Thank you so much for your support over the years especially in 2025! This year has been extremely busy. Moreover, we are still rebuilding our facility after a sudden move nearly 3 years ago!
Your support has meant that there hasn’t been a day when we could not meet our mission. In difficult times, because of you, we’ve thrived. Thank you!!
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.
A Really Big Day at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bird ally x!!!
Thanks to the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, for over thirty years of responding to wildlife injured and displaced by oil spills!
Thanks for coming to see us! In the video I failed to adequately acknowledge the people who came to visit! Rats! But we’ll take care of it here: Victoria Hall, the new Director, Frankie Lill, wildlife planning specialist (and haiku enthusiast!), Danny Vickers, wildlife planning specialist, and Wendy Massey, a friend and colleague I’ve known since my first oil spill response, 23 years ago, then called the San Mateo Mystery Spills, now known as the Luckenbach spills, from the sunken (1953) SS Jacob Luckenbach.
Your support is makes us able to be a part of this incredible network of care providers ready to jump into action for oil spill-impacted wild animals. And right now, at the end of Summer, and our very busy season, we need you to keep us even keeled and underway! Thank you for your past current and future support!
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.
The first baby raccoons of our 2025 wild orphan season were admitted on May 25. For the baby raccoons who come to us so young that their eyes are still closed, they will be in care for at least four months before they are able to be released back to their wild freedom. Our first babies released this year were a little older when admitted so they spent less time in care, only 3 months! From eyes just opening, only having a milk replace, to a 3+ kilogram omnivore with a strong desire to soak their food in water, the journey with orphaned raccoons is a privilege to share – they are smart, inventive, curious, bold, cautious, and more – and given the chance (which we never give) they could probably beat us at checkers.
Because raccoons are so smart we have to take very positive steps during their time in care to protect their wildness, respect their privacy and ensure that they each have a healthy fear of people. (If you’ve ever met a person, you can probably imagine why this fear is necessary.)
Almost every baby raccoon we admit lost their mother due to trapping. People see an adult raccoon around their property, or under their house, and they trap her and take her far away, or they kill her. In either case, they leave behind babies who will die without her unless they are rescued. Please, if you ever have a problem with a raccoon, or any wild animal, call us! We can help resolve the situation in a way that everyone, you, the raccoon mother and the raccoon babies can be satisfied – and the wild family can be kept together.
Treating wild orphans is tricky business. It requires a trained staff and it takes plenty of resources. Your support provides these crucial elements. Thank you! Thank you for making sure our region has a place that wild animals in need can be helped. We wouldn’t be here, 365 days a year (366 in leap year!) without your support.
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
Summer 2025 has been very busy – so far the busiest on record! Humboldt Wildlife Care Center has treated over 1100 patients already this year. And this year has also brought in the most Gray Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) kits on record. So far we’ve admitted had 8 kits from all around Humboldt County. Four were orphaned when their mother was shot. Two were sick babies who we were able to treat over the course of a few weeks and then return to their mother. Two were each found as individual lost babies, sick, near death, and starving.
Smart, hungry and with boundless curiousity, they are a challenge and a privilege to shepherd into wild and free adulthood! Please enjoy these photos, made as discreetly as possible during the course of their care. We respect their privacy, we protect their wildness and we make sure they can hunt and forage – this is at the heart of raising all orphaned wild babies. It’s serious work, filled with physical, mental and emotional challenges. It also takes cold hard cash. Thank you for helping us give these 8 Gray Fox kits the second chance they needed and deserved.
2025 has been a heck of year, so far and we still have months to go. As is true every Summer, it’s at this point of the year that we really need you. Our coffers are low and the need is still high!
Want to help?
photos: Laura Corsiglia/BAX
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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.
