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.
Pink mouth? Blue eyes? Yep that’s a baby crow!So adorable…Weight checks are a crucial part of baby care!In the aviary…Release evaluation!Flies like a champ!Ready to roll!Out of the box forever!Into the woods, back to the wild, resumption of freedom!
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.
New babies only a few days oldWeight checks are a regular part of careIn the aviaryDuckweed is a blessing.Frightened by human care providers, the ducklings huddle in fear.Release evaluation day!On the way to freedomA flotilla of Wood Ducks sets sail into their wild and free destiny!
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.
it was a path to release that required paying attention.Out of the box, in the sun, no barriers in sightA young bird’s first real flight back …… to an extremely luxurious home.
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
A 5 gram baby Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) whose nest fell. We tried to get the nest back up, but the parents had already left the site. Now the baby will be with us until old enough for release.
We are deep in the middle of Wild Baby Season! In the few months from the end of May to the end of August we admit half of the patients we’ll treat all year and 95% of these patients are orphaned babies. Yes, it’s a lot of mouths to feed. Yes, without your help, we’d be unable to meet the challenge. Yes, being able to help so many innocent your animals get a second chance at wild freedom is a joy and a privilege beyond measure.
Mallard ducklings (Anas platyrhynchos) we admitted when they were 30 gram yellow puffballs, now 700 grams and ready for duckweed in the Wild!
In the Wild!
The madness has been underway since early April, but now we’re really cooking. The busiest weeks are just ahead. We really do need your help. Please donate if you can. Our facility, our staff, our utility providers, and most of all, our patients, are depending on you!!!
Tree squirrels, in this case a Western Gray (Sciurus griseus), are semi-flighted!
At release, the ground wasn’t on this Western Gray Squirrel’s list of things to do.
Canada goslings (Branta canadensis) old enough to be on their own make their way out of the transport crates/
These orphaned goslings have each other, which is more than many wild orphans have. Helping wild babies reach maturity is easier if they have some buddies, or conspecifics, as we call them professionally.
Your support is critical always, but especially now. The next 10 weeks we will need to feed hundreds of wild babies, buy a lot of medicine, a lot of electricity, a lot of water, a lot telephone and a lot of staff hours. Your donation goes directly to the care we provide. Please help! Thank you so much!!!
A soundtrack to wild orphan season and our work… enjoy.
It happens a lot. A duck’s eggs hatch and her precocial chicks must be led to water… and far too often, instead they are led to slaughter – decimated on one of the worst things ever invented, the auto-route.
Often the whole family is lost, but sometimes only the mother is killed. Her babies scatter. Passing motorists (practitioners of motorism, the religion of mechanized movement) will report the mayhem to us at Humboldt Wildife Care Center… sometimes we need help with traffic from CHP to make the rescue safe, sometimes it means a voyage into a mucky marsh by the side of the highway. Such was the case on a late Saturday afternoon in mid-May.
The mother Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) was crossing US 101 south of Eureka, near King Salmon. She didn’t make it. Her babies, newly hatched, scattered in all directions. A person driving by saw it happen and called our facility. A team was prepared and dispatched to the scene.
The ducklings had scattered around a slough between the highway and the bay at low tide. It was a lot of muck. After an hour of searching – and getting pretty dirty – our intrepid team recovered a dozen healthy tiny wood ducklings.
To provide an environment and the care that protects, supports and teaches any young wild orphan until they’re able to provide for themselves is, to say the least, a specialized endeavor. First the young ducklings must be kept safe and warm, with access to food and water, and not just to drink, but swim in. Precocial birds must encounter the world they will live in immediately; but without a parent that world would kill them. So our heat lamps and small pools and collected duckweed must stand in for everything their mother would’ve given them. Obviously we are not the same, and that’s why no one would ever choose to be an orphan. But here we are.
HWCC/bax staff rehabilitator Alondra Cardena notes the weights of the tiny Wood Ducklings.
These ducklings are doing well. They weighed about 22 grams on admission and now they are close to 200 grams. They’ll be 600 grams by the time we are considering them for release. By then they will have graduated from several types of housing meant to keep them safe and help them thrive and learn and grow. We cannot replace their mother – no one can – but with skill, empathy, and knowledge we can offer them a second chance at their wild and free destiny that the highways of the world are hell bent on taking awa
Each of our patients requires complex consideration and treatment. They need a facility purpose built to provide these things, and a skilled staff to operate. Your support is what makes all of it happen. Please donate to give our wild neighbors in need the second chance they deserve. Thank you for everything!
A mom goes out for food. “I’ll be right back,” she tells her kids … but she doesn’t comes back. Her kids keep getting hungrier. Still, she doesn’t come back. Eventually, in desperation, they go out, maybe to look for her, or maybe out of confusion. But now they’re lost. And still she doesn’t come back.
This scenario unfolds across the season, across the years, across the history of mothers and children everywhere over time. Usually it ends in the death of the family. Unless someone intervenes.
At a facilities building on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus, earlier in May, a person who works there found two young Pacific Wrens (Troglodytes pacificus), who’d left the nest a little too soon. Nearby he found a dead adult wren.
Two young Pacific Wrens, just before learning to fly, admitted to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center
When we admitted them into care at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, both young birds were dehydrated. They were also pretty excited about the mealworms we offered them. One of the babies was nearly flighted and the other wasn’t far behind. We set them up in our baby bird nursery and put them on a regular feeding schedule every 30 minutes. As soon as we could we went back to the rescue site to see if the second parent was present, so we could return the babies to them, but sadly, there were no living adults to be seen. The care of these youngsters was in our hands
Because they were so close to being able to fly it wasn’t long before their attempts produced actual lift and the old magic of leaving the ground under your own power was new again.
The siblings left the temporary housing we have for baby birds about to fledge directly into one of our songbird aviaries. Here we continued to feed them mealworms every 45 mintues to an hour until they were finding the food all by themselves. As soon as their flight was strong and they were feeding themselves completely, we took them back to the place where they were found, a little bit deeper into the nearby forest, and they were free.
“How did I get up here? I flew!!” said the fledgling Wren.
“Please release me, let me go!!!”
Cryptic coloring matches the west coast forests perfectly!
The loss of parents is usually a tragedy that a nest of babies doesn’t survive, but this time, thanks to someone who saw the problem and who called us, the young were given a second chance at the wild freedom for which they were intended. Your support is why there is a facility in our region that make these second chances possible. Your support is why there are mealworms in Manila! Your support built the songbird aviary that provided the security and opportunity to learn that would have been provided by their parents. Your support makes this work possible! Thank you!!
After 16 years of building our digital community of support, it’s time for us to reimagine and recreate a less toxic environment that reaches more people to secure the success of our mission!
Bird Ally X co-founder and Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax director, (me) talks about the successes of the past, the challenges of our present moment, and our commitment to the future.
Your support is critical. Without you, we are nearly paralyzed. Please help us meet this years;a challenges – wild baby season is well under way!
Thank you for everything, especially your love for the Wild, and of course, our Wild Neighbors.
