With wildfires ravaging Mendocino and Trinity county forests and rural communities and threatening Humboldt county, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bird ally x has admitted a few wild animals who were refugees from the flames. Some of these patients have recovered well, but we’ve been made aware of more wild animals that may have been rescued from the fire but are unable to be brought into care at HWCC/bax due to limited resources, road closures, and evacuation orders.
A Western Grebe (Aechmophorus occidentalis), with fire in his own eyes, enjoys the wet soggy dripping water of our seabird pool after spending too many hours in the August Complex Fire, currently surrounding Ruth Lake. This highly aquatic bird was found on the ground near the mountain community of Mad River by Heidi, a local resident. She kept the bird safe for a day and then transported to Hydesville where HWCC/bax staff met her to complete his trip to our facility.
HWCC/bax will accept any and all wildlife impacted by the fires. Our facility and staff are ready. Even wild animals with injuries beyond our capacity to treat locally but which have a good prognosis with the proper care can be stabilized here at HWCC and transported to our colleagues in other parts of the state with more advanced facilities.
Western Grebe, stranded in the fire zone, finds freedom and the safety of the sea in Humboldt Bay.
If necessary, our staff will organize a pickup point near the evacuation areas. If you have a an injured wild animal in your possession or care, we want to help you get that animal the care and treatment they need and deserve. Let us know. We can and we will help. Report fire-impacted wild animals on our hotline 707 822 8839. And please, be as careful and as safe as you can be.
As always, our work is dependent on the support of our community. Without you, our doors would close forever. Please donate if you can. Thank You!!!
We’ve fallen behind in reporting on our hectic Summer season, due in part to the global coronavirus pandemic, and also to our sudden huge increase in patients over previous Summers. So let us take a breath, slip away from the clinic and our never-ending tasks and catch you up with some of our cases and releases from over the hectic baby season. Here’s a little tune to accompany you.
https://youtu.be/UdYGRnM8JN4
Three of the six young Gray Foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) we provided care for at Humboldt Wildlfie Care Center, Summer 2020.A young fox surveys their freedom after release.Orphaned Gray Fox at release performs the title song from the smash hit Broadway musical, Into the Woods. No Zoom app required.Two nestling Great Blue Herons (Ardea herodias), blown from their tree during a late Spring wind storm, get the hang of eating human caregiver delivered fish.In the early days of the Herons’ care we offered their fish on long hemostats. Quickly they began picking up their fish all by themselves. Soon after that they were hunting live fish in a pool.Launching into flight at the release site, just south of the Hoopa Reservation, where the two Herons came from. Covid 19 restrictions kept us from taking them all the way home, so a few miles from home would have to suffice.Great Blue Heron puts a lot of distance between themself and the humans who tried their best to provide good care. We did our jobs. But the stench of humanity still lingers…Caspian Tern (Hydroprogne caspia) in care: This Tern was found struggling in the surf. Without any injuries and in good body condition, we presumed the problem was an accidental dunking. After a few days of fish and rest, this bird who barks like a cat was raring to go!Released back to Humboldt Bay, where a large colony of Caspian Terns raise their young every year, this beautiful bird was one good tern…As the saying goes, one good Tern photo deserves another. Each year mother Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) make their nests near Humboldt Bay and other bodies of water and every year when they lead their precocial babies to that water they have to cross roads. Mayhem ensues. Of the 24 orphaned Mallards we treated this year, 16 of them were found on the highway with their dead mother. Caring for Mallard babies until they can be released is a privilege, but returning them to the wild that is a lustrous green carpet of duckeed is one of life’s marvels. The Arcata Marsh, home to many ducks and aquatic birds, is rich with nutritious and natural duck food.Nature is perfect.A juvenile Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis), very thin and full of lice was admitted this Summer after she turned up on a farm in Arcata (very out of place). Here she is being checked out after 27 days in care. A release exam is given to all our patients before we return them to their wild freedom. Dylan says that ‘to live outside the law you must be honest’ – well, maybe so, but you also must be as fit as a fiddle.In our Pelican Aviary, this 3 months old female is flying well again!After being found in a field with dairy cows in the Arcata Bottoms, our former patient is ready for a world of flight, salt water, diving and the company of her kind.
There is no getting around that 2020 has been a very difficult year, for our clinic, for our staff, for our community, for our nation, for the world. Yet, in these really difficult days, we’ve treated, as of this writing, September 10, 1,227 patients. Right now we’ve treated 300 more patients, year to date, in our small hospital on Humboldt Bay than any year in our 41 year history.
In March, as the pandemic was first hitting, it seemed entirely possible that our mission would be crushed under the weight of so much turmoil and uncertainty. It seemed possible that we wouldn’t make it through the Summer. But in fact, we’ve not only kept our doors open, we’ve managed to handle thousands of phone calls that often are better than the hands-on care we provide since these consultations and house calls prevent injuries and keep wild families together. We’ve learned as we went along how to do our work with a skeleton crew and with a shoestring budget. We’ve learned how to communicate effectively, how to keep our cool, how to appreciate the beauty and humor of life without seeing each other’s smiles or laughter. And none of this would have been possible without your support.
By the end of this month we will have treated more patients at HWCC than any previous year and we’ll still have three months to go. We have no idea how disastrous the rest of the year might be, or if we’ll ever return to what used to be normal. But as we’ve all been learning, we’ll keep on keeping on. Our wild neighbors will continue to have a place where they can be treated, cared for, and when possible, released back to their wild freedom. This is our commitment and promise and with your continued support we’ll keep it.
The Pandemic year is putting our facility at risk. As our human community grapples with the health and economic challenges of COVID19, donations have fallen sharply even as our admissions of wild animals in need is up nearly 20% over last year! WE NEED YOUR HELP BADLY!
2020 began in turmoil. First of all, as wildlife centered caregivers, the fires in Australia, with their incalculable toll on wild animals was difficult to watch without understanding that climate chaos threatened all that we hold closest to our hearts, all that gives life on our beautiful green Earth meaning.
Second of all, our fundraising in 2019 did not keep pace with our caseload, which had increased over 2018 by nearly 15%! We finished the year, down $8000 from our usual yearly amount, and short of our actual needs.
And then, in February, it became apparent that the novel coronavirus, COVID 19, was going to impact our daily lives here in Humboldt County.
In early March we put our volunteer and intern programs on haitus, reducing clinic staffing to the few members of our paid part-time crew, and myself, the director. We hoped, naively, that a few weeks would see us return to our usual Spring and Summer.
Needless to say, its been anything but usual.
Our caseload is heavier than any year in HWCC history. We wondered how the pandemic would impact our work, speculating that people might not be out and about as much and therefore finding fewer orphaned or injured wild animals. But such is not the case at all. As I write this, just past noon on July 28, we’ve admitted 940 patients this year so far, about 170 more patients than last year to this date. 170 is the number of patients we typically admit in our busiest months, June and July – so this year it’s like we got an extra June thrown in with our regular June.
This year we are treating well over a dozen orphaned seabirds, mostly Common Murres and Rhinoceros Auklets, over a dozen Black-tailed Deer fawns, we’ve cared for and released two dozen orphaned Mallard ducklings and nearly a dozen Canada Goslings – many House Finches, White crowned Sparrows, Violet Green Swallows, – we’ve provided care and housing to more baby Robins this year than the last 8 years combined! With our masks on and hearts engaged we’ve helped nearly 30 homeowners and renters peacefully resolve a wildlife conflict, keeping wild families together.
Our staff is well-trained, dedicated, and willing to make sacrifices. The long hours are part of the job, as are the joys and the heartbreaks. But this pandemic year is asking more than we are able to give. We can summon the energy to rise to the occasion, to meet the challenge of our tasks, but we can’t print our own money. When the electric bill (thankfully shut-offs are postponed during the pandemic) and the water bill come due, no amount of staff member sacrifice will be accepted as currency. We need money.
I don’t particularly like discussing the details. But they go like this. Every year we set a goal for our fundraising. Every year we fall short. In 2011, when I came to HWCC, we had an annual budget of about $50,000 a year, one paid staff member and almost no patient housing, no pools for seabirds, no aviaries for raptors or ravens, no place for raccoons or opossums, no waterfowl aviary for ducks and geese.
Since 2015, we’ve raised about $110,000 each year, with which we developed our facility as best as we can within our space and financial limits, and added part-time staff to our crew. Our caseload has risen from 900 animals per year in 2010 to last year’s high of 1332 wild animals in need. We’ve added important services which reduce the number of injured and orphaned wild neighbors, such as advocating for policies that protect the Wild, and most critically, our humane solutions program which peacefully resolves human/wild conflicts keeping wild families together – this helps stop illegal trapping of wild mothers, like Raccoons, and stops their babies from becoming orphans.
Now here we are, the end of July, and we are more than $22,000 behind our most recent years. This is serious. We cannot sustain such a deficit for long.
Every day when people bring us injured wild animals they’ve found, they often say, “Oh my god, we’re so glad you’re here, we didn’t know what to do.” When this pandemic started, and businesses were first being closed, and medical supplies became hard to get, I voiced to close friends my private fear that the turmoil caused by the novel coronavirus could swamp our small wildlife hospital and few would even mourn our passing in the greater losses all around us.
But we are still here, and we have a hundered patients currently in our care, and probably another five hundred coming before this year is over. We cannot disappear! I promise that I and the rest of HWCC/bax staff and interns (we brought a few back in June) will be here – caring for our patients as best we can. Quality care though, depends on people who are able to help us out with the things that we can only get with money. Please donate! Please dont let the only wildlife hospital serving Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte and Mendocino counties be another casualty of COVID19.
It’s a chaotic time in the world and in America especially, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic striking right when public leadership at the highest level in this country is at odds with public health. Every single day Humboldt Wildife Care Center/bird ally x opens our doors to the needs of our wild neighbors and no matter how frightening the times, our dedicated staff show up and get the job done. This is the first in a series of quick posts to catch up the news of our mission.
Here we are, past mid-July, and our pandemic year is only intensifying. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to take the time to write about our work. We rarely have time for more than a brief social media post to keep our supporters aware of how things are going. Our volunteer program remains in hiatus – to protect them, but also to protect our clinic and our mission. Our small wildlife hospital on Humboldt Bay is the only thing of its kind across three counties and we must stay covid-free. Most days we are grossly understaffed. On top of that our caseload is greater than ever – we’ve already provided care for nearly 900 wild neighbors this year to date! Since its founding in 1979, HWCC has not treated so many patients in one 6 and a half month period. In 2013 we treated just over 900 animals for the whole year!
Through our humane solutions program, we’ve helped keep dozens of wild families together, preventing senseless deaths of mother raccoons and skunks, and protecting their babies from becoming orphans. Still, even with these efforts, we currently have more than 75 orphaned wild babies in care.
Right now we are caring for 11 Black-tailed Deer fawns, 14 baby Raccoons, a dozen Striped Skunk babies. Two days we ago released four young American Robins we’d cared for since they were nestlings. We’ve treated Western Gray Squirrels, Deer mice, Opossums, various species of Swallows. Today or tomorrow we’ll be releasing 2 young Great Blue Herons whose nest was destroyed in the windstorm of mid-May. Now they are fully grown and able to hunt for their own fish. We’ll be taking them back to the Trinity River.
For the last two months, four young Gray foxes have been growing up in our care. The stage where we provide them live crickets to begin their lessons in providing their own meals has begun. The joy of helping these young intelligent predators reach their true destiny is indescribable. Pictures help!
Four Gray fox kits warily watch their caregiver as she prepares to capture them for their weekly examination. Keeping these wild predators wild is critical to their successful release!
Currently we also have 3 baby Common Murres in care, and several more brought to us as they were dying. Sad as this is, it might be a good sign for the local population of Common Murres, as the last few years their breeding colonies had largely failed, and this might mean that there are more babies making it to sea this year.
Not only our increased workload with decreased staffing has cost us, though; a huge stress has been the funding. As the pandemic has hit our human economy hard, it has taken a toll on the resources available for our wild neighbors, wild neighbors who are in our care because of what the human built world has done to them. It’s been hard to ask for financial support during a time of such economic stress, but we aren’t going to be run on magic forever. We do have a real electric bill, water bill, rent bill, fish bill, staff wages and more to pay. Right now we need your help. It’s critical.
To all who’ve been supporting us through this, thank you. Your contributions are more than material. You lift our spirits too.
Please contribute if you can. Every little bit helps.
Fish hooks and fishing line cause uncountable wildlife injuries. The toll fishing gear takes on marine birds, reptiles, and mammals (not to mention the targeted species!) numbers in the thousands along the California coast alone each year. (see study here) According to the Humane Society of the United States (link here) over a million marine animals are killed each year by “longline” fishing at sea.
From “ghost nets” that sweep silently through the sea, lost from their vessel, killing whales, dolphins, sea turtles, seabirds, fish and more, to wads of monofilament line that litter the shores of rivers and lakes ensnaring chickadees and egrets, this pollution problem is a source of untold, unknowable suffering for our wild neighbors.
In the last 8 years we’ve treated nearly 200 animals at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax who’ve been injured or entangled by discarded fishing gear. We have no idea how many, locally, are injured and never rescued, but that number is significantly higher than the relatively lucky few who are found and treated.
Sadly in the last week we’ve had three patients entangled in fishing line with hook injuries – a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias), and two Western Gulls (Larus occidentalis).
In the case of the heron, we received a call in the late morning that one of these unmistakable large birds was struggling on the bank of the Mad River where it flows through Blue Lake, a few miles inland from Humboldt Bay. When staff arrived on the scene, they found the heron, entangled in line.
The rescued is heron is taken back to the vehicle.
Fortunately, the injuries the heron suffered were minimal, within a few days the bold and pointed argument he made was let me out of here or somebody gets it. Other than imminent death by entaglement, there was nothing at all wrong – a very strong, large, and healthy individual – it would have been a tragedy no matter who suffers, but for such a remarkably successful individual to perish from something that violates the universal contract – the laws of natural selection, fitness, and adaptability – seems especially cruel – just as when a magnificently healthy songbird is brought to us with fatal injuries from a car or a cat. Fishing line, hooks, lures, nets, etc, are not agents of evolution, targeting the least fit among us – they are simply an injustice – a thoughtless or callous disregard.
After several days we took the rightfully indignant truly Great Blue Heron back to the Mad River, and wild freedom.
HWCC/bax Assistant Rehab Manager Lucinda Adamson and staff member Desiree Vang remove hook and line form Great Blue Heron – watch to see the Heron’s release!
Soon after releasing the heron, HWCC received an early morning message from Shelter Cove, nearly two hours south of our clinic by car. A gull was dangling by fishing line from a bluff above Black Sands beach. At first we tried to find someone closer to the scene who could help, but the current pandemic has reduced available resources… So we launched staff on resuce mission. When our staff reached the gull, the bird was dead, hanging from line.
Photograph texted to HWCC/bax in the early morning hours of a gull entangled in fishing line at Black Sands Beach in Shelter Cove.ex-HWCC/bax intern and generally awesome climber and animal care giver Savannah Shore scrambles up the bluff to retrieve the bird.The gull had been ensnared in this old gear.
take a moment
A few days before the gull died on that bluff, we admitted another hooked and entangled Western Gull, this bird found in Field’s Landing, right on Humboldt Bay. Unfortunately he had swallowed a hook. He was spitting up blood around a long piece of filament that reached further down his throat than we could see. This gull would need a wildlife surgeon.
We reached out to Bird Ally X co-founder and skilled wildlife veterinarian, Dr. Shannon Riggs, in Morro Bay where she is the Director of Animal Services for Pacific Wildlife Care. (listen to a conversation with Dr Riggs on our podcast) Shannon agreed to treat the bird and long relay (with awkward social distancing) was set up for transport. Jen Martin, an HWCC/bax intern who is not able to come to the clinic for shifts currently due to the pandemic, drove the gull down to Native Songbird Care and Conservation (NSCC) in Sebastopol, near Santa Rosa. BAX co-founder Marie Travers, volunteers at NSCC occasionally and was able to be there to receive the gull. Marie transported the gull to the Salinas area, where a Pacific Wildlife Care volunteer met her to take the bird on the last leg of the journey.
Radiographs of the gull with hook lodge in esophagus. Can you spot the offending piece of barbed metal?
The day after the gull arrived in Morro Bay (May 6, which as we all know is the anniversary of the day Henry Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of 44), Dr Riggs texted me the pictures of the radiographs she had made of the hook’s location. She added this comment to the images: “Well, it’s not in the worst place possible, but pretty damned close. Will try to get it tomorrow, but not very optimistic.”
A good ‘doc’ doesn’t deliver false hope or promises and Shannon is a very good doctor. I’ve worked with her since 2007 and I trust her completely – I replied: Good Luck! – confident that the bird was in the best hands possible.
The hook that was caught in the gull’s esophagusOur patient, post-op.
The next day we learned that the surgery was successful and that the gull was recovering well. Getting the above pictures, of the hook and the standing gull, post-op, were wonderful moments in a day of animal care, with losses, exhaustion, grief and joy. No animal still in captive care is out of the woods yet, so cautiously we celebrate his recovery. Soon we’ll be coordinating the trip back north so the gull can return to his home on Humboldt Bay, free and ready again for the wild challenges.
While at the release site for the Great Blue Heron above, this crap was picked up and brought back to the clinic by HCC/bax staff.
Everywhere that people go, fishing hooks and line are sure to follow. With our non-essential business on stand-still in many places, wouldn’t this be a good time to assign yourself some essential work? Namely, helping to clean this junk out of our local environs. It’s literally everywhere. If you go to beach, the river, a lake, a bay, a slough – carry a trash bag with you and pick up what others have left behind. You may never learn of the tragedy that you’ve averted, but every scrap removed from the environment is a scrap that won’t kill an innocent victim.
None of our work would happen as well as it does, with as many successes as we have, without your support. I say this all the time, because it true. Your generosity makes everything possible for wildlife care in our region, our state, and our world. Thank you.
It was on March 10 that we realized that our small world of Humboldt County, and specifically our work at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, was going to be significantly impacted by the novel coronavirus disease called COVID 19. That day we notified our volunteers, the majority of them students at Humboldt State University, that we would prefer that they not travel out of the area for the upcoming Spring Break, since community spread had already started in California’s urban areas. We were clinging to a quaint idea that the fabled Redwood Curtain might screen out the virus and we could somehow dodge the bullet.
Five days after we warned our dedicated volunteers about community spread in the rest of California, we made the difficult, but necessary decision to suspend our volunteer program. The risk to our volunteers, the risk to the Care Center, and the risk to our community added up to a steep reduction in the staffing of HWCC/bax. Within a couple of days, our local officials released a “Shelter in Place” order that slowed or stopped many activities and businesses deemed “non-essential”. With that order, we also suspended our intern program, leaving only 5 of us to keep our dear (and only!) local facility for injured and orphaned wildlife operating all day, every day.
Now more than a month later and the nature of our days at HWCC/bax seem irrevocably changed. In busy times and in slow, wildlife care providers everywhere lean heavily on volunteers – our tasks are many and our resources are often quite scant. We simply don’t have the ability to hire the workforce we need. Without volunteers who generously give their time and labor, our efforts could not be sustained. Yet here we are, going into Spring wild baby season, and our staffing is at the bare minimum.
Sadly, but necessary for everyone’s safety, our volunteer board is empty.
Of course, while we anxiously await the time when our volunteers can safely resume their roles at our clinic, we’ve taken other measures to keep our facility and our key staff as safe as we can manage.
Some of these measures were easy for us to implement. As a wildlife hospital, cleanliness and sanitization already play a large part in our daily lives! Still we upped our game. Every touched surface (eg, door handles, broom handles, faucets, markers, pens, keys, eyewear, countertops – the list is long!) is ‘spritzed’ with alcohol (70% or greater) multiple times each day. Our trips to stores, the bank, the post office have been reduced from daily to every three days in order to help limit our exposure to possible infection and also to help essential store employees reduce the risk we pose them as possibly asymptomatic carriers of the virus.
The most important addition to our protocols, which we also instituted at the time that community spread was identified in California (March 10) is the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), specifically procedural masks and exam gloves, in situations we cannot control, such as interacting with members of the public who’ve found an injured wild animal, helping people solve the problem of a denning mother raccoon, running errands and working together with patients when we cannot maintain sufficient distance.
Also, the use of masks helps us with another problem that may be more important than we first thought. After tigers held captive in the Brooklyn Zoo showed symptoms of COVID-19 and tested positive, we now realize that our patients may be at risk of catching this virus from us, their care providers.
HWCC/bax staff using PPE while performing the admission exam on a Northern Flicker who had crashed into a window.
Other measures we’ve taken to improve HWCC/bax staff safety have been to identify ourselves clearly when we are out rescuing wild animals in trouble. While the Shelter in Place order has been enforced with a fairly light touch in Humboldt County, we see that the need for tighter controls might become necessary. Being able to be indentified from a distance when in public performing our duties is a critical component of all well-managed responses. Responding to wild animals in distress during a global pandemic is something that we learn to do on the job, of course, since nothing of this magnitude has occurred in any of our lifetimes but the few centenarians who walk among us. Still, as emergency responders during other catastrophic events (toxic spills, forest fires, etc) we do have training and experience working inside of incident command structures, and applying that knowledge to this crisis has been a critical part of our work over the last month.
With safety in mind, we now wear uniform t-shirts that clearly identify us as Care Center staff. We have placards that identify our vehicles so that law enforcement officers, agency representatives and concerned citizens can see immediately who we are and what we are doing. Also, uniforms of this type give us the flexibility to don and doff work gear at work so that we are better able to keep any potential virus contaminated items out of our own homes, protecting our families, friends and pets.
Our new highly visible staff t-shirts, as demonstrated by essential crewmember and newest board member, Nora Chatmon.
Besides our thin procedural masks, which are something we always have on hand, we’ve been working on handmade masks, following a pattern that is based on some degree of research, which suggests that these are better protection for our staff and colleagues. The pattern we use can be found here – it uses a material very similar to what is found in hospital masks, nonwoven polypropelene. Based on our study of various patterns, we believe that this mask offers the best handmade protection.
Our chief and only current mask maker, BAX co-founder Laura Corsiglia, working hard at her machine.The fruit of her labors …
We’ve been responding as proactively as we can to this constantly changing situation, and through it all, we’ve also been meeting our mission. Spring is coming. It can’t be stopped. You might as well try to stop the world. Over one half of our annual patient admissions occur in the next four months. Each day we admit patients, as we’ve always done. The pandemic has slowed the impacts of human society on the wild, but still, cars, windows, cats, pollution and more continue to take their toll.
Unfortunately, reduced human activity doesn’t prevent avian collisions with windows. This Hermit Thrush recently was in care, after colliding with a picture window in Freshwater. Fortunately, they were gotten into care quickly and the wonderful songster made a full and rapid recovery.
Right now, we’ve admitted close to 200 patients this year, and we were running about 20% above 2019. Since the Shelter in Place order, our admissions are down a little over 10%, which is about 20 patients less than this time last year. It’s not easy to tell if this is because less animals are getting injured by people due to the sudden reduction in human activity, or if injured wild animals are being found less often due to people staying home.
Many of our patients at this time of year are struggling seabirds – Common Murres, Surf Scoters, wintering Loons – who are found on area beaches. Their ailments, usually starvation, are considered to be the direct result of declining ocean health, which is due to society’s abuse – agricultural run-off, over-fishing, plastics pollution, acidification, and of course climate chaos. But these are chronic problems decades in the making, and won’t be undone by many of us working from home, and not going to school for a month. So we are presuming that seabirds, at least, are still suffering, but being found less. To address this we have formed one team, prepared with PPE, and a map of the places we most frequently find beached, struggling seabirds, and send them out a few times each week to survey the “hotpsots” for injured wild animals.
Soon after launching this team, they were able to rescue an Aleutian Cackling Goose from the beach in Samoa who was struggling with an injured hip, rolled by the surf, stranded and starving. The goose is improving now, gaining weight while recovering in our waterfowl aviary.
An Aleutian Cackling Goose, injured and stranded on a desolate Samoa beach now recovers in care at HWCC/bax.
Having a crew in the field regularly is something we’ve been working toward over a period of years. We hope to make this a permament feature, at least some of the hours of the day, as we move forward. The region for which we are responsible is enormous – a response team in the field makes it just a little bit smaller, but it’s a little bit that makes a big difference!
While we strive to improve, there is no question that the economic fallout of this virus is hurting us too. We began 2020 with an ambitious plan to raise funds (see fundraiser here!) to make critical improvements to our patient housing and facility.
Well, our big dreams fundraiser is not going so well, but we have managed to complete the remodel of our “duckling pond”, where we house young waterfowl who still need heat support until they are old enough for our waterfowl aviary! Your support getting this done is greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Our freshly remodeled duckling pond when it was almost finished. Now it’s just about ready to go! And just in time too!
WILD BABY SEASON!!!
On April 12, Easter Sunday, a dog attacked and killed a mother Opossum (Didelphis virginiana) – five of her tiny babies – each less than 25 grams – survived and were admitted that same day. We’ve already successfully convinced a mother Raccoon to move her den out of a residential crawl space. Spring is here. It’s likely that in 6 weeks we’ll have a hundred young wild animals in our care.
On admission day, these young Opossums will need weeks of care before they are ready to be released to their wild freedom.
Real Concern
The challenges we routinely face at HWCC/bax are being exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. All of us are impacted, and we all are caught in a sea of uncertainty. It’s been a hundred years since people have dealt with something of this magnitude and our systems seem shaky, fragile, and prone to fail. Our ability to stay open, in any Summer is directly related to the flow of resources that comes form our community of supporters near and far. You are the ones who are still reading this long update! You care about the wild! You love Mother Earth and all her beings. Your support keeps us in action.
The gravity of the situation that the world faces can’t be overstated. It’s that gravity that makes me, as the primary person who asks for support, nervous. The path we walk in the best of times is precarious, and in these times, I worry daily that what we’ve worked to achieve at HWCC/bax over the last nine years, since I’ve been here, but also the legacy of care for wildlife that HWCC began to establish in 1979, is in real jeopardy. The cushion for us to fall back on is about as thin as a dollar bill. With our volunteers safer at home, and our resources on the wane, we are entering into a busy season with nothing in place but our training, our experience and our commitment to excellent care for our wild neighbors.
On social media, just a couple of days ago, as people were carrying weapons at the state capitol of Michigan in protest of quarantine measures, a friend posted a photograph of a lovely stream in her neighborhood, back East. Another person commented, “Nature is healing, but I feel it is only an escape from reality.” One thing I know – nature is the source of everything, it is reality. Our work is small – one small Thrush, one small Opossum, one small care provider at a time – but we strive on behalf of beautiful Mother Earth and all of our wild kith and kin. We work for the real, and we put our whole selves in … it’s really all that we have to invest, anyway.
If you are able, in these difficult days, to help us out, to support us through this trial, it will mean a very lot to us. It may mean everything.
Good luck to you, good luck to us all, stay safe, stay home if you can, and thank you for your enduring love of all that is wild and free.
I hope that in this time of Sheltering in Place in order to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus that is wreaking havoc around the world, that each of you is safe and healthy. I know that none of us are untouched by the global pandemic, and I also know that many of us will be touched very hard.
Nothing like this has happened in anyone’s memory. Certainly we’ve lived through epidemics, bad flu seasons, and worse – the US government’s response to the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s was horrible for those impacted, who lost lives, lovers, friends and family – but none of those crises is preparation for a life in lockdown while we hush, hoping the monster passes our door.
Our world is upended. We hope that most of us staying home will restore normalcy and minimize our losses sooner than later, but the fact is that we are sailing uncharted seas.
Uncharted waters are fun for explorers, and we all love voyages of discovery, but in keeping our wildlife hospital afloat and on course, we need to be able to navigate. Navigation without charts is unnerving to say the least. How will this pandemic impact our work? Will the resources we need to meet our mission be available? Will the community still support care for injured and orphaned wild neighbors in the midst of a human-centered crisis? How will we provide care for our patients in these uncharted waters?
Humboldt Wildlife Care Center staff, and skeleton crew takes a socially distant break. left to right, Lucinda Adamson, assistant rehabilitation manager; Brooke Brown, rehabilitation tech; and Desiree Vang, rehabilitation tech.Monte Merrick (me) Humboldt Wildlife Care Center director.
Needless to say, these questions, which we don’t have answers for, cause us some anxiety. Of course a lot of what happens next is up to us. Our commitment to providing our wild neighbors with quality care is not even slightly reduced by the COVID 19 pandemic.
Our commitment to providing quality care is the most mission-critical piece of the puzzle, no doubt. But we cannot meet our mission without the people who keep our doors open with their support. Right now, donations have fallen so far that it makes us wonder if the pandemic is going to swallow us whole.
We are entering the busiest season of our year – wild baby season. Just today, Saturday, April 4, we performed the first of many house calls to come, identifying a Raccoon mother’s den under a bathtub. Now we’ll be able to help the homeowner humanely convince the new mother to take her babies elsewhere.
An orphaned raccoon about to receive milk replacer.
By the time the season has ended, based on previous years (possibly not that helpful of a reference) we will have helped homeowners protect their property and hundreds of raccoon, skunk, swallow, and sparrow families stay together, – learning, growing and becoming part of our natural community.
Spring and Mother Earth’s northern renewal are here – they won’t stop for our crisis, and human society, even as most of us are staying home, will continue to injure wild animals, through passive, chronic problems like pollution, habitat loss and general environmental degradation as well as acute and aggressive agents, such as cars, abuse, and other violent conflicts from which no wild animal is safe.
Our work is never going to be unnecessary, at least not in our lifetimes. And it will always fall to those who care the most to make the deepest sacrifices, to do the work if able, and otherwise to provide moral and financial support. We’ve gained a lot of ground in the last nine years at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. We’ve built not one but several excellent crews, with many individuals dispersed throughout the world of wildlife care, doing good work. I sincerely hope that we can count on you to keep us going – keep our doors open, our electricity on, the phone functional and our staff stable.
Right now, our fundraiser to pay for necessary repairs to our facility is languishing, as are our general resources. We operate on a shoestring budget without a cushion for lean times. We just tighten our belts and do what we can. Without your support, our belts will have never been so tight. Please help us get through this uncertain time. Our wild neighbors depend on you. Thank you for your love of the wild.
With warmth, gratitude and a profound wish for all of us to emerge from this pandemic with health and happiness,
In our latest episode of New Wild Review we look at the sudden changes the global pandemic caused by the outbreak of coronavirus disease – 19. As states, counties and municipalities move to slow the spread of the virus, through shelter in place orders and social distancing, essential services, including wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, continue. How does the pandemic effect our work? How will the pandemic effect wildlife? We don’t know. But we can ponder it while we work.
If you’re at a facility that is open and admitting patients, check out this World Health Organization document on preparing your workplace to keep yourself and co-workers safe.
Found lying face down along a trail on the Humboldt Bay Wildlife Refuge, this American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus), the secretive cryptically colored cousin to the haughty Herons and elegant Egrets was in rough shape when brought to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center in Bayside. With feathers torn out, puncture wounds, and damaged air sacs (for a quick video tour of avian repsiration, evolved for flight click here ) we were pretty certain the bird had been mauled by a dog.
Fortunately, the Bittern suffered no broken bones. Unfortunately, these birds are very private, and time in captivity is highly stressful for them (it is for all wild animals, but this species especially so.) They often won’t eat. For the first week, we had to “assist feed” our patient, carefully sliding whole fish down their throat. Once the Bittern was stable and able to be moved to a purpose-built outdoor waterfowl aviary, we added live fish to the marsh-like pool and tall reeds for comfort. Immediately, they began to eat all of the live fish we could get. Their condition rapidly improved.
Intern Val Rodriguez prepares to administer oral hydration while Nora Chatmon, long time volunteer and intern, as well as newest member of our Board of Directors, instructs and assists.
After 18 days in care, the Bittern was ready to go home. Two volunteers (this was only a few days before we changed everything for social-dostancing purposes, including suspending our volunteer program) and our newest staff person, Desiree Vang, took the Bittern back to the Wildlife Refuge for release.
Now just a couple of weeks later, everything at our clinic and in our community and in the world has changed due to Coronavirus Disease 19. Our volunteer and intern programs have been suspended at our facility until social distancing and “shelter in place” orders are lifted. We are at the very start of our hectic wild baby season and how this will be impacted we’ve yet to discover. But even with a skeleton crew and reduced resources, we are still here, still open, and in need of your support more than ever… Please contribute something… all donations big and small make a huge difference for our wild neighbors. Thank you for helping us during these difficult times.
