention!!). Our work is far from complete. With the addition of HWCC to our organization we have a working lab for developing affordable and achievable techniques and solutions to the problems of shoestring-budget wildlife rehabilitation. We have an internship program that allows us to train the next generation of wildlife rehabilitators.

We have an education program that brings a message of humane co-existence to classrooms and organizations across our diverse community.

And most importantly, we have the capacity to provide care and save wild lives. As we continue to grapple with the dictates of our work and strategize the future of our efforts, I’d like to close this retrospective with the most important part of the last seven years – the support we’ve received and the wild neighbors we’ve helped!

Want to help? Great! We need your support! Click here to Donate Now!

*the six are – Shannon Riggs, DVM; January Bill; Vann Masvidal; Marie Travers; Laura Corsiglia; Monte Merrick

All images belong to Bird Ally X, thanks!

Last chance to help pay our August bills

Posted on August 31, 2016August 31, 2016 by Monte Merrick

Right now we are $1800 short of our August expenses. We need to raise $7000 dollars this month. Reaching this goal is critical to the success of our mission. Can you help? $1800 will cover our rent and water bill, our electric bill and our part of our fish bill. Long term, of course we’ll need more, but right now, $1800 will go a long way toward keeping our mission on track! Help us continue to provide care and advocacy for our wild neighbors on the Redwood Coast! Please help, you’re all we’ve got! Thank you!!!

CLICK HERE TO DONATE NOW! THANKS

Ban Bobcat Trapping!

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Monte Merrick

Can You Help?

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Monte Merrick

Each year BAX/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center raises a certain amount of money. Without this money we could accomplish nothing. Our supporters make a big difference everyday in the lives of injured and orphaned wild animals.

Food for our pateints.
Medical supplies.
Patient housing.
Water.
Electric.
Gas for rescues across our huge geographical area
Small stipends for our most critical staff.

These are the direct costs of helping individual wild animals and wild families. We also advocate for wild animals in an effort to shift public policy toward peaceful co-existence with our wild kin. Producing workshops and educational materials for wildlife rehabilitators is another way that we work to improve the conditions and ameliorate some of the negative impacts our society has on wild animals.

Your support is critical to these efforts. And we need your support now.

This year we’ve had more wild patients brought to us than ever. Now we need your help more than ever. After a very taxing Spring and Summer we need help now recovering from our costs. We need help making the needed repairs to our facility. We need help paying our water bill. This is the very ordinary, very work-a-day, real word of direct animal care. Loving wild animals means providing clean water for pools. It means laundry soap. It means late nights writing letters to our policy makers. We express our love for baby wild mammals with food that will help them grow and learn what it means to be a a wild and free adult.

Help us grow so that we can provide for all of Northern California’s wildlife. Help us build our Aviary in Manila specifically for pelicans and other large seabirds. Help us provide the kind of professional staff our region’s wildlife needs and deserves.

Please donate. Please.

Thank you for being a part of this life-saving work.

Wildlife Services Contract Renewed

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Monte Merrick

Wild places and wild things constitute a treasure to be cherished and protected for all time. The pleasure and refreshment which they give man confirm their value to society. More importantly perhaps, the wonder, beauty, and elemental force in which the least of them share suggest a higher right to exist–not granted them by man and not his to take away. – Richard M. Nixon, 1972

67 Coyotes, 9 Mountain Lions, 38 Black Bears, 235 Striped Skunks, 218 Raccoons, 57 Opossums, 17 Gray Fox – animals reported killed by Wildlife Services in Humboldt County between 2010 and 2013.

We are deeply disappointed with the Humboldt County Board of Supervisor’s decision to renew our County’s contract with one of the US Government’s least accountable agencies, Wildlife Services, whose illegal activities, cover-ups, opacity, and lack of regulatory framework have been as well-documented as possible given that very opacity. Still, we are glad for the opportunity to have much needed discussion regarding this agency’s activities in our own backyard. Past contract renewals have slipped by without notice. With an approach to human/wildlife conflicts as outdated and entrenched as Humboldt County’s it certainly must be true that it will take more than a couple of hours of 3-5 minute public comments to undo decades of poor practices.

Humboldt Wildlife Care Center operates in every district of Humboldt County as well as Northern Mendocino, Del Norte, Trinity, parts of Siskiyou and even Curry County in Oregon across the state line. We respond to calls regarding injured, orphaned, and so-called nuisance wildlife every day of the year. We run on the proverbial shoestring budget, utilizing volunteer labor and relying on the generosity of our community. We assist with any problem, and when something is beyond our local capacity, we have resources around the State and the Nation on which we can rely.

The decision to renew the contract is disappointing, not only because it legitimizes past unnecessary wildlife kills, and not only because of the future unnecessary wildlife kills it will allow, but also because it undermines the public education and outreach work on which HWCC/BAX spends a significant amount of resources.

Incredibly, it was even suggested by the Supervisors that HWCC/BAX could collaborate with Wildlife Services. With our commitment to co-existence, to the intrinsic value of wild animals, to non-lethal measures, transparency, and accountability to our community, obviously we find little in common with the branch the Sacramento Bee calls the “Killing Agency.” Our work in this county, to promote co-existence between people and our wild neighbors, to educate on the laws regarding how wild animals may be treated, competes with the County’s diametrically opposed message.

Trapping wildlife does not solve human/wildlife conflicts. Trapping doesn’t address or control rabies. The circumstances that bring a wild animal into conflict with people are most often, if not always, sources for food, water or shelter that are provided, intentionally or not, by people – often by the same people experiencing the problem. Removing these provisions usually results in the wild animal moving on – trapping and killing the animal changes nothing, leaves the attractant in place for other animals, risks orphaning any young of the trapped animal, and needlessly applies a capital penalty on the wild animal for a human transgression. In short, trapping is lazy, cruel and ineffective. Humane solutions are not only ethically superior, humane solutions last.

The Board’s statement, that there is no problem that needs to be addressed, displays a callous disregard for the lives of countless wild animals who have been killed without cause, their disrupted families, and also the values and concerns of a majority of people everywhere. According to Humboldt County Agricultural Commissioner Jeff Dolf, since 1921, Humboldt County has contracted with Wildlife Services. The number of animals senselessly killed over the last 9 decades would be astonishing if it were calculable.

The Board of Supervisors has neither the the knowledge or experience to make decisions on these matters. Presented with legitimate concerns regarding a controversial program, it is our view that the Supervisors did not perform due diligence in seeking alternative perspectives from knowledgeable sources. Rather than research the issue, members of the Board stood by childhood playmates, gross misapprehensions of disease vectors and a poor understanding of the successes of more advanced programs in other counties. The decision to continue contracting with Wildlife Services does a disservice to the County, to the citizens of this County who deserve better leadership, and to the wild animals who have as much right to their existence as we have to ours.

We of course will carry forward with our mission. We will continue to provide quality care for injured and orphaned wildlife, to partner with trustee agencies to provide non-lethal solutions for human/wildlife conflicts and embrace and support the progress our culture has shown in our ability and willingness to share in the bounty of Mother Nature.

While we wish to find a way forward toward a more humane future for Humboldt County and California, it would be negligent of us, as citizens of this county and as one of the many voices for this county’s wild residents, if we did not express our sorrow and disappointment with the Board’s decision and the deeply flawed reasoning that produced it.

Meanwhile, please take a look at this online petition to bring transparency and accountability to Wildlife Services. If you’ve already signed it, please share it with your circle of friends and colleagues. https://www.change.org/petitions/wildlife-services-stop-slaughtering-millions-of-wild-animals

P.S. This kind of advocacy work may not cost us much in food, medicine or other resources, but it does take time. Please contribute what you can. Help us supply the ounce of prevention… Thank you for your support and for your love of wildlife

Ban on Hounding Bear Upheld! Donnelly’s AB 2205 Dies in Committee

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Monte Merrick

“You mean there’s a Senator for all of this!” – Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder when first introduced to the wild mountain ranges of the Pacific Northwest.

Today in Sacramento, AB 2205, authored by Assemblymember Tim Donnelly (R-33), currently seeking the nomination for Republican candidate for governor of California, was killed in the Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee. The bill, had it passed, would have overturned California’s ban on the use of hounds to hunt bear and bobcat. The final vote, 5 ayes, 8 nays and 2 not voting was a solid victory for wildlife advocates in the state.

The ban on hounding bear and bobcat, SB 1221, was passed and signed into law in 2012. In the ban’s first year, the number of Black Bear killed, according to self-reporting sport hunters, fell by nearly half – down to just over 1000 bears from the previous year’s 1900.

Proponents of hounding bear tried in vain to make the easily refuted claim that use of hounds to hunt Black Bear is a humane, necessary and useful wildlife management tool. Fortunately, the committee heard expert testimony from wildlife scientists, legal experts and animal welfare advocates which clearly demonstrated that hunting with hounds is a burden on the bear, other non-targeted wild animals who are harassed by the presence of hounds, and of course the hounds themselves, who are often hurt, lost or killed in the hunt. Even the lead bear scientist working for California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Marc Kenyon, is on record stating that California’s bear population is managed only for recreational purposes. There is no need to kill bears in our state.

Bird Ally X sent a letter in opposition to AB 2205, as well as asked our Humboldt County Board fo Supervisors to oppose this bill. While our Board of Supervisors chose instead to support this ill-advised plan, predominantly in an effort to “grab” local control wherever possible (according to chair Rex Bohn), our representatives in Sacramento did the right thing.

We are very grateful to all the organizations and individuals who spoke for the speechless, for the wild animals, wild lands, and wild systems this bill would have harmed.

Thank you for making your voice heard! Once again, concerned wildlife advocates have preserved a necessary protection of our wild neighbors with whom we share our beautiful world!

Your support of Bird Ally X and Humboldt Wildlife Care Center makes our work as wildlife rehabilitators and wildlife advocates possible!