When Saving the Earth means Rescuing Society

I have been working as a wildlife rehabilitator for 26 years. I will tell you briefly why. 

One day in the late 90s I looked up from the book I was reading – I had been studying the westward expansion of the US, and reading women’s diaries of the overland crossing, the details surrounding the “ill-fated” Donner Party, and of course the genocide of Native Americans that was part and parcel of so-called Manifest Destiny.



I looked up from the book, which was filled with nightmarish suffering, and looked outside – it was 4 am. In the eastern sky the last quarter moon was rising over the Cascades, Venus was just below and behind the mountains the sky was beginning to glow with the coming dawn. Suddenly the dome of sky was a vast expanse, and here I was, in it. In the mix with the Earth, the moon, Venus and the Sun. The mountains jagged in a mountainous perfection and all of the known world before me. 



At breakfast later, I was reading the Seattle Weekly – an ad for the PAWS Wildlife Center asked “Want to Help Return and Animal to the Wild?” and I knew in my heart, in my gut as they say, that this ad was for me. I needed the real world, unmediated by books, just as I had seen at 4 am… real, concrete, actionable. And action, not study, is what I needed.



Even then, 1999, the world was in grave danger. The greenhouse effect had supplanted nuclear winter as the thing that was going to get us all in the end in the late 80s. By 1999 we were already calling that phenomenon ‘climate change’.



I had moved to Seattle from New Jersey in 1993. It was the aftermath of the forest wars. As a reader, of course I had caught up with the science and political skirmishes surrounding ancient forests and old-growth logging. Timothy Egan’s book The Good Rain was an excellent introduction to the Pacific Northwest and offered a concise history of the region including the battles to save the forests, and the most famous indicator species of forest health, the Spotted Owl. My reading had walked me right up to that moment at 4 am, and there I stood at the window, dissolved by the real and reassembled in an instant … In an instant the mountains were no longer mountains and the stars no longer stars and then they were, mountains mountains and stars stars again.



While I still had and still have so much to learn, it was then that I graduated into my real work. I needed to help with the ordinary grueling work of rescue. Rescuing what our world was treating as so much “overburden” – the forest and wild community that sits inconveniently above all that valuable mineral wealth, whether is is coal, or gold, or a good location for a billionaire’s golf course.



Like most of us currently topside, I was born into a world that had a doomsday clock ticking. It has been a feature of daily recognition that bad times were coming, if we didn’t change our ways and for over twenty we’ve largely known that it was too late. It was probably the nineties when it last seemed possible that we could have a future watching our great great grandchildren grow on a green Earth from our little corner of the afterlife.



From the vivid protests against the World Trade Organization, November of ’99 to the launch of the destruction of Iraq in March of 2003 the prevailing idea, in America at least, was that the future was going to be a lot worse than it had to be. Avarice had outflanked prudence and care. The world was less profitable saved than burned. Money had spoken.



In the twenty some years since, we’ve lived through hope and dread in a cycle almost as dependable as the tides. But even our hopes, our accomplishments, such as marriage equality, the occasional killer cop who is charged with homicide, and so on, even these in each election since 2008 have been grounded in the inescapable realities of climate disruption and environmental catastrophe that we’d have to deal with – no matter how much reform and transformation we bring to the still pressing injustices of our daily world, the collapse of our world was coming and we could either do it in cooperation, or we could destroy ourselves along with the world.



When Joe Biden won in 2020, it was a relief but not a surprise. By 2020, the only people who still supported that wreck of a human soul, Trump, were the fools and the wicked. Most people are neither. Biden’s administration was a surprise to me. At the start of the primary season, I had said that I’d take any democrat over Biden – Kamala Harris then Elizabeth Warren then anybody but Biden but certainly Biden over Trump.- those were my preferences. In my online world and in my daily life, I met many of my kind. Trump’s handling of COVID and the rise of the Proud Boys and neo-Nazis under Trump, as well as every other single thing about the man, whether politician, celebrity, or real estate conman. I’ve been despising Donald Trump since his first casino was built in Atlantic City in the Anti-Christ fashion, a skyscraper with his name at the top in in thirty foot tall red-letters, as if he were Damien Thorne. As my great-grandmother, my grandmother and mother said to me many times, if you walk like a duck and talk like a duck and … well you just might be the devil on earth.

When Biden won in 2020, the simple relief of Trump not being president was astonishingly restful. COVID was still a problem, but because of our work, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center staff were able to receive the vaccine just a week after his inauguration, We managed in other words, we did the things, wore the masks, tried to stay current on latest developments as scientists, representatives, healthcare providers, teachers, administrators, neighbors all of us all over the world wrangled with the pandemic.

We made it through. Here we are. 



I used to say during the worst of the pandemic in America, with lockdown protests and sane people turning into lunatics believing things like the pandemic was a planned attack, that the vaccine was a trap, that masks don’t work, – i said that the pandemic was breaking America, and it did. But I didn’t think it was breaking the whole world. I thought the world was learning that cooperation and shared experience saved lives and made the world a better place. For every relationship strained by a zoom meeting maybe there’s one born that would’ve been otherwise impossible. I came out of the pandemic believing that maybe there was still a chance to navigate the coming turmoil with more grace and less despair, while avoiding the unnecessary turmoil of a descent into fascism. 



That we strengthen bonds during turbulent times is as natural as battening a hatch. We secure hitches. We tighten straps. We call our neighbors or our parent across the sea – we grasp onto what endures – door jambs, granite, deeply rooted things, our friendships, our dreams.



When tiktokers outsmarted the cacodemon and made him believe he had a big crowd for a campaign rally by reserving all the tickets in a plot hatched in broad daylight, I was uplifted. His dismay walking back from the nearly empty stadium was a joyful occasion and in that light he looked already defeated, and he was. Had he not been, I would’ve been thrown into dismay – but a crushing one, because it would have meant that I was wrong and that my hope that he was but a dumbass immoral debauched and depraved villain yes, but one who could be defeated was wrong too. But he lost. He lost and in losing, lost even more, debasing himself even further with his ridiculous inability to concede losses. 



I did not believe that he was going to win in 2016 and I was wrong. Simply put I didn’t think that poorly of my neighbors.



I did not believe there was a snowball’s chance in hell that he would win in 2024. I had some fairly negative opinions about the MAGA crowd, but I thought their numbers too small – and nobody with a brain or a conscience would vote for him – stopping him seemed like it was everybody’s agreed upon assignment. The tent was huge – it included Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney and Beyoncé. We all know that.



Now here we are, the same unavoidable environmental crisis, which is an existential threat to humanity and whole lot of other lives too, and instead of working together, instead of tightening bonds, instead of investing in our world and opening our hearts to what is real, loving it and saving what we can and looking to find a new way forward that doesn’t kill the road we walk, instead we’re going to be fighting idiotic morons who know neither the value or price of anything who on whim can put a luxury car in orbit around Mars – impractical, vainglorious, puerile and avaricious – arrogant sadists who claim to want a better world and the only way to attain it is by destroying this one, the only world we have.

Now here we are, seven weeks since Donald Trump returned to the White House and the wreckage that surrounds is nearly impossible to catalogue. Tens of thousands of federal employees, from weather scientists, to wildlife biologists, to disease experts and more, just erased, and all of their work too. Purges of departments to rid them of references to accomplishments of people of color and women. We’ve endured cruel and vicious attacks on trans people, gays, lesbians, and more. – Abandonment and betrayal of allies in apparent service to our adversaries. The elimination of critical aid around the world that will result in untold death and suffering. Government programs have been scrubbed of references to to climate science while the head of the EPA recommends reversing the finding from 2009 that fossil fuels are an endangerment. Yesterday it was reported that criminal investigations into organizations because they applied for and were awarded federal grants from the EPA to do climate work were underway. Habitat for Humanity, for example, is one of the organizations named.



It’s a lot to take in.



The chaos and destruction have already caused harm to our work, just by destabilizing day to day life. Bird Ally X does not receive federal funding, thankfully, but many of our colleagues and partners do. The work of everyone who is on the frontlines of conservation and restoration and rehabilitation is being thrown into question.



It’s more than it feels like we can bear, even though we must. We must bear it and also keep our strength to fight back and to prevail. Despair must be managed. And we are all learning to do so, but the biggest problem, – my biggest problem, is that I was barely able to imagine us collectively arresting the environmental collapse that has been speeding toward us for decades. The hope that we might prevail, that we might turn this rig around, that has surfaced and been subsumed to surface again seems likely to be lost forever. 


The effort to stop what has to be seen as a hostile takeover of our society must win, but will it eat the only time that we had remaining on the clock?

 For my part, I will say this. I’m an interventionist. Every rehabilitator is. Every caregiver is. I will continue to intervene until I am dead. Frankly, I hope, after death, to be an intervening phantom. 

Our patients will need us no matter the state of the world.

For so many people who deeply love the Wild, human civilization has almost completely played the villain’s role in the fight to preserve and conserve Nature. But here we are. Conservationists, caregivers, people who simply want an ocean to play in that won’t make them sick, piscavores and vegans, farmers, fishers, and clerks, we’re all served by a society and a rule of law that provides a means to improvement, that is accountable to us – that is us. A government is not a business, and our world is not a balance sheet. Yes, it’s ironic that in order to save the Wild we now must rescue society, but unsurprising. Since as a species we made the first poisons that would outlast us we’ve known. We are on the hook. We have have to prevail. Civilization is too dangerous of a thing to leave in the hands of billionaires and dictators or left to decay into a river without interference.

I tell our new staff, I tell anyone who wants to listen, that what we are is who we are. If we are refugees trying to reach some of the last inhabitable land on Earth, some of us will still bend over to give aid to the struggling Raccoon, or the broken-winged Robin. If our vessel is approaching the falls and all seems lost, wildlife rehabilitators won’t stop rowing until we simply no longer can.

Your support keeps our facility open no matter what. Please donate if you can. Thank you so much!!!

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Latest Podcast! New Wild Review vol 5 ep 3 with Laura Corsiglia, imagination and the Wild!

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

Want to help us meet the incredible challenges of our mission. Donate today!

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New Wild Review vol 5 ep 2 Disaster Response and Everyday Living

Our latest episode of New Wild Review with guest Lucinda Adamson, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center’s Assistant Rehabilitation Manager.

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Raptor Aviary FUNDING ACHIEVED!

Thanks to many donors, building our much needed raptor aviary is now underway!

Many supporters contributed with donation since our call went out in August for help. Thank you so much. And very recently, Cal Poly Humboldt professor of marketing Dr. Sarita Ray Chaudhury, who put us over the finish line with a $5000 dollar donation!

Many other donors have provided substantial help rebuilding our facility, a project that still has some distance to go before we are finished! Our colleagues at Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue have generously supported our rebuild as have Julie Buchanan and more!

Our busy Summer is winding to a close and now begins our season of building projects!

Still to come:
A Pelican, Gull and Cormorant Aviary (the PGC!) (estimated cost, $7000)
Small Mammal Housing! (estimated cost $4000)
Specialty Aviary for Swifts and Swallows! (estimated cost $4000)
Laundry facility (estimated cost $6000)

We have big plans and major goals for the future of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. An on-staff veterinarian with a well equipped surgical suite is a must! Our goal is to have this capability, thereby reducing the number of patients who we must transport to other parts of the state for critical surgical needs, by early 2026 – that’s only 18 months away!

In other words, while great progress is being made, we still have some distance to go. Your support is still needed, and in fact will always be needed! Thank you for helping us meet our mission of rehabilitating injured and orphaned wild animals. And thank you for your love of the wild!

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URGENT! Volunteers Needed! Support Needed!

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!!!

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The Eagle, as they say, has Landed! (but took off again right away!)

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 Eagle is landing at the airport in Humboldt County…

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.

Not the aircraft in question, but it was just like this one…. a real cutie-pie!

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.

Opening our transport crate to get the Eagle out for his admission examination.
Ash Shields, holding a Bald Eagle for the first time, is an asset to our field. Yes, that’s a halo above their head.
Palpating the shoulders for injuries, swelling or anything that might explain the matter. It takes the three of us, – Ash, myself and those are Na’Mae Gray’s hands helping keep the Eagle still by holding his head and right wing.
The Eagle is in pretty good shape overall.

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.

On site at Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue.
SCWR is a beautiful facility. HWCC is working hard to finish building our capacity in order to meet the needs of our patients.

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.

(l-r) Laura, Ash, Na’mae, waiting for our ship to come in at the airport with a very long name, in one of the very few pictures not taken by Laura.
Lou, of Flying Tails (foreground) and the pilot Eric bring the Bald Eagle out from the hangar where they’ve left the lovely little Beechcraft.
Cindi Choate and Na’mae leave restricted areas in pursuit of the Eagle’s return to freedom
The ground crew meets the air crew!
At the release site, Ash and Na’mae carry the crate to the field of the Eagle’s dreams.
Na’Mae waits for the Eagle to emerge!
And suddenly he decides to fly!
The Eagle left the crate and flew out of the field and about 60 feet up into a nearby Redwood, where he reclaimed his mastery of all he surveyed!
Happy staff! Alondra Cardena, Ash and Na’Mae enjoy the successful release!
Alondra shares her video of the Eagle leaving the crate with Ash and Na’Mae – and they make a fine staff group photo at the same time! Below is the video Alondra shot.

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!

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Happy Mother’s Jay!

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.

An encouraging sign! An adult Steller’s Jay flew over the neighborhood!
We watched and listened following the clues to a Camellia tree. High inside its canopy which we detected a well built nest.
We placed the baby on a branch inside the Camellia, as high as we could reach. The baby quickly fluttered down and hopped around on the ground – a classic fledgling move. So, the baby won’t be contained by the nest ever again, but is still dependent on their parents. It’s a vulnerable time in a young bird’s life. These first steps of independence wreak havoc on us all!

If we can determine that the baby and parents are aware of each other and in communication, the family will be considered reunited. We stand back to observe, keeping a close eye on the baby.
A parent suddenly appears, perching a distance above. They glare at us. We move further back.
The parent approached the baby and we could hear them calling to each other.
Several times the parent came to the baby, then flew away to forage and return with food.
Keeping watch over babies, hunting for them, guiding them on how to live as a member of one’s own species and eventually fly free on their own – thanks Mom. (or Dad. or Parent. Steller’s Jays pairs look the same and do the same work. Of course one does lay the eggs. After that though it’s equal cooperation. So here’s to you, avian parents!)


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!!!

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Mallard Ducklings Were Lost and Now are Found

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) mothers for millions of years have selected safe secluded places to lay their eggs. Under bushy plants, in high grasses, and not more than a day hike from a nice pond. Once her babies hatch from their eggs, they are quickly on the move. Unlike songbirds whose young are altricial, meaning they are unable to do anything for themselves at all but open their mouths and accept food, ducklings are precocial – they come into the world ready to walk around and feed themselves. Within hours of hatching, mother Mallards lead their babies to water.

[Please support our work. Your contribution goes directly to the care of injured and orphaned wild animals and keeps our doors open! We need you! Please help. You can donate here now.] 

Of course in the intervening years, human have arrived on the scene, and in the last few thousand years began the process of covering the Earth in roads and other serious threats to our wild neighbors. Now an obstacle course of mayhem stands in the way of Mallard families and the ponds where they must grow, develop and learn to be successful adults. A mother killed by a car in traffic might leaving a dozen day old ducklings scrambling for their innocent lives. An off-leash dog might scatter a family with some babies never re-grouped. However it happens, thousands upon thousands of Mallard babies are separated from their families in California each year. Every year Mallards are the avian species most frequently admitted for rehabilitation in our state. Swimming pools with no way for a duckling to get out, pollution, traffic, dogs and cats, curious unsupervised children – the threats to young ducklings in human society are nearly endless.

At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, we see less victims of these threats simply because we have a much lower human population. Still, we raise anywhere between 20 and 40 Mallard ducklings each year.

Orphaned Mallard patients from 2016, learning about duckweed, the miracle food!

Our three young Mallards who are currently in care, under a heat lamp in our indoor housing. Soon they’ll be old enough to be housed outside.


Last week we admitted the first Mallard orphans of the year. Found scrambling though a backyard in the coastal community of Manila, these three babies are doing very well, now. Currently housed indoors until they are big enough to stay warm through the night, soon we’ll move them to our specially built duckling pond and then to our waterfowl aviary where they will continue to grow and develop in relative privacy – their wildness respected and protected – until they are old enough to fend for themselves. When they are ready, after about six weeks in care, they’ll be returned to their free and wild lives.


Right now we are entering the busiest time of our year. Every day from now through the rest of Summer we will be helping keep wild families together and raising wild orphans when we must. The workload is intense and so is our need for your support. We are striving raise $25,ooo by May 31. We have $20,000 to go. Your support makes all the difference. Please donate today. Thank you!

photos: Bird Ally X

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Wild Baby Season is Coming!

The earth rolls around the sun dipping first this hemisphere then that one toward the light and the wild animals follow suit. Summer birds have already begun to return to the North Coast. Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) investigate the old cavities where they may have raised last year’s young. Ravens (Corvus corax) fly though late Spring winds with sticks for their nests held tightly between their bills.

Mother mammals are on the move, seeking safe places to give birth. This year everyone is in  a hurry to bloom and leaf!

All of  this means that our busiest season is about to start. Each year we treat around 1200 animals. Nearly half of these patients come in during the months of May, June and July. While we stive to reduce the number of our wild neighbors who need help,  through public education and good phone consultation to resolve human/wild conflicts, still our caseload and our costs will predictably skyrocket in the coming weeks.

We will be reaching out to you frequently, asking for help. Financial contributions of any amount are critical. We’ll also be asking for donated supplies, like goat milk, produce, sheets, towels, vinegar and baking soda – all things that are crucial to our daily operation!

Nestling Swallows (2015) receiving their regular feeding – soon these birds would fledge into our Songbird aviary where they continued to be fed while they learned to fly and eat on the wing.  
Common Murre (Uria aalge) chicks, separated from their fathers at sea, too young to provide for themselves. Each year we raise any number of these oceanic birds, depending on the how successful the year’s breeding season is… last year we raised 6, the year before, 30.
Every year for the last 5 years we’ve provided safe haven and bits of mouse for a Western Screech-owl (Megascops kennicottii) chick found in Fortuna’s Rohner Park

Every year we care for several Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) goslings who’ve been orphaned by the highways that separate their nest site from the water. Parents killed trying cross US101 leave chicks scurrying in traffic – a dangerous situation for all. If safely captured, the young geese will come to our facility in Bayside.

The most common reason for young Opossums (Didelphis virginiana) to be orphaned? Their mothers are hit by cars while they’re still in her pouch. Each year we admit over 50 babies! 

Black-crowned Night-Heron(Nycticorax nycticorax) chick’s life took a turn for the worse when s/he was knocked from the nest high above the beach at Moonstone during a wind storm. This yung bird ate a lot of fish!
Every summer we save lives, preserve wild families, and give unfortunate victims of accidents and human intervention a second chance. This juvenile Hermit Warbler (Setophaga occidentalis) whose nest was disturbed in the Arcata Community Forest. An improvised substitute made from a basket lined with twigs and mosses was placed high in the tree  above where the young not yet flighted bird was found. Soon parent birds were seen bringing food and resuming care. Reuniting wild babies with their families is an important and frequent task throughout Spring and Summer.
Each year Raccoon (Procyon lotor) mothers are shot, trapped, poisoned and otherwise mistreated in ways that leaves their babies behind, often stuck in an attic or a crawlspace and left to die. When they’re lucky, someone hears them, finds them and brings them to us. Almost every single orphaned raccoon we care for could have been raised by their mother if only people would take basic steps to protect their property by preventing Raccoons and other animals from getting in, or seeking advice before acting irresponsibly and resorting to lethal solutions. Providing care to orphaned Raccoons isn’t cheap! Usually they are in care 4 moths before they can be released. Each baby costs nearly $500 to raise successfully and we raise over 20 of these curious Earthlings each year!


Every year our busy season has the added stress of paying for food and medicine, the water bill, the electric bill, staff salaries. Scrimping and saving is good and necessary, but so is knowing that our basic costs are going to be covered. It’s good to know that if an unexpected major expense comes up – like last year when we treated a lead-poisoned Bald Eagle whose care required six months of recuperation – that we’ve got it covered.

So, we’re launching a special Baby Season fundraiser.* Our goal is $25,000 between now and May 31. That’s 9 weeks. $25,000 will keep us going through early Spring and leave us ready to take on the most hectic months of our year with something in reserve, reducing our stress so that we can be better care providers. It costs us about $12,000 a month to operate during the Summer. Your help is vitally important. Without your generosity… well, let’s just say that we are grateful that you’ve kept us going this long and we look forward to your continued support. Let’s make this the best, least stressful Wild Baby season we’ve had. Thank you!!

*By the way, we are still a couple thousand short of our March goal of $7000. Want to help us reach it? Donate here. Thank you!!

 

photo: Bird Ally X/ Laura Corsiglia

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