A soundtrack to wild orphan season and our work… enjoy.
It happens a lot. A duck’s eggs hatch and her precocial chicks must be led to water… and far too often, instead they are led to slaughter – decimated on one of the worst things ever invented, the auto-route.
Often the whole family is lost, but sometimes only the mother is killed. Her babies scatter. Passing motorists (practitioners of motorism, the religion of mechanized movement) will report the mayhem to us at Humboldt Wildife Care Center… sometimes we need help with traffic from CHP to make the rescue safe, sometimes it means a voyage into a mucky marsh by the side of the highway. Such was the case on a late Saturday afternoon in mid-May.
The mother Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) was crossing US 101 south of Eureka, near King Salmon. She didn’t make it. Her babies, newly hatched, scattered in all directions. A person driving by saw it happen and called our facility. A team was prepared and dispatched to the scene.
The ducklings had scattered around a slough between the highway and the bay at low tide. It was a lot of muck. After an hour of searching – and getting pretty dirty – our intrepid team recovered a dozen healthy tiny wood ducklings.
To provide an environment and the care that protects, supports and teaches any young wild orphan until they’re able to provide for themselves is, to say the least, a specialized endeavor. First the young ducklings must be kept safe and warm, with access to food and water, and not just to drink, but swim in. Precocial birds must encounter the world they will live in immediately; but without a parent that world would kill them. So our heat lamps and small pools and collected duckweed must stand in for everything their mother would’ve given them. Obviously we are not the same, and that’s why no one would ever choose to be an orphan. But here we are.
HWCC/bax staff rehabilitator Alondra Cardena notes the weights of the tiny Wood Ducklings.
These ducklings are doing well. They weighed about 22 grams on admission and now they are close to 200 grams. They’ll be 600 grams by the time we are considering them for release. By then they will have graduated from several types of housing meant to keep them safe and help them thrive and learn and grow. We cannot replace their mother – no one can – but with skill, empathy, and knowledge we can offer them a second chance at their wild and free destiny that the highways of the world are hell bent on taking awa
Each of our patients requires complex consideration and treatment. They need a facility purpose built to provide these things, and a skilled staff to operate. Your support is what makes all of it happen. Please donate to give our wild neighbors in need the second chance they deserve. Thank you for everything!
A mom goes out for food. “I’ll be right back,” she tells her kids … but she doesn’t comes back. Her kids keep getting hungrier. Still, she doesn’t come back. Eventually, in desperation, they go out, maybe to look for her, or maybe out of confusion. But now they’re lost. And still she doesn’t come back.
This scenario unfolds across the season, across the years, across the history of mothers and children everywhere over time. Usually it ends in the death of the family. Unless someone intervenes.
At a facilities building on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus, earlier in May, a person who works there found two young Pacific Wrens (Troglodytes pacificus), who’d left the nest a little too soon. Nearby he found a dead adult wren.
Two young Pacific Wrens, just before learning to fly, admitted to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center
When we admitted them into care at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, both young birds were dehydrated. They were also pretty excited about the mealworms we offered them. One of the babies was nearly flighted and the other wasn’t far behind. We set them up in our baby bird nursery and put them on a regular feeding schedule every 30 minutes. As soon as we could we went back to the rescue site to see if the second parent was present, so we could return the babies to them, but sadly, there were no living adults to be seen. The care of these youngsters was in our hands
Because they were so close to being able to fly it wasn’t long before their attempts produced actual lift and the old magic of leaving the ground under your own power was new again.
The siblings left the temporary housing we have for baby birds about to fledge directly into one of our songbird aviaries. Here we continued to feed them mealworms every 45 mintues to an hour until they were finding the food all by themselves. As soon as their flight was strong and they were feeding themselves completely, we took them back to the place where they were found, a little bit deeper into the nearby forest, and they were free.
“How did I get up here? I flew!!” said the fledgling Wren.
“Please release me, let me go!!!”
Cryptic coloring matches the west coast forests perfectly!
The loss of parents is usually a tragedy that a nest of babies doesn’t survive, but this time, thanks to someone who saw the problem and who called us, the young were given a second chance at the wild freedom for which they were intended. Your support is why there is a facility in our region that make these second chances possible. Your support is why there are mealworms in Manila! Your support built the songbird aviary that provided the security and opportunity to learn that would have been provided by their parents. Your support makes this work possible! Thank you!!
One thing that used to be true in the olden times was that seasonal events were predictable. Now the the youngsters today may find this hard to believe but naturalists from 30 years ago might’ve known what day a certain woodland plant bloomed and made a trek to be there to see it happen.
While the stars and planets might still adhere to regular returns, natural cycles on Earth seem to be increasingly irregular. Of course, the best science of our time and back nearly forty years has predicted exactly this, so it’s not a surprise overall that seasonal events are harder to predict, but when we admit hatching year Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) in the middle of April, here on the the North Coast, a month earlier than we ever have before, it’s remarkable.
Ten years ago, mid to late June was the earliest we would see recently fledged Brown Pelicans, who must make the roughly 500 mile flight from the nearest breeding ground in the Channel Islands, to arrive in Humboldt County.
Fifty years ago, Brown pelicans in California began their breeding season in mid March – the pelican breeding season coincides with the arrival of their food source, primarily anchovies. In fact breeding may not start until the anchovies are present. We admitted ten young pelicans, all this year’s model, in April.
A young Brown Pelican is given an examination by HWCC/bax staff
Incubation of eggs requires about one month until hatching, and it takes about 2 months for nestling Pelicans to fledge (meaning first flight). Independence from the nesting site takes about 3 months. From egg to independent bird takes about 4 months. this means that the latest that the birds we admitted could have begun as newly laid eggs would have been mid-December 2024. A nesting that early had been observed before, in 1985, but it was rare – this year it seems to be the norm.
Brown Pelicans in the West nest and raise their babies in Southern and Baja California and it’s in SoCal that Brown pelicans are in greatest trouble. Since March, hundreds of Brown Pelicans have been admitted for care in the southern half of our state.
There have been two events happening simultaneously. There has been a domoic acid outbreak in the Southland that was harming mutliple marine species including Brown Pelicans of any age. The other event is more common, a simple starvation event severely impacting hatching year Pelicans who are first learning to provide for of themselves.
Domoic acid is a toxin produced by harmful Algal blooms. These occur usually as a result of agricultural runoff into the nearby rivers and coastal waters. The algae’s waste products contain domoic acid which is a neurotoxin and causes, among other calamities, paralysis in the poisoned animal followed by death.
Colleagues at International Bird Rescue in Los Angeles and SF Bay Area have admitted over 200 Brown Pelicans, including some adults with Domoic acid poisoning symptoms.
In Morro Bay, Pacific Wildife Care (PWC) started to admit starving young juveniles on March 1. The rehabilitation manager at PWC, (and Bird Ally X co-founder) Vann Masvidal, says they’ve treated 37 Pelicans since then – only two of them were adults who showed neurological symptoms – unfortunately they did not survive. Those adults have been submitted for testing.
Young Brown Pelicans enjoy some fish at Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay. (photo courtesy Vann Masvidal/PWC)
The problems persist. Wildlife rescue organizations all along the California coast are still in the middle of treating this large influx of pelican patients, who of course require intensive care, as well as large amounts of fish. That this is occurring at the start of the wild baby season is taxing already thin resources for everyone.
A Brown Pelican is given fluids orally to treat dehydration
Here at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bird ally x, a dozen Brown Pelicans have been admitted, most of them during the week between April 15 and April 23. Brown Pelicans in trouble or deceased have been called in to us from Fort Bragg in Mendocino to Brookings in southern Oregon. Domoic acid is not a concern on the North Coast – all of the Pelicans we’ve admitted have been starving juveniles, most very weak and dehydrated. Because we don’t face the same ocean conditions here as in the southland or the Bay area, we surmise that these pelicans are arriving here too weak to benefit from the plentiful food sources of our cold off shore waters, especially as this is their first time being here – youngster that they are – and they are still learning their independence. It’s an enormous challenge that some cannot meet.
Brown Pelicans in care at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center
This, of course, is where our work is critical. The pelicans we’ve admitted have been cold, weak, and emaciated, missing as much as 50% of their body mass. Once in our care they receive all the support we can give them: heat support for their hypothermia, fluid support for their dehydration, medicine to stop the opportunistic parasites which attack debilitated animals. Once these birds are stable, they receive the all important, most magical medicine of all: fish, and lots of it.
Once they’ve regained their strength and body mass, have demonstrated proper flight and meet all other release criteria, we can send these youngsters back to sea, with the groceries onboard, so to speak, to get them through the learning curve they still must face. Whenever we can, we release them into a group with adult pelicans, so that they have the guidance they need from the best experts on being a pelican that ever there could be.
A young Brown Pelican embarks in her second chance!
In the video below, our two young patients find an adult Brown Pelican up in the sky
RIght now we still have a few pelicans in care. We continue to get reports of dead pelicans seen on beaches around the region. We continue to go on calls about sick, weak, or oddly behaving pelicans. Yesterday a young Pelican was picked up on the bridge to Ferndale.
Your support as we provide the care these birds need for a second chance at wild freedom is critical. As we enter wild baby season – we already have over 50 babies in care – we need you more than we can properly say.
If you already support our work, thank you! It means so much!! And if you’d like to support our work now, please click here:
Wild Baby Season is off to hectic start this year! If it was a competition (it isn’t!) we’d be in the lead for busiest year on record already! We’re currently running 18% above last year! As of today we have nearly 50 wild babies in care. From duckling and goslings to helplessly small baby opossums, and even some very young Brown pelicans! We need your help, as always, but especially now!
Please donate today to help us help our wild neighbors in need! We are desperate for your help. Here’s me saying the same thing on video!
Thank you for keeping our doors open, our incubators warm, and our patients’ bellies full.
