Thank you to everyone who played a role – no matter how small – in keeping our doors open all year and promoting peaceful coexistence with the Wild! You’re the tops! You’re the Mona Lisa!
After some unforeseen delays, we were able to begin putting up our new raptor aviary. Soon it will be soaring!
Your support makes our work possible, including re-building our facility after our sudden move two years ago. Thank you for keeping our doors open and our patients provided with care.
These three Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) are a joy to care for, and the reward is incredible. But we cannot pay our bills with our happiness and fulfillment, though that would be incredibly useful if we could considering how rich in those things we are. However, there is a solution! You! Your support makes this work possible. Please donate if you can.
A quick video made at day’s end, the beginning of September, reflecting on our current state and our needs….
Your support makes everything we do possible. We need you. Thank you
Look! A soundtrack!
First feeding of the morning, 7:45 am.
Your support means everything. We’ve already treated, cared for, raised and released 25 Swallows in 2025 (Barn, Violet-green, Cliff; family, Hirundinidae) and these 5 Barn Swallows still in care will most likely be the last Swallow babies of the year. Just in staff time alone, these babies are dear, but they’re dearness is most reliably measured in the joy they express in flight. At the end of Summer, we’re running on fumes. We need you. Please help.
Until this year, our statistically normal number of Crows (technically, American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) that we admit annually has fluctuated between 20 and 30, with about 75% of them being juveniles, fledglings, nestlings or hatchlings – in other words only about 1 in 4 are adults. But this year has been extraordinary. So far, we’ve already admitted 53 crows, and an astonishing 87% of them have been this year’s babies!
Crows are perhaps the best animal ever to come down the pike. What a thrill it is to help them reach their adulthood! It’s a shame of course, as all orphans are a tragedy – yet the privilege of helping these incredible beings overcome the horrifying setback of losing their parents is a joy beyond compare.
As is always the case with our patients, their wildness, their freedom and their autonomy must be respected. It’s good for people to practice this kind of respect toward other living beings in their daily lives. It’s salvific.
Often, juvenile crows make a few mistakes – perfectly normal for adventurous and bright adolescents to run astray – which separate them from their family. In such cases, if they come to us, we can sometimes get them home. Re-uniting a crow baby with crow parents is the best possible outcome. Of course that’s not always possible. In which case, we have an aviary and diet that will have to do, until they can be released, able to be independent, able to be an adult crow. Learning how to do this effectively is a life-long journey.
What pays for the process, what makes the process possible, what gives these incredible and intelligent wild neighbors the second chance they need and deserve – no matter how many we admit! – is your support. Thank you for getting us this far. Thank you for taking us further.
In mid-May, a mother Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) crossing US 101 near King Salmon was killed by a car and her babies scattered into the adjacent wetland. This has been a common occurrence for the last hundred years, ever since the rise of the worst thing to ever happen to the real world – the automobile. We posted a story about the babies in May. (which you can see here)
After six weeks in care, and many weight checks, and a lot of duckweed, the babies were at last old enough to be on their own. We took them to a nice little pond where they could get accustomed to their restored freedom and when ready, launch into the sky.
Your support, of course, is why we had staff at the ready to rescue these orphaned Wood Ducks. Your support bought the heat lamp and paid for the laundry soap that cleaned the linens we use in the duckling care. Your support provided the waterfowl aviary all our injured and orphaned ducks, geese, gulls, egrets and more use to recover. Thank you! You make our work possible. If you can please support us now. As Summer winds down our coffers are empty and we still have nearly 50 patients in care, and we still have another 400 animals we are likely to admit before the year ends. Please help.
A Humboldt Wildlife Care Center volunteer who lives in Crescent City was spending the day on Harris Beach in Brookings when they found a stranded young Pelagic Cormorant (Urile pelagicus). They scooped up the lost youngster and called us – we met them halfway to get the new patient. (We put on some miles covering the North Coast!)
Too young to be on their own, away from the colony but not quite flighted, the little Cormorant was soon eating fish and gaining weight. Pelagic Cormorants are significantly smaller than the other two Cormorants, the Double-crested (Nannopterum auritum) and the Brandt’s (Urile penicillatus), who we also see here, but even so, they can really put away le Poisson!
After nearly three weeks, our young patient was flying and diving and ready for release. We loaded him up and took him back to Oregon and the Harris Beach colony where his family and whole gang are still enjoying the Summer. We scrambled over rocks to reach an area just across from a large rock past the break where many Pelagic Cormorants were perched and flying. Once out of the box, beyond our grasp, our young patient left our care for home and wild freedom.
Your support is why this desperate young Pelagic Cormorant had a place to go. As you see, we’re the only hope for a second chance for the seabirds of our region for a vast area of the Redwood Coast. We are not as famous as the trees, so it’s your support that we need. Thank you for keeping options open for our literally and figuratively stranded wild neighbors. If you want to help, please
photos: Laura Corsiglia/ bird ally x
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Our latest podcast! In which the ways in which being a modern human who provides care for wild animals is nearly as deranged as a robot being wild.
