Four wild ducks are being treated for avian botulism infection at the hospital Bird Ally X built on the Tulelake Wildlife Refuge last year.
Two BAX co-directors, January Bill, who lives in the region, and Marie Travers, will be leading the effort. A botulism outbreak on the Klamath Refuge in 2018 resulted in over 400 wild birds, predominantly waterfowl, to be treated for the bacterial infection, and thousands of other birds deaths. (read more about last year’s response.)
Marie Travers (left) and January Bill examine a patient during the 2018 botulism response on the Tulelake Refuge.
January and Marie also led last year’s response, which resulted in hundreds of birds saved from the paralyzing disease, as well as the development of protocols for care which were shared around the western states, where avian botulism is becoming a chronic problem, as well as the entire wildlife rehabilitation community.
Avian botulism is caused by bacteria that is commonly found in fish. During dry hot spells, as water levels drop and water temperatures rise, infected fish who are killed by the environmental conditions are then eaten by piscivorous (fish-eating) waterfowl. Avian botulism is neuro-toxic, causing paralysis and death. Infected dead birds contribute to the virulence of the outbreak, as their carcasses are also eaten by other wildlife. Because water is at the heart of the problem, managing the conditions is fraught with all of the political obstacles that water wars in the West have historically presented.
Effective protocols can give botulism patients a good prognosis, but the first few days of treatment require intensive hands-on care. Here, January Bill administers IV fluids to a suffering duck.
As the world spins into its unsettling future, with fires raging across the equator and arctic, we know that wildlife tragedies like this will increase, everywhere. We also know that our wild neighbors, innocent of this disaster, will suffer as much or more than the human communities that are also being deeply harmed – including our own, wherever we are.
With your support, BAX will always be here, committed to helping the wild victims of human catastrophe, providing care for those who survive. Your support is what makes our response to botulism in Tulelake, and all our work, possible. We need you now. Thank you!
It’s been a crazy Summer. Our caseload is the heaviest in our 40 year history. Right now, in a lull that allows me to stop a minute to get out a quick appeal for help, we have nearly 60 patients in care.
Two orphaned raccoons in our care are close to being weaned. After weaning they still have 10 weeks of growing and learning to do before we can release them back to their wild freedom.
At a time when our need is greatest, our donations are at their lowest. We need your help.
13 raccoons, 4 opossums, a Green heron, two cormorants, 6 swallows, 2 Song sparrows, 2 swifts, 3 deer fawns, and more need your support. As do all the animals that we will admit in the remaining months of baby season, and beyond. If our caseload trend continues, we will admit another 300 to 400 animals before this year ends.
Staff removes multiple hooks and line from an entangled Common Murre. Derelict fishing gear results in thousands of Marine wildlife deaths annually in California alone!Ten baby opossums admitted after their mother was hit by a car. A kind and compassionate person brought them to our clinic from Southern Humboldt July 3rd. It will be another few weeks before any of this litter will be released.
We simply can’t meet the challenge of caring for wild animals injured by human activity and the derangement of their habitat caused by our ongoing ecological crisis without your help.
Also, I can’t express deeply enough our gratitude for those who’ve chosen to sustain us monthly. Regular donations, rolling in each month are what keep us going … While we don’t have the money we need to cover all of our expenses at this time, if it weren’t for those generous monthly contributions, we wouldn’t have the day to day funds to keep stocked on basic food and medicine. Thank you. If you’d like to become a monthly sustainer, follow this link.
Our water bill, our rent, our electric bill, our small staff – each of these are mission critical expenses that can’t be paid without your financial support. Please help. Donate today! Thank you for keeping our doors open!
It’s the time when this year’s wild babies are first showing their independence, climbing from nests, stepping out on a limb. But one false step, and that independence comes crashing down.
Inside the box, a young owl, a “brancher” who’s left the nest but isn’t ready to fly, waits to be returned to their family.
Late in the afternoon the day before Mother’s Day, such a misstep brought a very young Barred Owl (Strix varia) down to the ground in Sequoia Park. Someone walking among the tall Redwoods saw the young, fluffy bird and gave Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax a call. Clinic staff went to the scene, and found a young “brancher” (a term birders use to describe a young bird after they first leave the nest but before they can fly) who’d lost their footing. Staff decided to bring the owl into our clinic for a quick exam.
With no injuries and in good health, we made plans to return the owl to their family the next day.
HWCC assistant rehabilitation manager, Lucinda Adamson, scans the tall trees for signs of the young owl’s parents.
No matter the species, it is much better to return healthy wild babies and juveniles to their parents when possible. We do a pretty good job of providing care for owlets at HWCC/bax, but no one can provide care the way a parent can. Keeping wild families together is one of our primary goals during the busy wild baby seasons of Spring and Summer.
So with the young owl in a box, our wild reunion team went back to Sequoia Park to return them to their family.
The tree with the nest cavity was located and the owl was given a lift up to the rough bark where they could get a good grasp. The young owl immediately began to climb toward the only home they’ve ever known.“You have to climb before you can fly.” – an old Owl proverb.Twenty feet and climbing!Focused on the ascent, a three week old Owl shows the world what free solo really looks like!Everything happens under the parent’s watchful gaze.
Had this owlet fallen to the ground in a more wild setting than a city park in the center of town, most likely they would have managed getting themselves back into the tree and out of harm’s way. However in a highly used public park, the possibility for the wrong kind of human intervention was simply to great to do nothing.
Every juvenile or baby wild animal that we admit at HWCC/bax is analyzed for the potential for reunion with their family, or even fostering them to another family of the same species. It’s a big relief for all when we are able to successfully reunite wild families. For those who are truly orphans, about half of our patients each year, we have protocols and methods to help them reach true independence with their wildness intact.
You can help! In fact without your help, we’d dry up and blow away like one hit wonders from the 70s! Your support keeps us open, prepared, and available to help all of our wild neighbors when their proximity to civilization leads to trouble. Thank you for helping make sure that our mission is kept on track and our work is supported. Thank you for donating and thank you for your love of the wild.
At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax, we treat well over a thousand orphaned or injured wild animals each year. But we help thousands more without ever getting close to them! Every Spring and Summer day our phone rings dozens of times as people run across wild animals in strange situations. Maybe they are in a conflict with a wild animal who is using their home as a den site, or a nest has been knocked down when limbing a tree.
A sunny warm Sunday in Spring is a perfect time to practice our phone skills! Here one our awesome interns (Erika Espino) plays the role of a caller who has a problem with a denning Raccoon
Many of these problems can be solved on the phone! We’ve helped hundreds of people co-exist with Raccoons by coaching them through convincing a mother Raccoon to den somewhere besides their crawlspace. We’ve assisted hundreds more over the years in getting baby birds back in their nests, or rebuilding their nests if they’ve been unintentionally destroyed.
Solving conflicts over the phone isn’t easy! Often, people who call are very frustrated and a little bit mad at the wild animal trying to use their space. Patience is usually required in order to get through this part of the call. But we always remember: The caller wants our help. They want to do the right thing. That’s why they called us.
And our solutions have to work! There are always those in any community who will leap to the lethal solution. If our program doesn’t get the job done, there is a very good chance that the caller will opt for violence and be forever convinced that humane solutions to conflict aren’t effective.
An HSU wildlife student and one of our wonderful volunteers (Alex Rivera) practices helping resolve denning Raccoon problems.
When you are on the phone with someone who is upset about the actions of a wild animal, and that animal’s life is on the line, the moment can be very stressful. As with all stressful tasks, preparation is critical!
We offer volunteers and staff regular opportunities to sharpen their phone skills with our Phone Workshop, which Bird Ally X developed. Using the details of actual calls, our participants practice helping various callers resolve a conflict or get a wild animal the care they need. Teaching the next generation of wildlife care providers the skills we’ve all acquired over the decades of practice is an important part of our mission. Operating Humboldt Wildlife Care Center not only provides help for the injured and orphaned wild neighbors of our region, and not only resolves wildlife conflicts peacefully saving perhaps thousands more each year, but our small facility on the edge of Humboldt Bay acts as our lab and ongoing classroom to develop and teach effective ways of caring for our wild neighbors and promoting co-existence with the Wild.
Your support makes this work possible! Thank you! Want to help? Please donate today! DONATE
We’re renovating and expanding our fawn housing this month to get ready for the orphaned young deer who will soon be coming our way. Each year we care for 6-12 fawns and our housing needs work!
Expanding the available space for our orphaned fawns will cost about $2000. We need to complete the work by the middle of May in order for it to benefit this year’s orphaned babies.
Every Spring and Summer, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center treats as many as 90 orphaned Opossums (Didelphis virginiana). We usually begin to admit them in mid-April – just around the corner! Nearly all of these young marsupials are brought to us after being found in the pouch of their mother, who’d been hit by a car. The second biggest human threat Opossums and their babies face that we see is being attacked by the family dog.
Sometimes, although rarely, the mother Opossum survives being hit by a car without life-threatening injuries. At times like these we are able to keep the wild family together.
There are people who run Opossums down on the road on purpose. Who hasn’t heard some yahoo bragging about this very fact. Who hasn’t heard an endless array of roadkill jokes, complete with point systems for keeping score? In fact, both informal and rigorous studies have demonstrated that somewhere between 3 and 6 per cent of drivers will swerve to intentionally hit an animal on the side of the road. The number of animals who are killed intentionally when no swerving is required remains unstudied.
Our education committee is always working on new ways to show people the Awesome Opossum. Here HWCC/bax volunteer coordinator, Ruth Mock, makes some very important points about Opossums using puppets, science and the warmth of our kinship. These go a long way toward promoting co-existence with Opossums and all of our wild neighbors!
Now, the simple act of driving puts all of us at risk of unintentionally colliding with others, other cars, pedestrians, wild neighbors, family dogs and house cats. It is very distressing to unintentionally kill with our cars and most of us have probably done so, and we can all commiserate together.
Still, it seems obvious that many of the Opossums who are hit by vehicles, since they are large and easily seen in headlights (their name, “Opossum”, is an Algonquin word, purported to mean “white animal” or “white dog”), are hit intentionally.
A growing orphan gets their weight checked and progress noted! Opossums are among the fastest maturing orphaned mammals that HWCC/bax treats. Opossums live short lives, by our standards, and they make up for it by producing a lot of babies! A mother may have as many as 12 babies in her pouch!
Opossums, according to the internet, are very useful animals. That they eat a large number of ticks seems to be the chief reason to let them be… That a fellow traveler on this one green and blue Earth needs to have utility to human civilization in order that they be spared the worst our kind has to offer is perhaps the real lesson in that strategy of advocacy.
Intentionally running down Opossums may be hard to stop through education. Is it really simple, curable ignorance that would cause a person to act with such wanton destructiveness? Seems unlikely.
A very young Opossum, only recently separated from his mother who’d been hit by a car.
That makes it incumbent on us to find ways to protect Opossums where we can. Road designs that prevent small animals from entering the roadway and offer crossing sites that are easy and natural to use are a great idea, but expensive to implement everywhere that they’re needed. Being extra-vigilant and remembering that in a region like ours, with many rural highways following streams and criss-crossing the bottoms, wild neighbors are likely to be seen – to expect to see wild animals and be prepared to give them safe passage.
Also, we need to remember that wild neighbors have a right to move freely through the terrain, without being confronted by dogs. Supervising our family dogs’ night-time potty excursions is our responsibility.
An Opossum has quite the weaponry on board in the event of such a confrontation. First, they can hiss and show teeth. Opossums have a lot of pointy teeth. Second, if that doesn’t work, they can pretend to be dead and allow a foul smelling secretion to ooze from their rectum. Deadly.
In other words, Opossums present absolutely no threat to human households, other than the occasional ocurrence of an Opossum coming in through the cat door for some cat food.
And finally, when all else fails, if you find an Opossum who has been attacked by dogs, or hit by a car, even if apparently dead, check to see if she is a mother with live babies in her pouch. At least we can give these little ones a second chance.
Opossums have been a part of North America for a very long time – they have a right to be here. They exist from sea to sea, their range limited only by snow and winter cold.
Two young Opossums on the day of their release, exploring the wide-world for the first time.
Each Opossum we raise, of the 80 or so we admit each year, costs a certain amount. Milk replacer formula, heating pads, solid food, housing rent, caregivers, all of it is provided by your generous support. Without your help, we would not be here. Without your help, none of our wild neighbors would get a second chance. With your help, we can prevent some of these injuries and the need for a second chance, and with your support we’ll be here when care is necessary.
Thank you for your love of our wild neighbors! Thank you helping us all co-exist peacefully.
Last year, between the 1160 patients BAX treated at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, and the 440 birds admitted during the botulism outbreak at the Lower Klamath Refuge north of Shasta, we provided direct care for 1600 wild animals.
We provided this care on approximately $110,000. (Thank you to everyone who donated!) While it is certainly the case that some patients cost more in care than others, still, this means that we spent an average of $68.75 per patient. Think about that. On less than 70 dollars per patient, we successfully treated and released hundreds of our wild neighbors.
Believe it or not, this remarkable success is also a failure.
Do you already know the value of our work and want to support us right now? DONATE HERE
We never have more in the bank than what will get us through the month. And at $70 per patient, we have absolutely no room to cut our expenses. Should we spend even less? Of course not.
Our goals for HWCC include expanding the care we provide, as well as expanding our education and outreach efforts promoting co-existence with our wild neighbors.
Yet, each Spring and Summer we struggle to make certain we have the food and medicine we need, that the electric and phone bills are paid, that our water bill is paid, that our rent is paid. Our staff is grossly underpaid and even so, meeting our payroll is a stressful struggle.
OUR GOAL FOR 2019: $150,000 RAISED BY THE END OF THE YEAR. We’ve set targets of $50,000 by April 30, $100,000 by August 31, and $150,000 by December 31! Right now we are $35,000 away from our April 30 target. Reaching it seems impossible, but not reaching it means another year entering our busy wild baby season uncertain of where the resources will come from. Please help us get close to our goal!
Chestnut-backed Chickadee nestlings receive initial hydration after their nest on a utility pole was accidentally destroyed while PG&E performed maintenance. Our doors are open every day just so innocent victims like these youngsters have somewhere to go.
For the success of our mission, for the care of our patients, for the education and outreach that will prevent injuries, orphanings and other harms to our wild neighbors, we need to find more resources.
When Bird Ally X took over the management of HWCC in 2011, we took on an organization that operated on even less, with no full-time staff, with a facility that was only sporadically open, and with no capacity to provide quality care for more than a few species of raptors and songbirds. Aquatic birds (50% of our caseload) were sent 300 miles away to a facility in the Bay Area.
This American Wigeon was the last of the botulism patients from the Klamath Refuge, who was transferred to HWCC to complete her rehabilitation. She was released in the Arcata Marsh, where she very well might have been headed during fall migration anyway!
Frankly, in 2011, the reputation of this facility was in shambles. Since BAX took on HWCC, we’ve developed the clinic into a topnotch wildlife hospital which has the respect of our colleagues from around the nation and the state. We’ve established a program to train new wildlife rehabilitators that has seen over 60 successful graduates, many of whom have gone on to work in various aspects of serving wildlife here and around the country.
Often wild patients who are difficult to treat, or presenting unusual problems are sent to us from around the state. We’ve admitted and successfully treated an Osprey sent us from Modesto, an Albatross rescued from a ship in Brookings, Deer fawns from Redding, and more.
Meet the March 2019, Oiled Wildlife Care Network Basic Responder Training graduates! Then of these awesome women are staff, interns and volunteers at HWCC/bax. Want to be a part of this team? Volunteering at HWCC is how you join!
In 2011, HWCC was not seen as an organization fit to be a viable member of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network. Since Bird Ally X took over the management and operation of HWCC, we’ve joined the OWCN, and added valuable team members to the roster of pre-trained oil spill responders available to help in the event of an oil spill in our area, or across the state.
In short, our effort to build HWCC into a respected wildlife care facility that is also a teaching hospital as well as a working lab developing real world improvements to the care all wildlife rehabilitators can provide has been largely successful, even as our resources are scarce! Look what we can do with very little! Imagine what we can accomplish with a little more!
A Western-screech Owl, in the moment before he flies back to his wild and free life, healthy and whole!
To sustain these advancements and build on them, we need your help now. A shoestring budget is common for missions such as ours, but we still need a sustainable flow of resources, especially as we move into our busy season.
Our goal this year is to raise $150,000 – and if we maintain the caseload of last year, that would raise our average sending per patient from $69 to $93 – still a fraction of our real costs, but a big improvement, an improvement that would reduce the stress on our staff, which by itself would enhance the quality of the care we’re able to provide
PLEASE HELP US REACH OUR GOAL! HELP US HELP OUR WILD NEIGHBORS! PLEASE DONATE TODAY!
Late Winter storms were tough on our region. Rain seemed to fall for days without ceasing and many of us suffered from chronic wet socks and an unshakeable chill. And that endless rain was tough on more than the human community.
In the last two weeks of February, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center admitted 8 birds of prey who were found struggling, their hunting grounds covered in water, or other challenges that caused more than a few area raptors to go hungry.
Young Peregrine Falcon found near Crescent City, mildly anemic and thin. Two weeks of domestic quail (purchased frozen from a supplier in Southern California) and a safe place to recover and he was ready to get back into action
A Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) was found struggling near Lake Earl outside of Crescent City, too weak to fly, as well as two Red-tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) from the same area, Crescent City and Brookings, Oregon, just north of Crescent City.
Found in Ferndale, covered in mud and with a deep cut on one of her toes, this Red-tailed Hawk gained over 300 grams (approximately 25% of her body mass) in the month she was in our care. That’s a lot of rats. (about 60 of them actually)Red-shouldered Hawk, found in the middle of a gravel road near Ferndale wastes no time leaping back into his wild freedom after a little bit more than a week in care.This adult female Red-tailed Hawk, found in Crescent City grounded with her feathers caked in mud, was a fierce and formidable patient. She refused to eat for the first few days, so un-accepting was she of the indignity of captivity. So we cut her rats in half and she was appetized beyond the reach of her principled disgust with all things human. She started eating. She was released after 10 days in care.
As the Eel River began to flood we admitted five hawks, four Red-tailed Hawks and one Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus), from its bottom lands, all of them displaced, wet, cold and hungry.
We can only surmise that there were other wild neighbors who didn’t survive the drenching storms of this winter. The last two weeks of February, during the rains, we admitted 31 wild animals for care, including several songbirds, ducks and gulls. During storms, simply because fewer people are outside, fewer struggling wild animals are found.
Another adult Red-tailed Hawk, found in Brookings after the storms. He was so thin and anemic at the time of his rescue that we weren’t sure he would recover, but here he is a month later, healthy, whole and back at home in the wide sky.
Right now, we are preparing for our busy season, yet also having a busy winter. Already our caseload is up 20% over last year, which was our busiest year so far. We need to raise $50,000 by April 30 to be able to stay open, with our staff and housing ready to meet whatever comes our way. These are trying times for many, and it’s no less true for our wild neighbors. We need to be here for them when they need us. Only your support will make that happen. Please donate today. Thank you for your love of the wild!! DONATE HERE
