Tangled Up and Bruised

Posted on November 19, 2016November 19, 2016 by Monte Merrick

How this bird was ever rescued was the product of the two ingredients we rely on the most: the unlikely timings of coincidence and intuition combined with the intentional timing of preparedness. Early in the morning last Tuesday, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center staff rehabilitator, Lucinda Adamson, woke up early from a dream about seabirds. Now Tuesday is Lucinda’s “Saturday” – the first day of her weekend – and getting up in the early hours of the day and heading to the beach might not be the first thing she wanted to do, but she thought she might as well go have a look. So off she went, equipped wth towels and a net, in case she found any seabirds stranded.

The surf has been rough and the waves large for most of November – and our clinic has been admitting more seabirds. We currently have several in care, recently released several more and will likely see many more seabirds before the end of the year.

[Yes, we need your help! Every day of every week of every month of every year we are here for the injured and orphaned wild neighbors. From Chipmunks to Pelicans, we are ready to help who ever comes through our door! Help us meet our critical November goal of $7000 ]

As soon as Lucinda got to Samoa Beach she found a bird. A Pacific Loon (Gavia pacifica) tangled in a lost scrap of fishing net. Scooping the bird up she brought him into the clinic just as staff was beginning the workday. Some mild teasing about working on her day off was in order, as we moved to admit the entangled loon.

On the beach at the moment of rescue -, any loon on a beach is a loon with a problem. If you see something say something!

Derelict fishing gear, improperly discarded fishing line, hooks, and lures are estimated to kill thousands of wild animals each year along California’s coast. At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, we don’t see many birds entangled, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. This Loon was found early in the morning, when the tide was low, during inclement weather on a deserted beach. That he was found at all is incredible.

Fortunately, although both feet, both wings and even the bird’s head and neck were caught in the net, no injuries except for a few mild abrasions were noted. The net slipped off easily. After a quick examination, we realized that bird was indeed very lucky – no serious injuries, thin but not yet dangerously thin, and still very alert and strong. After the exam we put the Loon in our new seabird pool to test his feather condition. Again, he was in better shape than many – waterproof, immediately diving, able to stay in the cold water and thrive. Now all he needs is time to regain lost weight.

The small scrap of net that had very nearly killed this Pacific Loon.

A moment during the examination after three days in care.

In our pool, waterproof and doing well – with a good prognosis, this loon is beating the odds.

This Pacific Loon is one of the luckier victims of derelict fishing gear. Most die at sea. Loons that make it to shore are often so debilitated that their chances for recovery are poor. Less than 50% of our patients impacted by are able to be released. If it wasn’t for your support – none would be. You provide the resources that enable us to take care of less common patients like this Pacific Loon, as well as pay staff members like Lucinda, who’s dedication and willingness to follow her early morning intuition rescued this bird from certain death. We rely on you, now and always. Thank you for your support!

Pumpkins, Squash and Apples Make Healthy Raccoons

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Monte Merrick

Last week we put out a call on Humboldt Wildlife Care Center’s Facebook page seeking donations of pumpkins, squash, fruit and more to help us feed the orphaned juvenile raccoons still in our care. And people have responded! Right now, with 18 Raccoons in care, we are feeding over 20 pounds of squash each day! And we still have over a month of care to provide. Your donations are helping a lot! Thank you! Here are two members of the always awesome California Conservation Corps dropping off a load of pumpkins!

Your help, in the form of donated food items, blankets, sheets, towels and other necessities are always appreciated! Financial support is awesome too – it helps us buy medicine and pay our utilities, rent and other bills that require good old-fashioned legal tender! If you can help us meet our goal of $7000 in donations this month, click here!

Thank you for helping us help wild animals!

Standing with Mother Earth

Posted on November 14, 2016November 15, 2016 by Monte Merrick

The results of the 2016 Presidential election surprised a lot of us. As conservationists, as lovers of the Wild, as passionate defenders of Mother Earth, many already felt that our government was not being authentically responsive to the gravity of our situation – the rising seas, the dying seas, the disappearing species, the endless stream of loss. And now we are facing an administration that has thrown what slender legal protections our natural world currently has in question; for example, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Power Act. Even if many of these protections were not enough, stripping them is certainly no improvement.

Even more disturbing is the apparent rise in cruel and hateful acts since the election. Each of us likely knows someone who has been accosted or assaulted, or who has seen strange and ersatz displays of triumphant power – from ignorantly scrawled racist graffiti to images associated with genocide and other crimes against humanity – nazi swastikas and confederate flags – on proud display. Even US flags, overlarge and billowing from the backs of pickup trucks, seem to announce a new reign of bullies in ascendancy.

In the days and weeks before the election, it became undeniably apparent that for many Americans, sexual assault, bragging of sexual assault, and blatant misogyny – the hatred of women – were not disqualifications to hold the highest office. For centuries now the connection between destruction of the land and the violation of women has been conclusively established. For those actively engaged in the protection of Mother Earth, dismantling misogyny has been integral to our work and imperative for our success.

Coupled, the stripping of legal protection for the wild and the unrestrained rise of the bully will have a negative impact on wildlife and wildlife care.

And yet even the cure may have serious repercussions for wildlife and wildlife care. While the work of large organizations to protect and strengthen federal laws that protect the wild is important; there is a real possibility that the efforts to protect what we love at the national level will absorb limited resources, sucking the oxygen out of the room, stranding small organizations who operate on the slimmest of budgets – the truly grassroots – which is where the wild lives and has her babies.

In our work, trauma, recovery, death and healing live side by side. Everyday, a gull might fly from her caregivers, free again, while another is admitted with a wing severed, hanging at the shoulder, wet, red bone under an exam light, fear in the gull’s eyes, a return to his ancestors the only hope.

People who work for the environment, for Mother Earth, have struggled a long time with the knowledge of how our society is destroying the world, destroying what all that we love depends on… Many of us were heartbroken long before this election – by the senseless destruction, the avarice, the cold calculations that value the fool’s gold beneath the forest more than the forest.

We’ve watched in horror while the losses have mounted – Mother Nature has been on the run since long before the 1970s. It’s seemed that nothing we’ve done has changed the world – a victory here, a victory there, while the machine only gets bigger, more costly, more destructive. And politics can seem a useless tool against this machine. Each president in his turn has sacrificed our collective future to some open grinder, a mountain range torn apart here, an ice sheet collapsing there…

We all know it and feel it – in our bones that are made of earth, by Mother Earth.

We must ensure that wildlife rehabilitators around the country are not stymied by the flow of support to large national organizations, even as we support their work. We will still need, especially in a world where callousness, where brutality, where thuggery, and hatred for mother earth are elevated, we will still need compassion for the injured, for the orphaned, and for the marginalized… and no one is more marginalized than wild animals… just drive down any road in your town and see the raccoon dead on the shoulder lying there bloating with not a resource turned her way.

Many people in our line of work shared emphatically their sense that this was our last shot at correcting the horrifying course that we’ve been on for decades, even as we likely all knew that we couldn’t stop this machine by replacing its operator.

Now, even inside the nausea and the fear that many of us feel, there is a way forward. There is a revolution underway – a revolution led by grandmothers, as it should be. This revolution is not for supremacy or for power. This revolution is for Mother Earth, for the wild, for the water, for the air, for the forests, for the deserts, even for us, humans of every color, of every gender, of every language.

There’s never really been a way for the USA to lead this revolution – the USA is largely responsiblefor the revolution’s necessity, through its policies that place corporate greed over the needs of the environment (i.e., wolf-eradication, fracking, mountain top removal coal mining). That USA is one of the revolution’s targets. The people of the USA have an obligation to take the necessary steps to protect the lives their government threatens.

As Dr Martin Luther King Jr said nearly 50 years ago – this country is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” This election was the voice of that America’s violence. It’s not our voice. Now we’ve got to stand with those who protect the water, protect the air, protect the wild, protect the people.

We can honor life. We can tune the life within us to the life outside us. We can join the grandmothers, the water protectors – we can #StandwithStandingRock

We can support those who provide the care that the victims of the onslaught of violence need. Wildlife rehabilitators everywhere are a first line defense against barbaric cruelty, against totalitarian indifference to life, against the crude callous disregard for the rich and central inner life of each of us.

Mother Earth does not forget the individual. Mother Earth works at the individual level. It is individuals who are born, who live, who dream, who study the rain-cleaned air, who gaze from the high rock over the plain, who hunger and thirst, who dance and who mate, who build and create, who suffer and die. It is only individuals who can actually stand. And we stand with Mother Earth.

She really is our only hope.

Please, in these perilous times, wherever you live, remember your local wildlife care providers. We all need you.

Shocked Yellow-rumped Warbler Thought Everything Was Clear! Didn’t See the Glass!

Posted on November 10, 2016 by Monte Merrick

Last Friday a compassionate young man at his job site off Myrtle Avenue in Eureka found this Yellow -rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata) on the ground beneath a window. After giving him a safe place to rest realized the bird needed care.

How alarming it is to see the passage ahead, the clear sky, the chosen path and believe it so much that you move in that direction without question, only to come to a hard and brutal invisible barrier. Window strikes kill hundreds of millions of birds in the United States each year!

This little guy was lucky. He was quickly brought into care and received anti-inflammatory medicine and a safe place to recover. Three days later he was released! (see video below of him back in trees, looking for insects)

If a bird strikes your window the first thing you should is move him gently into a box and call us. While a bird may fly off after an hour or so of rest, we don’t know that they are truly able to survive without care. It is surmised that many birds die of cerebral hemorrhging in the first 24 hours after the collision.

For ideas on how to prevent window strikes, check out this site.

As always, we are here to help wild animals who are innocently caught in the many pitfalls, traps and obstacles our modern world puts in their path. Your help ensures that we will always be here. Thank you for your generous support!

A Personal Letter from one of our Co-founders – Why We Need You.

Posted on November 7, 2016November 7, 2016 by Monte Merrick

Dear Supporters and fellow Wildlife Lovers;

I feel a pressing need to address you directly, as a person, as a wildlife rehabilitator, as someone committed to correcting the injustices our built world consistently inflicts on our wild neighbors, and also, and perhaps most significantly, as the person who is most directly responsible for communicating our work, our goals, and our needs to you, our supporters, followers and fellow wildlife lovers.

Talking about our work is easy. I am deeply committed to it. I love what we do. I feel privileged to be able to work so closely with wild animals. I am grateful for all that having been so close to unfettered freedom has taught me. Standing up in front of a room, putting my thoughts on paper, posting on the internet, is natural for me – as natural as rising early every summer morning and crossing the Arcata bottoms on my way to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, our clinic in Bayside, to prep food for a couple dozen orphaned raccoons, offer mealworms to nestling songbirds, and return calls from people who’ve found an injured wild animal, or help them resolve a conflict with an animal who has wandered across one of our arbitrary and unnatural lines we’ve drawn between our world and theirs.

[You can click here to Donate Now]

My comfort zone includes some pretty awful things – broken wings, a car-smashed Opossum mother with babies still in her pouch, a thrush torn apart by a housecat and still breathing. My training and experience have taught me how to set aside immediate feelings and take action. It’s what I do. It’s what all wildlife rehabilitators do – every day of the year – here at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, and in every other clinic – from well-funded organizations with a million dollar budget to the garage and shed of a “backyard rehabber” – which is by far the most common.

BAX supports all wildlife rehabilitators with education and workshops. As rehabilitators we know how critical good information is to do the job that we are each so passionate about – it’s one of our three primary missions.

We also provide direct care for wild animals in distress – at HWCC, but also as responders to oil spills around our state and beyond. One of our co-founders, Marie Travers, is currently in British Columbia, Canada, working with Focus Wildlife responding to a maritime accident that spilled thousand of gallons of fuel into a pristine habitat near the Great Bear Rainforest, one of the largest remaining unspoiled temperate rainforests in the world.

Promoting co-existence with the Wild is another of our critical missions. This takes many forms, including what you are reading right now. We go to schools. We go to conferences. We rely on the support of local media to help us bring a voice for the voiceless.

Arguing for justice is difficult and emotionally costly work, but it is very gratifying. The desire for justice, the urge to rise to the defense of the marginalized, is common, and who is more marginalized than the skunk hit by a car and carelessly, thoughtlessly, left by the side of the road, bloating and forgotten? There is an adage among conservationists, that “every victory is temporary, every loss permanent.” We feel the truth of this each day. And by and large, we remain undaunted.

But for me, there is one task that requires me to steel my nerves, gather my courage, and plunge in. And that is asking for your support – your money – your check. It’s obvious, of course, that all of what I’ve described above – the thousands of animals we’ve cared for, the thousands more we’ve prevented from becoming casualties, the people we’ve reached, the wild lives and the human lives we’ve helped – can’t be done in our world without money. So, regardless of my discomfort, I ask for donations. I ask often. Some people might be good at it. Maybe I am, I don’t know. I just know that what we need and what we have don’t match. So comfortable or not, good at it or not, I have to do it – just like I’m doing now.

Every month I set a goal. The last few months the goal was $7000 – honestly, that’s not quite enough, and if it wasn’t for the holiday and end of year fundraising, as well as a reliable foundation grant, we wouldn’t meet our needs on $84,000 a year – a terrible crisis – we can’t spend what we don’t have. Yet, the last two months we haven’t even come close to meeting our $7000 goal. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried.

Worrying about the care we provide is part of my job – I accept it – worrying about our volunteers and staff – that they’re being treated well and getting the opportunities to learn they want and need – is also part of my job. Worrying about the money? It’s part of my job, but it’s the one that scares me the most. The other aspects are in my control. Our quality of care, our intern program – those are ours to make as good as we can. The support required, well, that depends on me asking, but it really depends on our community providing. We are only as strong as you make us.

We have a relatively small budget. In our dreams, we’d have $250,000 a year to spend. We’d be able to fund every program we’ve designed and pay the staff meager salaries to get it done. As it is, we make it all work, for now, on about $100,000 per year. We have one full time and one part time staff person. Everything else goes to our patients and our wildlife ambassador birds. Right now, we are $10,000 short of our usual annual donations. So far, we are continuing to meet our mission – you can scroll though our past stories to see the work we’ve done – from returning a local Bald Eagle who’d suffered lead poisoning to the wild, to delivering our aquatic bird workshop to rehabilitators on the Oregon coast. Yet, we have expenses, such as food and medicine, still unpaid from our busy summer season. Our suppliers know that we work hard, but that doesn’t mean they give their products away.

Now as wintering seabirds and geese return to our region, our expenses will increase again. Additionally, this is the time of year when repairs and maintenance to our facility must be completed.

In short, we need your help.

As this year’s contentious election season comes to a close, and the anxiety of our uncertain future looms – climate chaos, toxic spills, international instability, here at home, no matter what happens, our wild neighbors will need us. Wild animals will still be the most marginalized victims of the hazards of the world we humans have built. And we’ll need to be here for them.

Only your support makes that possible. Which is why I fight my discomfort and ask for your generous donation. Please, we need you. [You can click here to Donate Now]

Thank you for your past support, and thank you for enduring my constant appeals.

Take care,
Monte Merrick
co-director Bird Ally X, director Humboldt Wildlife Care Center

Halloween Mask? No Problem!

Posted on October 31, 2016October 31, 2016 by Monte Merrick

It’s Halloween and two of our Raccoon patients were released! These masked juveniles won’t be trick or treating the neighborhoods however. They’ll be strictly wild, thanks to your support!

raccoon-11-31-16

There is still time to help us close in on our October goal of $7000 – although time is running out! Hopefully we won’t turn into a pumpkin at midnight!

Click here to support our work!

Help Us Help Our Wild Neighbors

Posted on October 29, 2016October 29, 2016 by Monte Merrick

We have a million things to do every day. Patients in care require feeding, bandage changes, check-ups, and the like. Patient housing needs to be cleaned, sometimes several times a day. The phone rings regularly with new tasks waiting on the other end of the line – wildlife rescue, a conflict with a wild animal to resolve, a question. [Please help us close the gap for October! We are over $3000 away from our goal of $7000 this month! Your support is the only thing that will get us there! Donate here, if you can]

A young Peregrine Falcon is given rehydrating fluids after an initial exam.

Pools must be maintained. The floor needs to be mopped. Supplies purchased. Bills paid. New volunteers need to be trained. Staff and interns meet to discuss our work and learn.

Caring for wild patients requires many skills. We prepare and deliver workshops and books as part of our mission to advance the quality of care that wild animals can receive. We travel to conferences to work with colleagues from around the state and around the country to learn new skills.

BAX co-founder Shannon Riggs, DVM instructs workshop attendee at recent California Council for Wildlife Rehabilitators (CCWR) annual symposium.

BAX co-founder Vann Masvidal in a teaching moment at 2016 CCWR symposium.

BAX co-founders Marie Travers, January Bill, and Vann Masvidal teach a workshop on cleaning oiled marine birds at a workshop we delivered in Morro Bay in 2014.

We follow public policy and proposed legislation that impacts our society’s relationship with nature. We attend public meetings so that we can advocate effectively on behalf of the Wild.

BAX/HWCC staff and volunteers attended the Fish and Game Commission’s meeting in Fortuna where it was decided to ban all Bobcat trapping in our state!

Our Wildlife Ambassador birds visit hundreds of school kids of all ages each year with a message of peaceful co-existence with the wild.

These are each important and no matter what the circumstances, must be accomplished. Sure we prioritize when our caseload is large – we don’t schedule trainings and workshops during baby season – we don’t work on book chapters when the pool is full of Western Grebes. Eventually, though, each task is critical to our mission.

In the winter, our “quiet” season is only a storm away from a major and sudden increase in our patients in care… we need to be ready for this at any time! Functioning pools and a freezer full of fish are mandatory!

And then there is the task that so many of us dread. Yet without success here, all other work comes to a stop – the task of asking you, our neighbors, for help.

We need you. And at this time of year, we need you the most. We still have babies in care from the summer – nearly two dozen juvenile raccoons! We have aviaries that need repair and this is the time of year to do it! We have fish bills and water bills and our landlord likes to see a rent check once a month too. Staff must be paid! (or they leave to find a job that does!)

Our patients vary greatly in mass, but in spirit each is exactly the same size – infinite.

Food, medicine, electric, water, phone, internet – each of these is mission critical. Even garbage collection costs money!

The only source for money that we can rely on daily, weekly, monthly, yearly is you,

Our largest single project, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center is the only all species wildlife clinic in Northwestern California! We serve a region, one of the wildest in our state, that is larger than New Jersey!

HWCC rehabilitator Lucinda Adamson listens for adults while attempting to reunite this juvenile Western Screech-owl with his family.

Right now, perhaps like many, we are struggling to make ends meet. Each month, our mission is made more difficult by this struggle. We need to raise at least $7000 by October 31 and we are only half way there. We need you. Our region needs you. Why? Because our injured, orphaned and threatened wild neighbors need us. Please help. Click here to Donate Now… every little bit helps… big bits help too! Thank you for your support and for your love of wildlife!

The real reward of our labor – releasing healthy fully recovered patients, such as this Great Egret (Ardea alba) we treated this summer, back to their free and wild lives.

We Stand With Standing Rock Against the Dakota Access Pipeline

Posted on October 25, 2016October 25, 2016 by Monte Merrick

Since August, news of the people of Standing Rock, North Dakota, a Lakota community (read Standing Rock statement here), who are working to protect their water supply, their livelihoods, their ancestral lands, their scared sites and the integrity of Mother Earth against a pipeline that is being built through their territory without their approval has spread around the world. Thousands of people have come, some from thousands of miles away, including Ecuador and Northern Europe, to stand with Standing Rock and join the water protectors. (read Standing Rock statement here)

In the course of peacefully defending Mother Earth, protectors have been arrested, pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed, and attacked by trained dogs. Even journalists at the scene have been arrested and charged.

Bird Ally X stands with the courageous and committed protectors of Standing Rock. As wildlife rehabilitators, we are on the frontline of the incessant war that industrial civilization wages against the Wild. We see, each and every day of our lives, the suffering, injury and death that is recklessly and thoughtlessly caused by the machinery of the Anthropocene – Falcons hit by cars, Gulls tangled in derelict fishing gear, Raccoon shot and trapped and their babies orphaned. We see it all: from the Swainson’s Thrush torn apart by a carelessly kept house cat to a Brown Pelican breeding colony washed over in an spilled oil, killing most of the young chicks.

BAX staff have responded acorss the continent to catastrophic oil spills, whether caused by shipping accidents, train derailments or pipeline breaches. We have waded knee-deep through Tar Sands, finding the oil soaked remains of entire families of Common Mergansers, Clark’s Grebes and Common Loons. We’ve pulled 50 year old turtles from oil-wrecked rivers. We’ve been in the dark core of the industrial project and seen the wreckage, the loss, and the pain that Mother Earth and her offspring suffer at the unthinking hand of a machine run amok.

We’ve watched as patient after patient dies. Yet we’ve also stood silently in joy when those we’ve been able to help are restored to their wild and free lives. We’ve seen how our own lives can be used to restore justice each day. We know that direct action, that committed action, saves lives.

Our name is our mission: Bird Ally X. We are in alliance with wild birds. We are in alliance with the wild. We use the word ‘ally’ the way our grandparents would – we are an equally staked partner in the fight. We are not here to help industrial civilization feel better about itself. We are here to fight for the rights of Mother Earth. We treat her offspring when they are injured, orphaned or sickened by the human built world. We help our colleagues who are engaged in the same tasks. We lend our voice to the wild and act on behalf of the preservation of our beautiful, life-giving world. As Henry Thoreau observed, “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

We are encouraged by the bravery of the Standing Rock community. We stand with Standing Rock and all protectors of Mother Earth. We stand with the Wild.

Learn more here.

Limited Edition Merganser T-shirt – Art by Laura Corsiglia

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Monte Merrick

Mergansers are awesome ducks. Everyone thinks so! Now you can support our work and show the world your love for these remarkable birds. Celebrating the mysterious beauty of the female Common Merganser, these shirts were printed locally by Blackjack Humboldt taken from original art made by internationally known artist Laura Corsiglia (who happens to be a co-founder and co-director of Bird Ally X! Laura also takes most of our photographs!)

Available in many sizes, the t-shirts are 100% organic cotton. But we have a limited number! We’re offering them for $35! Stop by our clinic in Bayside to get yours! We’re open every day from 9 to 5. Not in the area? Well you can order online (there will be a $4.99 shipping/handling fee)! Just click here.

It’s a thrill to be able to offer these shirts. The original drawing was done as a gift for another co-director but it’s too lovely to keep to ourselves. Vote Merganser!