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For our third episode, I sat down with BAX co-founder and co-director Dr. Shannon Riggs, to talk about her career providing medical care for injured and orphaned wild animals, the past, present and future of wildlife rehabilitation, and the never ending need for financial support.
We also discover a shared opinion on the topic of Rage Against the Machine. Hope you enjoy the episode!
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Hi Friends and Lovers of the Wild,
Back in January, I posted a story on our facebook page concerning a study of the Common Murre (Uria aalge) die off that occured in the Eastern Pacific Ocean the the Fall/Winter/Spring of 2015/2016. It’s a sad story about the deaths of a million of these remarkable seabirds.
Immediately after posting the story I got a message from a friend and fellow animal rescuer in the Los Angeles area:
“It all seems so heartbreakingly pointless doesn’t it? We’re busting our asses saving one animal at a time and the whole f*****g planet is on the brink of extinction. If we don’t blow ourselves up in another war first.”
I felt that her despair was real and very familiar. So I wanted to address it without relying on platitudes… It became the instigator of our second podcast for our newy launched Bird Ally X: New Wild Review.
It’s a 29 minute “meditation” on our current world and the inevitable nature of despair. No answers are offered, but I hope that those of you in this field who feel hopeless at times are at least offered a branch to cling to…
As always, if you like our content and appreciate our work, please support us.
Thank you for your love of the Wild, and your support of Bird Ally X,
Monte Merrick
This podcast was written and produced by Monte Merrick. The music used in this podcast is from Dreaming Dead Sea (Uria aalge)
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Volume 1, Episode 1 Natural history, daily work, and frequent sightings:
Our first episode of our new podcast! In this premiere episode, we’re sharing BAX co-founder Monte Merrick’s talk on the importance of understanding the lives of wild animals in order to provide quality care for injured wildlife in care. This is adapted from a talk MM gave at an oil spill conference in 2007.
A very short article written by HWCC director and BAX co-founder Monte Merrick, 18 years ago while working at a wild bird hospital in Los Angeles…
“How does it feel when a bird you are trying to save dies?”
Asking this was a young girl in the back row of a group of students visiting the center. It was the last question of the morning.
Fourth and fifth graders, they’d sat attentively while I examined a juvenile Black-crowned Night Heron. They’d groaned while I debrided the seal bite wound on the chest of a Brown Pelican. I told them about the care each bird would receive and what the antibiotics that were administered were intended to fight and how we would ensure that all of the birds’ nutritional needs were met. Through all of our interactions the birds and I were separated from the children by a glass wall, headphones and a public address system. Behind me a television screen monitored from a distance the pools and aviaries where our patients are housed.
As I examined the heron I felt along the length of each of his limbs and described why I needed to “palpate” for any thing that might indicate a fracture or a dislocation. I explained that palpate means feel.
Although the kids and I had fun during the demonstration, everything was kept professional and sanitary and distant – just as it should be. After all we are not here to cuddle the birds or terrify them. Only briefly, to administer the medications, did I uncover the heron or the pelican’s head. After finishing the birds’ care I stood behind the glass and listened through the headphones to the kids’ questions, – about animal bites and the number of patients and how we find the birds. My voice answered through speakers that I could not exactly hear.
One of the first skills we acquire when entering wildlife rehabilitation is a new vocabulary. Medical terminology is used for every procedure. The tests that we perform, such as fecal analysis and blood work, are described in purely scientific terms. As with the distance we respectfully maintain between ourselves and our patients, this is as it should be. Consistent care requires consistent results, which is why the protocols of science were developed in the first place.
But the last question was a curve ball. Clinical language was of no use. Palpate, in this situation, does not mean feel. Now I thought only of the eyes of a Double-crested Cormorant that I cared for a few years ago. They were emeralds on a black velvet cloth. They were old and new and ablaze and dying. Each day for three days her attitude declined. She stopped eating. It was decided that she should be euthanized and that third day I went to her cage to catch her up. She was lying on her back next to the ramp to the kiddie pool that held her untouched smelt. She was already dead.
As we all know, no matter what our experience, no matter how many times this happens, when an animal dies we are horrified. Finding a bird dead in their housing is always a shock, no matter how poor the prognosis may have been.
I answered the young girl’s question as best as I could. I told her that we try very hard to provide the best care we can. I told her that every death was sad but also an opportunity to learn more so that the next patient might benefit. I told her what I had always been told by my teachers – I told her that each of our patients would have certainly died had we not intervened.
Committing to the care of a bird is an emotional commitment, not a clinical one, and the sadness of death is not eased by exposure – in fact it is the great privilege of our work that we get as close to death as regularly as we do. Death becomes more personal, more real, the more it is witnessed. While the language and protocols of medicine make it possible to provide the highest quality care, it is the language of the heart that describes why anyone might feel the need to do so.
*************
Nearly two decades later, the protocols have changed – which is how protocols work – changeable with new information. But the motivation to care for our patients is the same – love, as the songs all know, is forever.
2020 is a long way from 2003, when the article above was written. But our needs in wildlife care are also the same. And it will always be true that your support is what makes our work possible. Please donate today!
The “too long, didn’t read” version? We pilot our ship on a wing, a prayer and the support of our communities. Please help us get closer to the resources we need to do the work we’re already doing. Please help us close out this year on a postive note for our work in the next year and decade. We need you. Our wild neighbors need you. Today, tomorrow and for all the foreseeable future. Help keep us here. Help us help our wild neighbors. On the last day of the year-end giving season, please support our work. DONATE
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, 2019 – the last day of the year and decade – Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bird ally x has admitted 1332 wild patients this year. Barring any late day emergency, we likely will finish the year somewhere near this number. By about a 100 patients over 2012, the year we treated 250 fish waste impacted Brown Pelicans, 2019 is the busiest year ever in our 40 year history, and we had no huge emergency as we did in 2012 – this is just day to day work, answering the phone, going on rescues, treating those injured and orphaned wild neighbors that our human neighbors found in their yards, their basements, the beaches and the highways.
Also in 2019, BAX rescued over 250 wild ducks sickened by another avian botulism outbreak on the Lower Klamath Refuge across the coastal range in Siskiyou County. This is the second avian botulism outbreak that BAX has responded to in that area, prompting a partnership with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the trustee agency for the refuge, to maintain a hospital at the scene for better preparedeness when another botulism outbreak inevitably happens again next Summer
Each year we treat more and more patients. Our daily caseload has been on a constant rising trajectory over the last ten years. Right now we are up 13% over last year and 2018 was 20% up from 2011. Besides the increased numbers of wild neighbors who are getting the help they need, what these numbers mean is that the effort our mission requires and the resources that our mission needs are also growing.
I love reporting our successes, sometimes I need to share our sorrows, but rarely do I want to say we are failing. But right now we are. We are not exeriencing a similar growth in our available resources to keep pace with our ever-increasing caseload .
In fact we’ve never enjoyed adequate resources to do our job. We’ve always had to sacrifice, usually in the form of critical staff working with little or no pay. We’ve managed, over the last decade, to feed our patients a high quality nature-based diet, to keep our utilities on, to expand our patient housing from essentially non-existent pre-2011 to the fully-functioning wildlife hospital we have today, open every day of the year.
We began 2019 with a stated goal of raising $150,000 by this day, December 31st. It was an ambitious, but critical, goal. Our budget and final tally for 2018 was $108,000, which we used caring for 1,159 patients at HWCC and another 440+ wild ducks and shorebirds on the Lower Klamath Refuge. That’s simply not enough to meet the needs of our work. Yet, in 2019 we have treated more wild patients at HWCC than ever and we are not even close to reaching our goal. In fact, as of today we are down about $6,000 from last year.
As I said at the top of this, we keep our vessel airtight and spaceworthy on elbow grease, good luck, clean living, personal sacrifice and the generous support of our neighbors who share our love for the Wild and want to ensure that innocent wild victims of civilization’s toxins, highways and towns get the second chance they deserve. Please help us close 2019 on a good number, like this one:
It’s really that simple. If the Wiyot do not want this project on their ancestral and sacred land, then it should not proceed.
Climate change, climate chaos, is a real and terrifying existential threat to our society. But to have a company from out of the area, a company which is deeply invested in climate destroying energy elsewhere, to try to hold us hostage using the threat of climate change as their leverage is a bully’s gambit.
How our land is lived on is a matter of local concern. How we arrive at decisions should obviously give serious weight to the opinions and knowledge of the people who are part of this land, to the people who have thousands of years of experience of living here sustainably.
No more really needs to be said.
Yet it’s also true that we oppose the wind farm because of the callous disregard of Terra-Gen for the wild lives who will be destroyed by its ordinary function. One of the few Bald Eagles that we treated at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax was rescued in the Bear River Valley and released on Bear River Ridge. Bear River Ridge is a place of unsurpassed beauty and splendor and it is not ours to destroy so that skyscrapers might live.
Dear Friends and Supporters,
As the winter skies return and we reflect on the past year, remembering our successes and our sorrows, we are reminded again of our singular and precious existence on this tilted world, slinging us through the wild universe and here on Earth we see the seasons. So regularly ordinary is it to be flung wild and free through a cosmos we’ll never fully grasp, that we might walk past a miracle here, a breathtaking moment of love and poetry there.
It’s a simple observable fact that the wild is boundless and there is no void. Each toehold, every crumb has someone to perch there, someone to feed. If we seek the wild we need look no further than the back of our own hands or the wild red blood cells who swim in our veins.
We can find the wild easily among the litter and chaos of any city street, where a family of Sparrows might be raising their babies, as was the case with the family of White crowned Sparrows on this card.
A fledgling bird separated from her family was found one morning in old town Eureka by a shopkeeper during a street festival. Unsure of what to do, they called us. The day was frantic with festival goers and we had no way of searching for the young bird’s family. So we took her back to our clinic, gave her an exam, made sure she was well hydrated. We offered her some food. The next day, an ordinary busy weekday, but without the festival crowd, we found her family and they found her.
The dunes, marshes and river bottoms of the Humboldt Bay Area have always been perfect habitat for White-crowned Sparrows, and though city-life has encroached on their world, still they make a good go of it in the nasturtium and shrubbery of our landscaping, a place we might be unlikely to call wild, the source of all good things.
Yet here we are – no matter how devastated, no matter how disrupted, no matter how desperate – we live as the Sparrows do, struggling and surviving, living by a wild code, whether we see it or not – as moved by universal forces as this wild family.
Thank you for making our work possible in 2019. We wish you a happy holiday season, and a fulfilling new year.
Thank you for your love of the Wild
All of us at Bird Ally X/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center
Every year, as we turn the clocks back in Autumn, the evening commute for many takes place at dusk or in the dark. Unfortunately this creates a terrible hazard for nocturnal wild neighbors who are just beginning their workday.
Owls especially, it seems, are the victims of highways filled with cars after the sun goes down. Each Autumn our caseload has a sudden drastic increase in Owls hit by vehicles.
Two patients we’ve recently treated, a Barred Owl (Strix varia) and Northern Saw-whet Owl (Aegolius acadicus) were both hit by cars at the end of the day. Fortunately neither suffered life-ending injuries. They each came in dazed, confused and unable to stand or fly, but soon were recovering and back on their feet, and then back on the wing.
In the early evenings of Autumn, it’s common for a misty fog to lay low across the river bottoms and lowlands, complicating visibility in waning daylight, with oncoming headlights making things worse. Yet the bottoms are prime hunting ground for all manner of nocturnal wild animals, from Owls to Raccoons and Skunks and Opossums.
It’s simply good manners to slow down and be vigilant, as we would in any neighborhood where pedestrian (or wing-borne) travelers are predictably present, crossing the highways as they must.
Every late Autumn and Winter we admit scores of wild neighbors who’ve been hit by vehicles. How many more are hit, killed, and never found we may never know… You can help reduce these numbers by keeping our wild neighbors in mind when driving. You can help support their care by supporting our work, keeping our doors open and our facility ready to care for Owls and others who are struck by vehicles, as well as all the wild patients we treat year-round.
Thank you for your love of the wild!
all photos: Laura Corsiglia/bax
Right now, at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center we are between two PG&E public safety power shutdowns. At the moment the power is on, the wi-fi is working, and our freezer is cold. 200 miles south, a terrible fire rages, displacing tens of thousands of people. And since the Tubbs Fire that tore through Santa Rosa and across wine country October of 2017, it’s beginning to look like the new world order.
We have concern for our friends and colleagues who are directly in harm’s way. If you live near a wildlife rehabilitator impacted by these fires, winds and power outages, please help them out…
A central piece of the mission of Bird Ally X is to help provide continuity of care that is available for our wild neighbors in times of trouble. A common way we’ve expressed this, in dramatic and frightening terms, is that even should humanity be reduced to a “ragtag” group of wandering shell-shocked refugees of the collapse of the Age of Oil, someone among them will find an injured Robin, or a contaminated Seabird and they will want to help. No matter how dire our circumstances, there will always be people trying help innocent wild victims of human calamity. And they’ll need good information – information that demonstrates how to provide quality care on a very tight budget in difficult circumstances.
When BAX assumed responsibility for Humboldt Wildlife Care Center in 2011, besides the opportunity to serve the injured and orphaned wildlife of the Redwood Coast, we saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate ways and means to accomplish excellence with limited resources. And in fact, just last week, we got the chance to do just that when the Oiled Wildlife Care Network held its biennial conference for California oiled wildlife caregivers in Eureka.
Bird Ally X staff taught multiple workshops on housing, stress reduction, and other aspects of wildlife rehabilitation. Our facility in Bayside became a working lab for the day, with participants from around the state visiting to learn basics of providing housing for the many different species that might be impacted by an oil spill, now that pipelines and rail cars are used more than ever to move oil around the world. In a way, it was a maiden voyage for our wildlife hospital lab. We brought students on board and showed them how we fly it.
Of course, our intern program, working mostly with local college students, has been accomplishing the same goal for the last 7 years, with dozens of participants. All of our staff at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center were once interns.
Preparing for this future by training young people as warrior-nurses has been a long-held mission. It’s a joy to be able to realize it as best we can. We’ve known that hard times lay in our future. Those of us on the front lines of the injuries to the Wild that civilization causes have been able to see it for years, – in the ever increasing frequency of starving seabirds, the species we hardly see any more, the changes to the rhythms of life.
Now, we’re surrounded. Some of us quite terribly so in fires that erupt by the hour, it seems, and many of the rest of us left literally in the dark. Tough times are here. Will they get tougher? Absolutely, no doubt.
So, now we are looking, as are so many others, for ways to take our care center off-grid. We cannot run a wildlife hospital relying on power that may not be there for the next few days several times a month. We must change our way of thinking about energy, about how to accomplish the same goals with a radically different usage.
Humboldt Wildlife Care Center has remained open through the power shutdowns, admitting patients, treating patients and releasing patients. The smallness of our wealth against the largeness of our goals has sharpened our survival skills. As we enter these times together, we will be here, taking care of wild animals in need, and learning on the job and teaching others how to survive in a world like we’ve never before seen.
