The avian botulism response on the Lower Klamth Refuge is at an end, thanks to the recent subfreezing overnight temperatures and rain in the region that eliminated the conditions in which the bacteria thrives.
233 aquatic birds were rescued, consisting primarily of freshwater ducks such as Mallards, Northern Shovelers, Northern Pintails and others, with 168 recovering and being released.
Northern Shovelers and other ducks in care at the USFWS/BAX avian hospital on the Lower Klamath Basin Refuge.
Support for the effort came from many sources, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, CAL- OR Waterfowl Association, long time BAX volunteers and donors, Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue, Wildlife Emergency Services, and staffing support from Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, the wildlife hospital operated by BAX as both an important part of wildlife care available in Northern California and a teaching facility introducing the next generation of wildlife care givers to our profession.
January Bill and Marie Travers, who co-led this response have done another fantastic job of providing quality care for the innocent victims of human meddling, such as the water wars of the west have caused with chronic misuse of this precious resource that we all need to survive.
Thank you to everyone who donated to support BAX in our mission, wherever it takes us, providing direct care for wildlife in need as well as education and support to both colleagues and communities, wherever it is needed.
Everyday we are here for our wildlife neighbors. Everyday we need your support. Thank you!!
September 22 2009 several friends sat down at the end of the workday at a seabird hospital to work on an outline for a workshop we’d be presenting at a wildlife rehabilitation conference the following Spring: An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation. At the end of our meeting, we stuck around to talk about a crazy idea – an idea hatched on the shores of Lummi Island Washington and fledged at the edge of the Suisun Marsh, home to 10 percent of the remaining wetlands of California.
The idea was for a collective of wildlife caregivers, who could help other caregivers deal with difficult times and cases, both through directly aiding them, as well as producing reference material, a library of helpful advice.
Dr Shannon Riggs, BAX co-founder visits Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. Staff and interns look forward to Shannon’s visits eagerly. She is an excellent teacher and our time with her is too rare!
To me, the idea was slightly embarrassing to propose since it sounded almost cartoon-ish – wildlife rehabilitators’ Super Friends – and the fact that our proposed name didn’t help alleviate that impression also had caused some reticence. But as is so often the case, a foolhardy courage prevailed and Bird Ally X was soon in flight.
Besides the workshop, which we’ve since presented many times across California and the USA, our primary mission was to share the skills and tools necessary to provide effective and ethical aquatic wild bird care. Later we would amend our mission to include all wild animals.
BAX co-founders, from right, January Bill, Laura Corsiglia, Marie Travers, on site at the Lower Klamath Basin refuge, 2018.
The six of us who produced the original workshop, Shannon Riggs, DVM, January Bill, Marie Travers, Vann Masvidal, Laura Corsiglia, and myself, met as colleagues in oiled wildlife response. In fact we first worked together as a whole on the November 2007 oil spill in San Francisco Bay caused when the Cosco Busan collided with the Bay Bridge in heavy fog, leaking well over 50,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the water. Approximately 1500 aquatic birds were rescued and brought into care by the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, and treated at the San Francisco Bay Oiled Wildlife Care and Education Center, in Fairfield.
Previous to this event each of us had extensive wildlife rehabilitation experience, on other oil spills and at other facilities, working with a variety of species, from songbirds to raccoons, from cougars to hawks. Most of us had worked in less privileged circumstances than we did as oil spill responders due to the lack resources available to the average wildlife rehabilitation facility. Working in oil response provided us the opportunity to develop skills, techniques, and protocols when working with large numbers of aquatic birds that we knew most wildlife rehabilitators simply couldn’t access.
BAX co-founder Vann Masvidal conducts a workshop on wound management at an annual wildlife rehabilitation conference.
Treating 1500 birds at one time will sharpen your skills quite quickly; repeatedly working in such an environment over the course of years will make you a leader in the field. All of us felt a need to share those skills and de-centralize them. There is far more coast, far more interior land, than the few specialized wildlife hospitals for aquatic birds could ever cover. To ensure that aquatic birds have quality care available when in need requires that we spread the benefits of our own experience and training.
While working at the Oiled Wildlife Care Network in the Bay Area, we routinely received sick and injured aquatic birds from as far away as Humboldt County, which did not yet have the facility or available skilled staff to provide care for aquatic birds. At the San Francisco facility we even once helped 140 seabirds caught in a harmful algal bloom off the coast of Astoria, Oregon. Clearly it would be better for the animals in need, if care was closer than 300-500 miles away.
The first Bird Ally X publication, An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation, began as a handout for our workshop participants in 2010. By 2012, our little “handout” had become a 152 page textbook. An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation is now in its second edition with over 1500 copies sold.
An aquatic bird care workshop that we could deliver at conferences and on-site at various facilities was our first step toward meeting our mission, complemented by our first publication, An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Care.
In August 2011, we met our first major challenge when we learned that juvenile Brown Pelicans were suffering from contamination by oily fish waste around Humboldt and Del Norte counties. We partnered with Humboldt Wildlife Care Center (HWCC) in Bayside to have a facility to provide care for approximately 50 young Brown pelicans. Over the next few years, we managed the rehabilitation program at HWCC, building its capacity to provide care for more of the wild animals who make their living and home on the North Coast.
HWCC/bax Assistant Rehab Manager Lucinda Adamson doesn’t mind a little rain when resotring a patient’s wild freedom.Wildlife care intern Nora Chatmon (left) prepares to tube-feed a starving Common Murre (Uria Aalge) desperate for calories, while staff rehabilitator Stephanie Owens holds the patient.
In 2014, seeing the opportunity to have an excellent facility that also doubles as a working lab for developing protocols and training future wildlife care providers, BAX took complete responsibility for HWCC, now HWCC/bax. To date nearly 60 interns, predominantly life science students at the nearby Humboldt State University, have passed through our program, with many going on to successful careers in wildlife rehabilitation and other wildlife related work.
As our co-founders no longer work together each day in the same facility, we meet up as often as time permits. Laura and I are here in Humboldt, where I’m the director of HWCC, and Laura continues her role as publications coordinator and art director. January Bill is now in Klamath Falls, Oregon, which puts her in a perfect position to bring excellent protocols and practices to the chronic avian botulism problem on the Lower Klamath Basin Refuge, rescuing and rehabilitating over 700 water birds in the last two years. Marie Travers works closely with January on the avian botulism problem and on their joint work focusing on patient stress in wildlife care. Marie continues her work as an oil spill responder as well.
HWCC/bax Volunteer Coordinator Ruth Mock speaks for the Opossums.
Shannon Riggs and Vann Masvidal each work with Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay, where they treat thousands of animals each year, many of them seabirds, and they continue to be the backbone of our board of directors.
At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center we’ve added excellent people to our crew. Lucinda Adamson, who was an intern during our second fish waste Pelican crisis in 2012 is now the Assistant Wildlife Rehabilitation Manager. Stephanie Owens, who began as a volunteer in 2014 is now a staff rehabilitator. Ruth Mock is volunteer coordinator.
Recent additions to our permanent gang, who recently completed internships, Brooke Brown who works with our humane solutions program for co-existing with our wild neighbors, and Desiree Vang, another recently graduated intern who is helping us with our membership data and other administrative tasks. Both continue to work in animal care in the clinic as well.
Lucinda Adamson and recent intern graduate Desiree Vang perform an admission exam on an American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos).Happy Recent internship graduate, Brooke Brown in the moment of joy immediately after seeing a healthy patient fly away.
Bird Ally X has a mission that will never be completed, because there will always be more to discover and more to teach. Moreover, it seems obvious that centralized solutions to global problems are a luxury that we won’t be able to afford much longer. Sooner more likely than later, our safety nets will be tested and it’s safe to assume that the well-being of individual wild animals will be ‘de-prioritized’ at the institutional level. But we know that it will be a concern to individual humans that individual animals receive proper treatment when in need.
As its ultimate mission, BAX must help ensure that those people, however burdened, however underfunded, however remote, have access to the best possible techniques to provide care for as many species as they can. Based on today’s degraded environment, we imagine the potential of ecological catastrophe and the damaging impact our foundering industrial society might have on our wild neighbors and we prepare to meet the needs of those who will provide their care.
When the Oiled Wildlife Care Network holds a training in region 1, nearly all participants are BAX staff, interns and volunteers!Tabytha Sheeley, an HWCC/bax intern now employed at Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay.
Whether it’s the hundreds of ducks on the Lower Klamath or the 1200+ wild animals we treat in Humboldt each year, not only are we there for those innocent lives, but we are there are also for the knowledge we can gain to be passed on to our colleagues and future colleagues; – that can be shared with our fellow lovers of the wild – that can be taught to children about the sentience and self-ownership of all that is wild and free – about our own wild freedom that pulses with every beat of our hearts.
Ten years is a long time, yet it is barely a beginning! We’ve met many challenges to get where we are, but we have so many more to overcome. Your support has made our accomplishments (and survival!) possible. With your continued support we will meet our continuing goals, such as fully realizing HWCC/bax as a teaching wildlife hospital, and helping to bring a greater level of compassion to bear on our wild neighbors, and thereby reduce the need for our services.
It’s a dream. It’s a dream you can help make real. Please donate today and let’s help make certain that the next ten years brings us closer to our goal.
With nearly 200 aquatic birds rescued in the avian botulism outbreak on the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, to date 144 have been released. Currently there are 19 birds still in care at the BAX/USFWS field hospital. Since temperatures are supposed to dip below freezing this week, it is believed that the outbreak will soon be over. Your support covering our costs and providing treatment for those birds still in care is greatly appreciated. Please help us care for these and all of our patients! Thank you!
Mallards and others recover in pools that allow them to go in and out of water as they desire – an important step as they heal!
Each year we provide care and educational opportunities to several orphaned Northern Raccoon babies (Procyon lotor) – anywhere from a dozen to three dozen of the young, highly inquisitive, intelligent, and iconic mammals, depending on how well our outreach protecting denning mothers works.
This year we had great success helping people peacefully co-exist with neighborhood raccoons or humanely evict raccoon families from raccoon dens in crawl spaces and attics. Because of this success, we’ve admitted less than 20 raccoon babies this year. (to read about our other years, and learn more about our raccoon program check out all of our stories tagged Northern Raccoon)
The following photos our from our first group of raccoons released this year, after four months in care, learning as much about the wild world as they can in care. In these photos, taken by Laura Corsiglia, one our staff, Brooke Brown, releases three raccoons, two sisters and a male who was housed with them. It’s always a joy to see these bright young minds when they are first released into the blaze of reality.
HWCC staffperson, Brooke Brown opens the crates, letting our young patients greet the wild with no barriers between them since they lost their mothers months ago as tiny babies.Exploring the real Earth.These two sisters stick together through thick and thin, brave, resolute and with boundless curiosityThe rocks, rivers and forests of our region are the birthright of our patientsA portrait of a highly sophisticated Earthling.The two sisters cross the river and climb the opposite tangled bank into their private freedom…The male soon follows them….“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…” –Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Your support makes our work protecting the young of the wild possible. Please help us keep our doors open and our wild neighbors in need with the care they deserve. Thank you.
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.A closer view…
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.
Flying with strength, she explored.
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.
UPDATE: 100 birds currently in care on Lower Klamath. Your support urgently needed. Please donate today
The avian botulism outbreak response on the Lower Klamath Basin Refuge was just on the verge of being ramped down when dozens more ducks turned up sick from the bacteria. Up until yesterday, 3 birds, a Mallard, a Gadwall and a Northern Pintail had been released and 2 Gadwalls were in care and improving. It was beginning to look like a much less serious year until yesterday afternoon over thirty birds were brought in to the facility on Highway 161, north of Shasta, on the Volcanic Legacy Scenic Highway (more info to follow.)
To support the effort, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax has sent a staff person to help with the sudden influx.
A new incubator purchased with the support of donations and grants helps make this isolated location north of Mt Shasta into a functioning wildlife rehabilitation facility. Our new incubators first botulism patient, a Mallard in the paralyzed phase of the illness.First recovered patients are released back into the Refuge in an area unaffected by the outbreak.
You can help too! Your material support of Bird Ally X is what allows to meet the challenges of our times support imperiled wild animals. Help save these ducks and all of our wild patients. Please donate today.
Birds gotta fly and fish gotta swim! No one knows this more than birds and fish. And when a young Green Heron (Butorides virescens) has to fly, fly they must! If it’s the first flight ever, mistakes might be made….
Our Green Heron patient flying in the aviary.
When we got the call that a heron was running around the intersection of 7th and F in Arcata, we quickly drove over to investigate, finding nobody. As it turns out a citizen had already captured and delivered the bird to the Arcata City Hall.
One of the hallmarks of being wild is that no permits are required to live your life. You are free to do as you wish. So there’s no real reason for a heron to visit government offices. If a wild bird does visit, chances are good that something has gone awry.
An employee of the city called to say they’d bring us the bird. While we waited, we speculated that the bird may have been hit by a car, – an obvious guess since found in traffic and not flying away. But when the heron was brought to our clinic a couple of miles away in Bayside, we saw that this bird was a young fledgling, possibly on their first sortie from the nest.
A release evaluation is exactly like an admission exam, but instead of looking for problems, we’re looking for resolution.
Green Herons aren’t endangered, but still they are very uncommon patient at HWCC/bax. We’ve treated 6 individuals over the last 8 years.
Unlike Great Egrets, Great Blue Herons and Black-crowned Night Herons, Green Herons are, in ornithological jargon, “secretive”. You could spend days at the marsh and never see the family of Green Herons who are just beyond your grasp.
Wetlands such as marshes and estuaries are prime habitat for these birds. As wetlands are under increasing attack, so are Green Heron populations in steep decline. Preserving their habitat is key to preserving their lives and existence.
In the case of this young bird, our first concern was getting the youngster back to their family. Less than a quarter mile from Arcata City Hall is a small wetland that seemed the likely location of the Green Heron family nest. In fact, we were informed by a reliable observer that a Green Heron nest had been active in a conifer very close to the nearby Arcata Community Center.
Within a day we had a team out looking for the family. We found the nest, but no birds were spotted. We knew that it was still likely that they were near, but without a confirmed sighting the risk was too great to simply leave the young Heron at the wetland and hope for the best. At this age, the bird would still be relying on food given by their parents.
With no family found, it would be up to us to provide the fledgling with opportunities to learn to forage as well as strengthen flight skills.
A simple kiddie pool can quickly be converted into a fish catching training ground. By mixing live and dead fish in this small pool, our young patient was soon catching and eating live fish like a champ!
Fledgling birds are typically as big if not bigger in weight than adults, so our patient no longer needed to grow, only learn. We provided a pool with live fish fso the Heron could learn to hunt, an aviary big enough for improving flight, and perches and grasses so that the heron’s inherited desire to hide could be satisfied.
After three weeks, the young bird was eating all the fish we offered and had lost the last of the downy nestling feathers. All that was left was release.
We released the Green Heron into excellent habitat not far from the original nest site. It’s quite possible that the bird’s parents and siblings had moved here too. In either case we were certain this bird was ready to be on their own.
In case the reason for their name was a mystery: Green Heron!Deep inside this thicket, lurks a strange and mysterious force, the Green Heron case #781.Cropping the image reveals the birds “secret” location.The Green Heron is somewhere in there, maybe never to be seen by human eyes again.Pull back, and the young bird is gone.
This young Heron was one of over 900 animals we’ve admitted for care, year to date. Your support paid for the fish the heron ate, the warmth the heron needed on the first night of care, the phone that received the call, the gasoline used to search for their family, and to transport to the release location, and our Bayside facility itself. Without any of these things, this bird wouldn’t be out there right now, wild, free, and able to survive.
2019 is a challenging year. Our caseload is up nearly 5% over last year. We’ve already admitted as many patients this year as we admitted in all of 2013. We need your help! We had a 2019 fundraising goal of $100,000 by August 31. We’re $40,000 short of that goal. We don’t expect to make up the difference, but with your help we can pay our bills from the crazy summer and prepare for the remaining months and the 300-400 more patients we are likely to admit before the year is over. Please help. Thank you!
