We need your support! Every Summer’s end is a rough time for us, with our coffers depleted, but this year is worse. Costs are skyrocketing and donations are dropping. It’s a scary time. Please help if you can.
With another avian botulism outbreak on the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, Bird Ally X is again responding to the crisis. BAX botulism co-manager, January Bill, reports that current daily admissions are low, averaging about ten birds, but that number can easily increase as the response ramps up and water levels and temperatures change. 60,000 waterbirds died on the Refuge during the avian botulism outbreak of 2020 while 140,000 died during 2024’s outbreak.
read more about Avian Botulism and past BAX responses here and here
The Lower Klamath and Tule Lake refuges, straddling the California – Oregon border north of Shasta are a critical stop for migratory birds on the Pacific flyway and even more critical nursery for hundreds of thousands of nesting waterbirds including many species of grebes, dabbling ducks and other waterfowl, wading birds such as Black-necked stilts, and various members of the Rail families. Teresa Wicks of the Bird Alliance of Oregon (formerly Portland Audubon) reports that this has been a good year for babies on the refuge complex with over 10,000 Stilt and Avocet chicks this year, and over 100,000 ducklings.
Over the course of four previous botulism responses over that last 8 years Bird Ally X has developed excellent care protocols for birds suffering from the effects of this neurotoxin. A major challenge this response faces is the lack of funding to support the team of staff and interns caring for the suffering birds.
Excellent care protocols obviously require excellent care providers. Excellent care providers require support. And that’s where you come in! Your donations to this effort will go directly to the food, medicine, water, and time that avian botulism victims require. Your support will help provide the best possible chance for recovery that these birds deserve.
Avian botulism is a human-caused problem, driven by how water is managed, especially in the arid West. Prioritizing agriculture in one of the driest regions in the nation and diverting water from critical rivers and wetlands hurts fish, hurts wildlife, and hurts the people who need both. There is not room for debate on providing care for a disaster that was caused by people. Water could’ve been released to the refuge and this disastrous outbreak would have been averted. That human act must be met by another human act, to provide restoration and rehabilitation to what and who we have harmed. Also, it’s not late to advocate for the release of adequate water to the Refuge!
Want to call for more water? Here’s some advice and talking points from Bird Alliance of Oregon to use when phoning your representative!
Every response has its naysayers, – those who question the ‘value’ of rescuing and treating wild animals who are the victims of human industrial mayhem, – oil spills, desertification, cars, cats, windows, whatever. It’s a morally indefensible position, and also an inaccurate position. Every response to human disasters has those who question the costs attributed to care, who wonder how much this or that life is worth in cold, hard cash. It is tedious to contend with such cynical dishonesty. True value is intrinsic and each of us knows this although some pretend that they don’t. Intrinsic value is what gives life value. Intrinsic value is why murder is murder and not mere killing. What is the ‘value’ of honesty when lying pays so much better? What is the ‘value’ of health when graves are so much cheaper? What is the ‘value’ of responsibility, of love, of trust, of the delirious call of a loon in the late Summer evening? What is the ‘value’ of the Wild. When someone talks like that, they mean only one thing: “I’m willing to harm anything for money.” We pay for this deceit in very practical terms every day in every place across the human world – the loss of biodiversity, and the losses this causes our commonwealth, our commons, which we share with the waterbirds of the West, is incalculable, although we are trying to calculate it.
So we do what’s right. It’s a simple calculation. Rescue who and what can be rescued. Save all we can save from senseless destruction. Restore what we’ve harmed. Otherwise, we destroy more than this Teal or that Grebe, although that’s already too high a price, we also destroy our relationship to reality, to the Wild, to our very being here on Earth.
Of course, if you’re a supporter of Bird Ally X, and our projects, you most likely already feel this way about the world and our responsibilities to it. And that’s why we count on you to help us do what’s right, right now.
Your support is critical. Please help. Click on the link and choose botulism response. Time is of the essence.
“Nobody wants to hear that you don’t like skunks or the way they smell. No one wants to hear your complaints about the odor. Countless skunks are killed by your stupid cars across our region and the world everyday and their only defense against your 2 ton mayhem is a musky spray. So shut up already about how that smell offends you. Really.”
Okay, that’s a way to let off steam. We can hold a fisher-price toy phone to our ear and say this into the bathroom mirror if we have to. As the song says, there are lots of things you can do alone, like being very brave on the phone.
Instead, advocating for the safety of some of our wild neighbors sometimes requires us to not fully speak our minds when speaking with a human member of our community who is mad at a skunk member. As a bunch of wildlife care supporting bunny huggers, you folks might not know this, but against skunks in general, the populace at large feels a significant amount of antipathy. Searching for resolutions can get quarrelsome when the caller has the skunk in a trap and wants us to take them away.
Each of us faces these sorts of problems daily. We live in an industrial, machined world, all putting our shoulders to the wheel. Of course it rubs us the wrong way. The wild freedom that inspires us and even heals us, can drive some of us mad with spite and envy. That’s how it looks to me sometimes, anyway.
Skunk babies start coming out of dens and getting into trouble around the middle of the June. The babies we admit before that time are usually neonatal, meaning that besides still nursing, their eyes are still closed. They’re less than four weeks old. Babies this young are admitted almost always because a person has somehow disrupted the den, a person or their proxy, such as the family dog.
Our first skunk baby this year was unusual. Someone opened their shed door and behold! there was a skunk mama carrying a baby. She just happened to be passing through the shed at that moment. Bad timing. Frightened, she dropped her baby and ran. The person felt terrible. They placed the baby in safe spot and left the shed hoping she would come back, but she never did. She probably had many more babies to worry about. We often see litters of six.
The person brought the baby in the next morning.
It would be ridiculous to pretend that the joy of being so near to someone as adorable as a baby skunk is a mere side effect of the work. Joy is always more than a side effect.
After weaning, the baby skunks in our care have several weeks in specially built housing that is for their family only. We call it the Mephitidary, after their family name, Mephitidae.
We tell you about the skunks we treat, this year, last year, years before because we can, because we have a front row seat to this work and we must share it. Our love fuels our work and we know that your love will too. Our love is in labor, yours in support. John Brown was not John Brown without the Secret Six supporting him. Sharing the stories with you of the individuals who pass through our care is at the heart of our mission. We want you to see the patients your support saves and gives another chance. As much as we get thrill at the delight of each young skunk who grows to carry on the mission of their kind, and pay for that thrill with the occasional need to shower, or leave our car windows open for a few days after going on a skunk rescue, what you put into our work entitles you to hear about the details and see their faces and love them as we do, with care and concern for their wildness, for their autonomy, for their right to be here as residents of Earth, made and spun into being by the same forces and out of the same stuff that makes us. The privilege of providing care for family Mephitidae is profound as well as broad. Every skunk opens into the realm we already inhabit – and every skunk invites us to consider these steps, the Skunk Dance – to dance as a skunk does through this world is the most important dream to consider when imagining what their care must include.
It is good for us to imagine deeply other lives, but to imagine other lives is not a good reason to become a wildlife caregiver – the only good reason to become a caregiver is to give care. It just so happens that in giving excellent care opportunities for this imaginitive work are abundant and necessity demands that we do it. The second chances we provide our patients are created in the admixture of your support and our broad palette of labors.
Thank you for making all aspects of our work possible.
Speaking of joy, one of the joys of this blog is writing for our supporters. This is not a neutral blog, we are allies of the Wild, after all. Bird Ally X was founded on the idea that the battles the Wild must wage against the machine are also our battles. We share the same enemies. We are fighting the same war, the war for the real, the war for the imagination, the war for the great collaborative world, the tapestry of vertebrae and femurs and cell walls and daydreams and the warmth of this ray of sun on my silky black fur and the passions of yesterday that will still thrill us tomorrow. Dear AI assistant, please don’t bother me about how to make that last sentence more concise. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but discursive love is what endures.
