A passing motorist crossing the top of Berry Summit, about 30 miles East of Humboldt Bay, witnessed a hawk getting hit by a car. She pulled over quickly and found the bird, who was stunned, unable to stand, let alone fly. She took the hawk home to Hoopa, and contacted Hoopa Tribal Forestry’s wildlife department. The injured raptor, a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) was brought to us by staff at the tribal Forestry agency.
Fortunately, the youngster hadn’t suffered any broken bones. WIthin a couple of days, he was standing and eating. Soon after we moved him outdoors where he made a few tentative flights. Unlike with illnesses, where the patient has suffered a chronic disability for an extended time, this Hawk, other than his disorientation and lethargy from the traumatic blow, was in decent physical condition. After nearly two weeks, he was moved to a larger aviary where we could better assess his flight.
RIght out of the box, the young Hawk surveys his new situation… a situation called restored freeedom...
We gave him another week of thawed rats and room to fly before we felt he was ready to go. With his blood parameters in good shape, his physical condition strong and his attitude fully returned, we took him back to Berry Summit.
Your support is what keeps our doors open, ready to receive injured wildlife from all over our region. From Oregon to Willits, from Weaverville to the sea, we are here for our wild neighbors in need. Thank you for making our work possible.
It’s been nearly 15 years since HWCC put its first center for wildlife care on the property of the Jacoby Creek Land Trust. Over the course of those years we’ve cared for neary 20,000 wild neighbors in distress! We helped ten times as many animals over the phone!
In 2020, HWCC cared for six orphaned Gray Foxes, from multiple families.Our seabird pools have been online since 2012. Half of HWCC’s patients are aquatic birds!Every year is diifferent: in 2019 we treated 21 adult Common Murres and no fledglings at all. In 2020, we treated 90 Common Murres, only ten of whom were adults, while 80 were stranded babies.
When BAX took over managing HWCC in 2011, we were able to use this small underfunded facility (still small! still underfunded!) to demonstrate that highly effective patient housing can be built on a shoestring budget. The methods and techniques we developed here have gone into workshops and trainings for wildlife caregivers around the state and around the world. Helping our colleagues meet the challenge of providing excellent care on very little money is a major part of our mission.
Every day we’ve rolled up the driveway to open our clinic to injured and orphaned wild neighbors in need, covering a region that extends from Southern Oregon to Northern Mendocino, from Mount Lassen to the Pacific. We’ve built patient housing and a reputation for care that has allowed other facilities from around the state send us “problem” patients, so that we could help get them on track for release to the wild.
This Osprey was nearly condemned to a life in captivity after being raised as an orphan at a small facility south of Sacramento. Because of our purpose-built housing we were able to take her on, giving her the time and care needed to prove she could make it on her own. She was released after two months of care, back to her wild freedom above the lakes and rivers of the San Joaquin Valley, in the company of an adult Osprey in our care from a fire who’d taken this youngster under her wing.
More than 60 interns – mostly recruited from students at Humboldt State University, but not all – have passed through our program, many using their experience here as a springboard into their careers, including field work and wildlife care. HWCC’s entire staff are graduates of our intern program.
Lucinda Adamson completed an internship at HWCC/bax in 2012. Hired in 2013, she is now Assistant Rehabilitation Manager.Desiree Vang started at HWCC as a volunteer many years ago. After completing an internship, she joined our staff and is now a mission critical member of our crew.Nora Chatmon, a vet tech, volunteered for years at HWCC and is now a staff rehabilitator as well as a member of our Board of Directors.Brooke Brown began as a volunteer, completed an internship and was hired to our staff in January 2020. Besides helping care for our wild patients, Brooke is also HWCC’s humane solutions tech, helping people solve willdife conflicts in ways that put the life and safety of the wild animal first.
In short, we’re proud of what we built here; we’re grateful for the physical location that gave our patients the first need in a second chance, a place to heal.
But our growth must continue, and to do so we must find a better location with room to meet the demands of our increasingly chaotic natural world. There are things we’ll never be able to do at our current location – for example reahbilitate our region’s orphaned Black Bear cubs, who currently go to Lake Tahoe! We need the security of owning the land on which we operate, or at least the security of guaranteed access to it for a very long time. We need more space than our current quarter acre.
“How do you rebuild a ship at sea? One board at a time.”
Still, we’ll have two more Summers in our current location. No matter how intensive the labor of relocating our facility is, we will continue be at our clinic 7 days a week, every day of the year, as usual, ready to help wildlife in need.
Our first step is finding a suitable location. Ideally this location will be at least two acres between Arcata and Eureka, easy to find and centrally located in the heart of the region we serve. After that comes the building.
We will not be able to do this without your help. Soon we will establish a fundraiser to cover the costs of moving.
This is a big project and it won’t happen without the support of our community. You’ve been there for us since 1979 when all patient care was done in people’s homes scattered across the North Coast. In the coming years we’re still going to need you, in fact we’ll need you even more. Thank you for helping us through this period of growth and expanded services to our wild neighbors in need.
Board of directors member and HWCC rehabilitator, Nora Chatmon (r) talks about human/wildlife conflict as Assistant Rehabilitation Manager, Lucinda Adamson (l) listens.
For the latest episode of New Wild Review, four-fifths of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center’s clinic staff got together in February to talk about our Humane Solutions program – a backstage unfiltered eavesdrop as we talk about our work, our frustrations and some of the misconceptions about our wild neighbors that work against peaceful co-existence…
Rehabilitator and Humane Solutions consultant Brooke Brown.
Nora Chatmon, Lucinda Adamson, Monte Merrick and Brooke Brown discuss our Humane Solutions program, in a backstage way…
The discussion took off, lasting much longer than expected. In this epsiode, part one of our staff roundtable discussion, featuring Lucinda Adamson, Nora Chatmon, and Brooke Brown, we cover many of the frustrations – next episode the meaning, the awe and the victories – coming soon, the second half, in S2E3…
We hope you enjoy this discussion and remember! – our successful work keeping wild families together comes from your support! Thank you!
As anyone with a bird feeder in their backyard can tell you, Winter 20/21 was filled to the brim and overflowing into the saucer with Pine Siskins (Spinus pinus), a member of the finch family (Fringillidae).
Irruptions like this aren’t that unusual – happening every few years or so – but over the winter, southern Canada and large parts of the United States saw the largest irruption in ‘recorded history’.*
Irruptions occur when a critical food in a species’ wintering grounds is in short supply – for Pine Siskins this means conifer seeds, and Spruce seeds are a favorite – driving the birds south in search of a meal. Starving and desperate, backyard bird feeders must seem like the luckiest break in the world to them.
A newly admitted Pine Siskin gets an intake examination
Unfortunately, when large numbers of birds are concentrated at feeders, the condition are perfect for the spread of an ordinary bacteria, Salmonella. Carried in the intestines of birds and shed through the feces, the closely grouped finches hungrily foraging are constantly exposing each other to the bacteria. The disease that results from the infection, salmonellosis, is often fatal, causing irreparable harm to each bird’s gastro-intestinal tract. Once visibly sick – unable to fly, lethargic, emaciated – nearly all Siskins die. This is the result we saw all across North America over the Winter.
In response to the enormous flocks of starving Pine Siskins, and the attending salmonellosis outbreak, a massive campaign to stop the infectious spread was mounted, with Federal, State and non-governmental organizations stepping in to recommend that all bird feeders be pulled until the outbreak was over.
Another day, another few Pine Siskins. From our first admission of the irruption on Novemebr 16, 2020 until now, HWCC admitted an average of three Siskins a day
At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, we admitted our first Pine Siskin of winter on November 16, 2020. He died two days later. By the end of 2020 we admitted 20 Siskins and only one survived to be released, but that bird did not have any symptoms of salmonellosis upon admission after hitting a window. We have now admitted 55 Pine Siskens, between November 16 and today, March 5. Today, we have one Siskin in care, another window strike, who is otherwise in good health. It was early-mid February when dying Siskins stopped coming in to our clinic. Since then, each bird has been cat caught or a window strike. Because the disease seems to have slowed considerably, the birds we’re admitting often have a much better prognosis.
Of the other 54 Siskins, 9 have been released, 7 came in DOA, 22 died in the first 24 hours in care, 3 died after a day had passed, and 13 were humanely euthanized due to the severity of their infection, or wounds caused by window strikes or house cats. Of course there was some overlap between sick Siskins and cat caught Siskins, due to the sick ones being more vulnerable.
HWCC did not join in the chorus of those recommending that bird feeders be taken down, on the simple reasoning that starvation was driving this concentration of birds, and that reducing available food would make it worse, further reducing availble feeding locations and increasing the density of birds, or simply move the tragedy to a place where the death and suffering wouldn’t be seen.
Catching a recovered bird in our aviary can be stressful! This Pine Siskin is looking good and ready to go home!
There is no easy test to determine if our patients have salmonellosis. We rely on clinical symptoms and context. An irruption coupled with Siskins admitted who are very thin, lethargic and sick is the only real diagnosis we have while the patient is alive. While some suggest that euthanasia is the only responsible course of treatment, without solid proof that these birds suffer from the bacteria, that is not a course we could follow.
While there are no studies to support this view, it seems that when hungry refugees show up at your door, the thing to do is provide, not deny, succor. Taking into consideration the unhealthy density of Siskins at feeders leads us to think that other areas could be used to provide more food, in a less concetrated manner than backyard feeders. Why not distribute food freely across parks and refuges? Intervention in nature when nature has been razed, pummeled, roped, when “they’ve tied her with fences and dragged her down” is the only morally responsible thing to do.
Release to Freedom, by any other name, would still be just as sweet!!
For now, the irruption in our region is over. Soon migration will completely make over our world and a whole new cast of characters will be at our feeders, in our yards, singing in our forests and towns. And when the human-modifed world causes our wild neighbors harm, we’ll be here to do what we can that is best for each individual.
Our doors are open each and every day of the year to our region’s injured and orphaned wild neighbors in need. Your support makes that possible. Please DONATE today, if you can! Thank you!!!
