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On the day I met Laura Corsiglia, I knew. Who else would I ever be able to talk with about wildlife and reality and necessity the way we could. Here’s a bit of what I mean
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Late on a Friday afternoon, a woman walking past a shuttered restaurant heard something that made her stop. Looking around she found the source – a large bin filled with old cooking oil – and also containing two juvenile raccoons. She called Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. Staff immediately was dispatched .
On scene we found two raccoons trapped in a large bin that contained several gallons of used cooking oil. We were saddened to find one of the raccoons had drowned.
The living raccoon was completely soaked in cooking oil. A small, juvenile male, he was in a lousy mood. With the oil soaking his fur he was cold and hungry. Tomorrow we could determine a course of treatment and determine the strategy for bathing him, but for the night we set him up with heat support and a decent meal. Perhaps many wouldn’t agree, but the raccoon found the whole fish, the egg, the live mealworms and the frozen rat we’d thawed for him to be appetizing. In the morning the food was gone.
We kept him indoors with heat support and food for a couple of days to make sure he was strong and ready to be washed. His size was working out in his favor. He was small enough that experienced staff members had no difficulty restraining him while he was lathered up with dish detergent (seventh generation free and clear) and rinsed of the foul smelling old oil which had darkened the suds and fouled the tub.
And then the bomb cyclone hit. This gave us plenty of opportunity to ensure that his fur would again protect him from the elements – the several days pre- and post-wash were good for his weight too. He’s a good looking raccoon and he looked it, even in the rain. A week after he’d been found in a situation that surely would have killed him without intervention, we released back to his wild freedom, a second chance in his grasp.
Your support, of course is why there was a place for the person who discovered this guy trapped in oil to call. Your support is what gave this raccoon a second shot. Your support is why a facility to properly provide his care exists. Thank you for helping us meet our mission, serving our region’s injured, orphaned (and sometimes half-drowned in cooking oil) wild animals in need of helping hand.
Help! Volunteers are needed! Avian Botulism has struck again, and thousands of migratory waterfowl and shorebirds are sick and dying! Beginning on September 3rd Bird Ally X Botulism Response has been treating over 50 new patients each day.
As of September 10, 356 sick birds have been admitted to our field hospital on the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge just south of Klamath Falls.
Staffing is very short right now and we desperately need help.
Volunteers are needed to assist with many tasks, housekeeping, feeding, helping with exams and more. You will be given the training you need to complete each task.
It is difficult but highly rewarding work! Bird Ally X is a leader in botulism response and you are needed on our team!
Local volunteers are especially needed as our ability to house crew members is limited.
Avian botulism is caused by environmental conditions that allow the toxin to bloom. High temperatures combined with dry weather lead to fish die-offs, which leads to a sudden explosion of the toxin in the environment. Aquatic invertebrates who feed on the dead fish are in turn eaten by waterfowl and shorebirds. The toxin causes paralysis and death.
Treatment works! Capturing sick birds and bringing them into care has a very high success rate. In 2020, the last time a major outbreak occurred, over 3000 birds were treated and released.
Want to be a hero? Easy, just put on your cape and come help out!
Can’t help in the field? Then please help with your donation! This is a problem you can absolutely throw money at!!!
Thank you for your compassion, your love for the Wild and your commitment to healing our ailing world!!!
A Beechcraft Bonanza is not as stylish or formidable as a Bald Eagle, but still it was with a certain amount of panache that the two-tone brown, trim and speedy plane touched down on the runway of the California Redwood Coast- Humboldt County Airport the early afternoon of August 7. Since the aircraft was bearing precious cargo in the form of one very important Humbodt County resident, a male Bald Eagle who resides with us here on Humboldt Bay, quoting Neil Armstrong to mark the occasion of his happy return home was only natural, perhaps even required: The Eagle Has Landed.
The neat little plane, owned by Eric and Cindi Choate, was flown by Eric and carried, besides the Bald Eagle, Cindi, and Luis “Lou” Rivas of Flying Tails, an animal rescue organization founded by San Francisco Bay area news anchor and private pilot, Ken Wayne. Flying Tails has a remarkable list of achievements over the years, flying animals in need of help or rescue all around the state. Flying Tails has gotten many wildlife rehabilitation patients into care and released back to the wild.
As it happens, Mr Wayne’s plane was being serviced on the day of the Eagle flight, so Lou was able to secure a ride with his friend, Eric, who also happens to be a Civil Air Patrol volunteer.
On the first of July is when this Eagle’s story in care begins. As so often happens in our work, it began with a phone call to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bird ally x. The caller was reporting that a Bald Eagle appeared to be injured in their driveway. The Eagle had been there all morning and they had seen blood on one of their wings.
We launched a crew to investigate. I took one of our seasonal rehabilitation techs, Na’Mae Gray, with me to help with the rescue as well as learn the techniques of injured raptor capture. I wasn’t convinced yet that we were going to find an Eagle. Eagle calls are much more less common than false alarm Eagle calls. Every wildlife rehabilitator can you tell about the time a caller brought them what they said was a Bald Eagle baby who turned out to be a nestling Pigeon.
But in fact the injured bird was indeed an adult Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus)! And while he couldn’t fly, he could run like the dickens. Around the ferns in the forest above Cal Poly I chased the Eagle with Na’Mae blocking possible escape routes. Shortly I caught the wise and wily bird in my long handled net – soon he was in our crate to be transported back to our clinic in Manila. (Remember we are at a new location: 68 Mill St in Manila!)
In our exam room, HWCC staff rehabilitator Ash Shields got a chance to help with their first Bald Eagle admission examination. Although my first time was nearly 25 years ago in Seattle, I can still remember the thrill and anxiousness of holding a Bald Eagle in my hands the first time. I mean I can remember the thrill from my first time seeing a Bald Eagle in the wild (near Shasta). I knew that Ash was probably feeling a complicated mix of excitement, fear and responsibility. “I was nervous,” they said, “but in awe of the strength this eagle had, and how powerful of a bird they are!”
During the exam, we found nothing really major wrong with him. We did note his slightly smaller stature, which we took to mean that this bird is a male. He was in decent body condition. There was some bleeding from a couple of his primary feathers, but no fractures. Still, a grounded Eagle has no future – dehydration and then starvation would claim him without our intervention. It seemed like the most he would need was food and time in an aviary recovering his ability to fly. The people who found him said he’d had a fish with him they first discovered him. We conjectured that he’d tangled with an Osprey over that fish and that the Osprey had managed to get their own licks in, even though they’d lost the fish. It’s a tough old world.
Needing aviary time, however simple a treatment plan, still presented us with a problem. Our eagle aviary was lost in our move from Bayside to Manila and we haven’t yet rebuilt it. (want to help rebuild our raptor aviary? donate here!) Sure, with your help we’ve rebuilt a lot in the last 18 months, but we still have a lot more to do! And this bird didn’t have time to wait for the end of our hectic wild baby season – no doubt he had his own baby season he needed to get back to. His partner was now a single parent.
Fortunately, just a four-hour drive South, is Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue. Their executive director, Doris Duncan, and I have know each other for nearly twenty years. At SCWR they treat thousands of wild patients each year, as well as maintain impressive programs to promote co-existence with our wild neighbors for rural, agricultural, suburban and urban areas. I reached out to Doris and she readily agreed to help us with this Eagle. The next day Bird Ally X co-founder and chief photographer administrator and general utility player, Laura Corsiglia and Ash took the drive to Petaluma and SCWR to deliver one Bald Eagle in need of an aviary and some quality care.
Doris Duncan of SCWR is a fantastic resource for wildlife rehabilitation, and she’s an excellent advocate for our profession. With her organization, she has also supported our work here in Humboldt County helping us when we were building and expanding our capacity at the old Bayside site.
After about 4 weeks, she texted me that the Eagle was ready for release. It was thrilling news! We started to arrange a team (probably Laura and one of our staff) to drive down to Petaluma to get him!
I texted Doris that we were ready to travel, but she replied, “No need! Flying Tails will bring your Eagle home!”
And there we were, on the 7 of August, at the airport, waiting for the Eagle to land. Our release site would be a field very close to the capture site, not 300 yards away, which happened to be at the home of one our board members, Lisken Rossi, as well as her parents (and HWCC supporters), Gail and Tony.
This Bald Eagle’s rescue was very much a group effort. The concerned callers who originally found the injured Eagle, HWCC/bax, Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue and Ken Wayne’s Flying Tails all worked together to give this beloved member of the Humboldt Bay community a second chance.
Of course, we are very committed to being able to provide quality care here in our region for all the wild patients we serve, so that means we need your help continuing to rebuild our capacity after our swiftly done relocation last year. So far, with your help we’ve been able to make great strides in building back our capacity and expanding it over what we had lost! Our new yard for orphaned fawns is a perfect example of our improved facility, made possible with your support. Our new waterfowl aviary is as well. A raptor aviary is next on the list. With your help we’ll soon get it done! Thank you for making our work possible!
photos: Laura Corsiglia (except for the ones she’s in)
video: Alondra Cardena
It was the evening of March 31 that we were having a class on hatchling and nestling care for our staff and volunteers. Part of the material in the class was the approximate dates that we tend to start admitting certain species. Roughly, we had until the last few days of April, most years, before Mallard ducklings would begin to emerge. Nestling and fledgling songbirds start coming in about two weeks later.
As an aside to that, we talked about things that we would prioritize to complete in the next few weeks in preparation for the season before all of our time would be taken up by patient care.
The season had other plans. Three days later, April 2, our first hatchling ducks started to come in.
I often tell staff that the two gods I pray to are Necessity and Dumb Luck. I love them both. Necessity tells me what’s next and Dumb Luck helps make it happen sometimes, maybe, you can hope. Necessity said next up is a duckling pond for baby ducks old enough to be housed outside but who still need the heat support that would have been provided by their mother. Necessity also gave us a week to build it.
The part needed that isn’t Necessity or Dumb Luck is no god. That’s where each of us comes in. Elbow grease. Commitment. Community support. By the end of April we finished putting up a waterfowl aviary and adjacent smaller duckling pond, our first since moving to Manila in March of 2023. Maybe what I mean by Dumb Luck is the aspect of our work that requires us to believe that what is necessary will be done, because it must be done. In hindsight, after the accomplishment, one feels enormous gratitude, and also very lucky.
As it happened, the season just got busier and busier from April 2 on – by the end of the week, were getting very tiny Virginia Opossum babies whose mothers had been killed by cars or dogs. By April 11 we had tiny raccoon babies, who had been taken from their mother when their den was uprooted during some “brush removal” in Del Norte County, 80 miles north of us. With neonatal mammals, the feedings are as close to around the clock as we can manage – an inescapable part of parenting, as every parent knows – that we recreate as best as we are able.
So here we are, just past the midway point of the Season of wild orphans – we’ve been working 14 hour days for more than three months now. We still have about two months to go. The fact that we’ve even made it his far is in every way because of your support. Support that stays critical. We still have so much more to come this Season, and we still have a lot to complete to bring our facility back to its proper capacity. Your help is going to keep being needed, hopefully forever. If you can please donate to keep our season going, our doors open, our utilities paid, our food delivered, our medicines covered – our needs met. We do a lot on a little – we can do even more on more. Thank you!!!
Please take a look at our slide show of photographs from what so far has been, it cannot be denied, a WILD WILD BABY SEASON.
We really need your help to keep going this Summer. We still have 2 months or more left of the Season and several hundred animals to admit. Please help us help our wild neighbiors in need! Thank you so much!!!!
Since 1979, HWCC has tried to provide excellent care for our region’s orphaned Mule Deer fawns. This year, thanks to your support and our volunteers’ efforts, including an incredibel work day put in by local members of the US Coast Guard! Watch the video for our report on our progress!
We have more to go, more to build to regain our lost capacity after last year’s move. Your support will make it all happen. Please help us help our wild neighbors!! Thank you!!!
Every patient in our care has been through a traumatic experience, and had we our druthers, we’d wish that it had never happened and we never saw them in our clinic – their wild, free lives uninterrupted by human society.
Stil, providing care for young Swallows is a transcendental joy and a supreme privilege. This summer so far we’ve admitted scores of Swallows – Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica), Cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota), and Violet-green swallows (Tachycineta thalassina). Of the swallows admitted, 24 were nestlings (still in the nest, not fully feathered) or fledglings (fully feathered but still need a parent and may have just left the nest or may have fallen out too soon).
Of those 24, two are currently in care and 20 thrived and made it back to wild freedom!
Providing care for all of our patients is a joy and a privilege. Swallows can’t help it that their elegance and grace and delightful personalities are so terrific! For me, personally, stepping into the aviary to feed them is like a restorative vacation in the middle of the incredible caseload of Summer. Most of them are out there now, meeting their intended destiny. And the reason we had the aviary, had the food, and had the facility to provide their care is because of your support. Thank you for making our work possible!
video shot and edited by Laura Corsiglia
A small bird with a big belly, covered in short blue-gray feathers with hardly a tail to speak of, a pair of big eyes and an impressive pinkish mouth, with a really splendid gravelly voice – this young Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) was found alone on the ground in an alley in Eureka and picked up by a kind member of the public.
Upon examination at our clinic, the little Jay was found to be in good health with no injuries. The only thing we were concerned about was the welfare of the family. The rescuer had wondered if the parents had been killed. The best thing to do would be to return to the site and look for the baby’s family, and if possible, attempt to reunite them with their parents. If no parents were found, the baby would come back to HWCC to be raised as an orphan until they could take care of themselves in the wild.
Like most parents, Steller’s Jays don’t abandon their babies. But tragedy can occur in a world full of cars, cats, windows, and natural predators – we treat nearly 200 orphaned songbirds each year!
We followed the address deep into Eureka, armed with binoculars and carrying the baby in a box lined with a soft pillowcase. We arrived at the site and proceeded to watch for Jays.
It’s awesome that this Jay’s mother and father were still present and that the youngster could return to their family. Of course, many young birds are actually orphaned and do need our care. While you can read on the internet that intervention may be the wrong thing, and that if you don’t know, you shouldn’t act, we can easily turn this reasoning around. In many cases we might not know enough to not act. To decide to do nothing might have consigned this wild animal to a needless death. The kind-hearted people who brought us the baby Jay were not able to tell that the baby wasn’t alone. They observed for a considerable time but didn’t see anything to allay their fears. This is perfectly fine! They aren’t professionals. They did the right thing. They called our clinic and told us what they’d seen. WIth no parents observed and the bird in the middle of an alley, with possible injuries, we suggested that they bring the baby to us. In this way we all played our part in helping protect this bird and gave them a second chance.
Want to help us provide the kind of care and attention that all wild neighbors in need deserve? Please consider donating! Your generosity is what makes our work possible. Without you there would be no one to call, no one to intervene, and no one to make sure that fledglings who’ve wandered far from home will get the attention and care they deserve. Thank you!!!
This Spring we’ve been adding to our capacity to provide care for injured and orphaned wildlife on California’s North coast. See our latest developmensts in this video. And please, help us help wildlife. We need your support! You can donate here: http://birdallyx.net/donate-now/
As if they were all on the same schedule, about 3 weeks ago young crows all over Humboldt County were making their first leaps toward independence by jumping out of their nests. As we remind everyone, this is wild baby season. All over the county, and everywhere, young animals are learning the ways of the world. For songbirds like crows, this means weak and a little clumsy flight long after they leave the nest. They are vulnerable to all sorts of dangers, and in our modern world many of these dangers are man-made – cars, windows, cats, and more. And some times they are at risk of false imprisonment.
When the Eureka Animal Control Officer Rob Patton pulled up in our driveway 2 weeks ago, we greeted him at the door.
“Got you a young crow,” he announced. We’ve worked with Eureka PD Animal Control for a long time. While many people might mistakenly nab a poorly flying young bird, thinking help is needed, Officer Patton knows whether a wild animal needs help or not.
Turns out the young crow landed in the equipment yard at the Police Station. They watched him for a week before deciding that no parents were nearby. So they booked him. Another lost fledgling – a definite youth at risk.
The crow was very underweight and quite excited to meet his food dish. Crows, like people, are omnivores – eggs, fruit, fish, mice, seeds, insects made up his diet. Gradually we moved him to larger housing where his flight improved.
Yesterday, we took him back to his old neighborhood. Not far from the police station, at the Eureka waterfront, is a common foraging place for crows and other birds. BAX/HWCC intern, Cheryl Henke and BAX co-director and photographer Laura Corsiglia scouted for crows.
Satisfied that this would be a good place for the young crow, they let him out of the carrier.
Almost immediately an adult crow came to him. The young crow gaped (opening his mouth wide to ask for food).
“I was astonished,” exclaimed Cheryl, “It was beyond belief. It was like they already knew each other!”
The adult quickly coaxed the bird from the ground to a nearby treetop. After some brief conversation, the two birds flew off together.
Your support allows us to sometimes pull off rescues as profoundly beautiful as this. Please donate what you can. Help keep wild families together, or perhaps, build new ones!
(all photos Laura Corsiglia/BAX)
