Prevention is the highest form of care!
Author: Monte Merrick
Did an open dumpster marinate this gull?
Western Gull contaminated by food gets emergency bath. Oil spill response techniques can be used on greasy tomato sauce too!
On a Thursday morning in late October, Eureka PD’s animal control officer, Rob Patton, pulled up in his truck with another patient for us. He’s one of our best repeat customers. Whether a raccoon baby, an opossum, a snake, or a songbird found in the road, Officer Patton does what he can for the wild animals of Eureka who get in harm’s way.
This time he had an adult Western Gull. Elissa Blair, one of BAX/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center’s volunteer staff, had first look at the bird. Before setting eyes on him she knew he smelled like rotten meat. And when she got him out of the box she discovered he was bright orange.
Western Gull in care, contaminated by pasta sauce?
Sometimes, it’s hard to know exactly what happened to cause an injury to a wild animal. Cat bites, window strikes, being hit by a vehicle – these are relatively easy to figure out. First theories about what had happened to this gull included dyes, paints, food coloring and more, all purposefully done by someone simply to torture this animal. Well, it is certainly true that such people exist. We treat far too may animals who were injured by intentional acts of cruelty.
But this case, a gull found near the restaurants of Old Town Eureka, the smell of rancid meat, and feathers the color of tomato sauce stains, we finally determined that the bird must have been “dumpster-diving” and gotten into somebody’s very old and discarded supper. For wildlife, restaurant grease traps and dumpsters are a source of food that can have a terrible cost. If this gull hadn’t been rescued, as weather got colder, his lack of waterproof feathers would have started to limit his choices, until he was forced to scavenge dumpsters only and rely on them for his only nutrition. Soon he would be thin and in poor health. Soon after that, he would be dead.
Fortunately, perhaps because of his orange feathers, his condition was noted and he was captured before his health had begun to fail. All he really needed was a good warm, sudsy bath.
With our extensive oil spill experience, and the infrastructure we built at HWCC for the 2011 and 2012 fish-oiled Brown Pelican response, we were able to clear up his troubles quickly.
BAX/HWCC staff Lucinda Adamson and Elissa Blair wash Western Gull.
It didn’t take long to get his bath water dirty!
Now that’s a clean tail.
Rinsing the soap out – the magical moment when clean water appears to make feathers dry!
Internal code, and some happy talk! (all above photos: Carol Andersen/BAX)
A few days after his bath, his feathers were waterproof and he was flying around the aviary. A short visit to rehab was all he needed. We released him closer to the ocean than Eureka… he’s free, of course to return to the open dumpsters of downtown, but we’re hoping he falls in with a more sea-going crowd and lives the life of a true gull – no lasagne – just fish, crabs, and whatever other tasty treat rolls in on the surf.
Thank you for supporting our work! This gull, and every animal we treat, receives the highest quality care we can provide, thanks to your contribution!
(All release photos: Laura Corsiglia/BAX)
Remember, we rely on your support to keep on keeping on! Your tax-deductible donation is greatly appreciated!
Wildlife Matters #2 available in mp3
Western Grebes Need Your Help
Young birds, tossed by big seas, struggle on area beaches. Over 50 Grebes rescued so far! Bird Ally X/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center needs your help providing these birds a second chance.
Western Grebes, elegant and graceful, recover in our seabird pool
During the second week of October a period of rough ocean conditions began on the North coast with breakers higher than 16 feet. Immediately Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/BAX began admitting immature Western Grebes who had been tossed on the beach by the big waves.
A young Grebe in a transport carrier. Eye protection is a good idea when handling these birds!
To date, we have admitted 50 of these elegant black and white birds for care. All of them are young birds. Western grebes raise their families all over the west on freshwater lakes. Once their young can fly and hunt for fish on their own, they depart the lakes to spend the winter along the coast on bays, inlets, river mouths and on the open ocean, often seen just beyond the break in large groups called rafts.
Checking body condition: many of our patients are emaciated.
Young birds who are unfamiliar with the ocean can struggle with storms and high seas, leaving them vulnerable. A few days of not being able to eat and they may find themselves too weak to recover on their own. Add to this mix the modern challenges of unpredictable ocean health due to a disrupted climate, overfishing and the pollution stream that comes from all sides, and the near-shore environment can now be seen as a much less hospitable place for young seabirds.
Blood is drawn for simple tests that can help us determine the overall health of each bird.
Once in care, all oceanic birds require resource-intensive treatment. Each bird eats a pound of fish a day! Rehydrating fluids, anti-parasite medicine and nutritional supplements also are needed.
After millions of years of evolution, Grebes are unable to tolerate being on land, or any hard surface, and must quickly be housed in pools. Clean water is absolutely necessary for their recovery. We conserve our resources as much as we can, but we still need your help providing these fundamental necessities for our patients.
A slightly warmed pool helps weakened Grebes get back on water – a must if they are to survive.
Each bird eats about a pound of fish a day.
Some tossed fish encourage our patients’ appetite while in the stressful captive environment.
Fortunately Western grebes are highly social and prefer to be with others.
Once healthy, the young birds are released into Humboldt Bay, where many species of prey-fish are abundant.
Thanks to community support we have released 18 of these birds back into the wild. We still have 14 Western Grebes in care who need you to help cover the costs of their ongoing treatment. A few more are admitted each day. Please give what you can.
Our mission to help individual animals survive against the challenges modern society has placed on the natural world is only possible with your support. As you scroll through the photographs of our patients, you can enjoy knowing that your contribution provides the best care available for struggling wild animals here on the beautiful Redwood Coast. Any amount helps. Besides financial support you can also help spread our work by sharing this page. Invite us to present at your club or organization. We love to talk to our community about wildlife and how we can all help. Contact us at info@birdallyx.net!
all photographs Laura Corsiglia/BAX
Young Western Grebes in Trouble
UPDATED: 15 Western Grebes admitted for care today. More possibly coming tomorrow.
Please help!
Over last weekend Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/BAX began admitting several Western grebes into care. Battered by unusually high surf, these young birds, freshly arrived from lakes across our region, have been beaching from the Samoa peninsula to Crescent City. Right now we have eight in care, with at least that many awaiting rescue. These elegant birds, black and white with long necks, pointed bills, and red eyes, are rarely seen on land. Evolved for pursuing fish beneath the waves, on beaches they are in serious trouble.
Once rescued, they will receive expert care at our facility in Bayside. Please help us provide food, medicine and clean water. Your contribution will go a long way toward giving these birds another chance. Thank you for being an ally in this life saving work.
Can You Help?
Each year BAX/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center raises a certain amount of money. Without this money we could accomplish nothing. Our supporters make a big difference everyday in the lives of injured and orphaned wild animals.
Food for our pateints.
Medical supplies.
Patient housing.
Water.
Electric.
Gas for rescues across our huge geographical area
Small stipends for our most critical staff.
These are the direct costs of helping individual wild animals and wild families. We also advocate for wild animals in an effort to shift public policy toward peaceful co-existence with our wild kin. Producing workshops and educational materials for wildlife rehabilitators is another way that we work to improve the conditions and ameliorate some of the negative impacts our society has on wild animals.
Your support is critical to these efforts. And we need your support now.
This year we’ve had more wild patients brought to us than ever. Now we need your help more than ever. After a very taxing Spring and Summer we need help now recovering from our costs. We need help making the needed repairs to our facility. We need help paying our water bill. This is the very ordinary, very work-a-day, real word of direct animal care. Loving wild animals means providing clean water for pools. It means laundry soap. It means late nights writing letters to our policy makers. We express our love for baby wild mammals with food that will help them grow and learn what it means to be a a wild and free adult.
Help us grow so that we can provide for all of Northern California’s wildlife. Help us build our Aviary in Manila specifically for pelicans and other large seabirds. Help us provide the kind of professional staff our region’s wildlife needs and deserves.
Thank you for being a part of this life-saving work.
Unified, to better serve Wildlife
Bird Ally X/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center are one wildlife service organization!
This is such an important occasion for us! After 3 years of partnership, BAX/HWCC have merged our distinct organizations in to one to better use our resources and be more effective at meeting our mission. We are excited and optimistic for this opportunity to expand our capacity to meet the needs of injured and orphaned wildlife on California’s North Coast and beyond and to practice and teach proven best practices and foster advances in wildlife rehabilitation.
As the region’s only permitted all-species wildlife rehabilitation clinic, we serve an enormous geographical area, covering nearly 20,000 square miles. Extending from northern Mendocino County to Curry County, Oregon, and east as far as Weaverville in Trinity County, our responsibility to provide care for injured and orphaned wildlife is weighty.
This region is more than simply large, however. Radiating out from our clinic in the heart of the Jacoby Creek Watershed through the ancient Redwoods, the dune forests, the near shore ocean, and the mountains to the east, our home-place is a potentially critical refuge. As the reality of climate change takes hold, it is becoming apparent that temperate North American rain forest – stretching from here to Alaska – may be key for many species’ survival. As a committed ally of the wild, BAX/HWCC doesn’t take this lightly.
A sense of urgency is growing in communities everywhere, that we must act now, and with intelligence, if we are to preserve ourselves and our wild neighbors.
In these shared current circumstances, joining together makes sense.
Unquestionably, a major component of protecting wild animals from injury and keeping their families together is to advocate for and practice place-based, energy-aware wildlife care.
BAX/HWCC, with your support, is able to provide leadership and innovation as we accept the challenge of making true progress for our relationship with our wild neighbors, especially as viewed by the generations that will follow ours. Together we match extensive professional wildlife care experience – from around our state, our country and our world – with the rooted knowledge and deep affection long time residents of our region have for our home.
Bringing familiarity with “state of the art” facilities, combined with the organic know-how, responsible husbandry and sustainable practices needed to reduce waste and repurpose the material wealth of our world, BAX/HWCC offers a possibility for the future of wildlife rehabilitation that is adaptable and resilient in uncertain times.
Most importantly, and most practically, this union allows us to streamline our efforts at outreach and education. Encouraging co-existence with our wild neighbors is as important as providing quality rehabilitative care. Because we reach out to a diverse community, our message of humane solutions for human/wildlife conflicts is one of our most effective forms of animal care!
As one entity our materials and programs can be efficiently designed and the burden of costs can be jointly shouldered. Our ability to ensure that the overall community is aware of the services to wildlife we provide will be enhanced by this streamlining as well. We look forward to producing more quality materials for schools, agencies and organizations.
We also will be “rolling out” our new website by the end of the year with expanded resources, thanks to support from the McLean Foundation and the Humbodlt Area Foundation.
There is, in short, a lot of work to be done. Against all our modern catastrophes, hands are needed everywhere. At Bird Ally X/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center we are committed to the rescue, rehabilitation and release of injured and orphaned wild animals. We believe that no matter what crises we face, these individual animals whose lives are disturbed by the industrial world, will always deserve the best available care.
Thank for your support of our organizations in the past, and for helping us reach this exceptional place. Now we ask for your continued support as we embark on this new era.
With warm appreciation,|
The Board, Staff and Volunteers of Bird Ally X/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center
September 25, 2014
Bird Ally X now on AmazonSmile
In Wildness is the Preservation of Raccoons, In Raccoons is the Preservation of the Wild
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Raccoon (Procyon lotor) babies have a lot to learn. As adults, Raccoons hunt and forage for a wide range of food, from songbird eggs to berries to the salmon a bear leaves behind. Raccoons hunt small rodents, crunch on snails, and nibble the mushrooms on the forest floor. Raccoons are brave, resilient, adaptable and notoriously intelligent.
Orphaned Raccoons in their housing, prepare for the wide and wild world. To help them recognize the real world when they see it, we’ve provided them an artificial river of concrete. We call it the Los Angeles river. No substitute for an ecosystem, but at least they know to look for fish in moving water.
Raccoons have lived in North America for millions of years. This familiar wild neighbor has nearly as many names as there are indigenous languages. We use the Algonquian name, derived from arahkunem – which is said to mean “scratches with hands.”(1) Locally, in Wiyot, the animal “with the painted face” is known as jbelhighujaji (pronunciation).(2)
For a glimpse into their place in the ecology of Northern California, a Shasta story has Coyote and Raccoon living together each with five children. When a jealous rivalry ends with Coyote killing and feeding Raccoon to his children, one of Coyote’s sons tells Raccoon’s orphans what happened – they decide to kill all Coyote’s pups but the one who told them. Afterward they flee with the spared pup into the sky. Coyote tries to follow but cannot keep up. The six young animals become the Pleiades, high above in winter when no raccoons are about, and down from the sky in Spring and Summer when raccoons emerge with young.(3)
Taken to a remote tributary of a nearby river, rehabiliator Lucie Adamson and volunteers prepare to release the season’s first six raccoons back into their wild freedom.
Taking their first tentative steps into a world without walls. As kits, as soon as they began eating solid food, they were offered fish, mushrooms, plant material, small rodents, small birds, vegetables, fruit, eggs and insects, hidden under rocks and logs, hanging from branches. They know where to look for food.
It isn’t frivolous to consider the seriousness of raising orphaned babies of a species this complex, this storied, this ordinary, this mysterious. Here we are, as removed from “universal nature” as any species has ever been, yet it’s up to us to provide an education for these wild young things.
When we commit to the care of a wild orphan, we accept the responsibility for their wild education. To teach a wild baby to be wild requires an inhabiting imagination. We must see the world this young animal will see, and then provide the challenges that will teach the skills necessary to thrive in that world.
When we commit to the care of a wild animal, we are committing to the wild, to nature – we are accepting Nature’s terms – we are accepting, and in fact seeking, the blaze of reality. This is, as they say, a tall order.
Young, healthy and in a lush and resource-filled environment, these orphans will soon find out they are home.
Meeting nature’s terms does place the rehabilitator in an awkward position. Our towns, our cities, ranches, forestry, fisheries, in short, nearly all of modern society struggles to co-exist with the wild. Promoting co-existence with wild animals – this alone puts a person outside of most of society’s concerns.
Just released, this Raccoon finds something to eat right away.
To be an ally of the wild often puts a wildlife caregiver in opposition to the general dreams and desires of our human neighbors. Schools, shopping centers, highways, solar farms, windmills, none of these, no matter their merits, is a boon to the wild. Even though any of these promises to preserve the world, a wildlife rehabilitator doubts the proposition.
Experience, or maybe intuition, knows that people don’t preserve ‘the Wild.” The wild is the expanding universe and the cosmic sweep of galaxies, it’s the comet’s eventual return, the dividing cell, the grasp of the leaf cutter beetle, the gill, the hoof, the photosensitive tissue that finds these words on the screen. We see the strip mine, the copper mine, the mountain top removed for the coal beneath – the old forest destroyed – the old forest re-named “overburden.” Factory trawlers scraping the bottom of the sea, oil spilled from exhaust into the suffocating sky – it’s hard to believe that modern society will preserve anything.
After nearly four months in care, a young Raccoon explores a real river for the first time.
Reaching the opposite shore.
Henry David Thoreau, in his essay “Walking,” offers what could be the wildlife rehabilitator’s complete philosophy, in eight simple words: “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”(4) This statement is irrefutable. In some ways it is shocking that it had to be uttered. To rehabilitate wildlife, rehabilitators live by this simple truth, its utter grace and its razor sharp accuracy.
Everything emanates from the Wild. What else can the wild be if not the headwaters of existence? The wild could be called the real. We may as well say that in reality is the preservation of the world – not in law, not in hybrid automobiles, not in aqueducts, not in theology. The real presents itself. Wild allies follow as we can.
This year, at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, BAX staff and volunteers have been caring for two dozen orphaned Raccoons. Our first litter of four, whose mother had been trapped and dumped miles away, came the third week of May. They were nearly three weeks old. Last weekend we released six youngsters who were ready to go. We still have over a dozen in care.
With startling speed the Raccoons dispersed into the forest.
It can be difficult, as caregivers, to prepare our charges to one day climb much higher than we ever could.
Each of these youngsters is learning to hunt, to forage, to climb, to hide when threatened. Each of these youngsters is fierce and determined. Healthy in mind and body, we release them into a carefully chosen site. Food must be present. Water, too. Cover against predators (Coyote is still looking for Raccoon) must be available. Room to roam – these animals must be able to disperse from this site, preferably adjusting to freedom and autonomy before encountering a backyard and the get-rich-quick scheme to be found in humanity’s garbage pails.
For the release, the six Raccoons were weighed, examined and put into transport carriers. We drove them to a remote location on a tributary of a nearby river. Once the carrier doors were opened, five of them sprung into action, heading for the river and swimming across to its other bank. Some climbed trees, others immediately searched for and found food (food we’d put there, but nothing like early success to build confidence!).
One Raccoon was more cautious. Our release team moved back from the site and waited.
At last, confident that the coast was clear, S/he left the carrier behind.
Forest riparian habitat is excellent for Raccoons. And it didn’t take this group long to figure that out. Now they’ve entered the real world. Will each survive and live long lives? No one knows. What we do know is that we’ve given these young wild kin the best chance we could.
One Raccoon hung back, not leaving the relative safety of the known carrier, poking her head out, ducking back in. Our team moved back and waited. Eventually, after many hesitating starts, she left the carrier and quickly disappeared into Reality.
All good things are wild and free. – Henry D Thoreau
Your contribution makes the care of orphaned Raccoons, and all of our wild neighbors who need our help, possible. Please donate. Thank you for being a part of our life-saving work.
All photos: Laura Corsiglia/Bird Ally X
(1) The Rice University Neologisms Database, ‘coon’, accessed 27 September 2014
(2) http://www.wiyot.us/language, accessed 27 September 2014
(3) Shasta and Athapascan Myths from Oregon, Livingston Farrand and Leo J. Frachtenberg: The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 28, No. 109 (Jul. – Sep., 1915) , pp. 207-242
(4) Walking, Henry David Thoreau, The Atlantic, June 1862
