We need your support! Every Summer’s end is a rough time for us, with our coffers depleted, but this year is worse. Costs are skyrocketing and donations are dropping. It’s a scary time. Please help if you can.
With another avian botulism outbreak on the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, Bird Ally X is again responding to the crisis. BAX botulism co-manager, January Bill, reports that current daily admissions are low, averaging about ten birds, but that number can easily increase as the response ramps up and water levels and temperatures change. 60,000 waterbirds died on the Refuge during the avian botulism outbreak of 2020 while 140,000 died during 2024’s outbreak.
read more about Avian Botulism and past BAX responses here and here
The Lower Klamath and Tule Lake refuges, straddling the California – Oregon border north of Shasta are a critical stop for migratory birds on the Pacific flyway and even more critical nursery for hundreds of thousands of nesting waterbirds including many species of grebes, dabbling ducks and other waterfowl, wading birds such as Black-necked stilts, and various members of the Rail families. Teresa Wicks of the Bird Alliance of Oregon (formerly Portland Audubon) reports that this has been a good year for babies on the refuge complex with over 10,000 Stilt and Avocet chicks this year, and over 100,000 ducklings.
Over the course of four previous botulism responses over that last 8 years Bird Ally X has developed excellent care protocols for birds suffering from the effects of this neurotoxin. A major challenge this response faces is the lack of funding to support the team of staff and interns caring for the suffering birds.
Excellent care protocols obviously require excellent care providers. Excellent care providers require support. And that’s where you come in! Your donations to this effort will go directly to the food, medicine, water, and time that avian botulism victims require. Your support will help provide the best possible chance for recovery that these birds deserve.
Avian botulism is a human-caused problem, driven by how water is managed, especially in the arid West. Prioritizing agriculture in one of the driest regions in the nation and diverting water from critical rivers and wetlands hurts fish, hurts wildlife, and hurts the people who need both. There is not room for debate on providing care for a disaster that was caused by people. Water could’ve been released to the refuge and this disastrous outbreak would have been averted. That human act must be met by another human act, to provide restoration and rehabilitation to what and who we have harmed. Also, it’s not late to advocate for the release of adequate water to the Refuge!
Want to call for more water? Here’s some advice and talking points from Bird Alliance of Oregon to use when phoning your representative!
Every response has its naysayers, – those who question the ‘value’ of rescuing and treating wild animals who are the victims of human industrial mayhem, – oil spills, desertification, cars, cats, windows, whatever. It’s a morally indefensible position, and also an inaccurate position. Every response to human disasters has those who question the costs attributed to care, who wonder how much this or that life is worth in cold, hard cash. It is tedious to contend with such cynical dishonesty. True value is intrinsic and each of us knows this although some pretend that they don’t. Intrinsic value is what gives life value. Intrinsic value is why murder is murder and not mere killing. What is the ‘value’ of honesty when lying pays so much better? What is the ‘value’ of health when graves are so much cheaper? What is the ‘value’ of responsibility, of love, of trust, of the delirious call of a loon in the late Summer evening? What is the ‘value’ of the Wild. When someone talks like that, they mean only one thing: “I’m willing to harm anything for money.” We pay for this deceit in very practical terms every day in every place across the human world – the loss of biodiversity, and the losses this causes our commonwealth, our commons, which we share with the waterbirds of the West, is incalculable, although we are trying to calculate it.
So we do what’s right. It’s a simple calculation. Rescue who and what can be rescued. Save all we can save from senseless destruction. Restore what we’ve harmed. Otherwise, we destroy more than this Teal or that Grebe, although that’s already too high a price, we also destroy our relationship to reality, to the Wild, to our very being here on Earth.
Of course, if you’re a supporter of Bird Ally X, and our projects, you most likely already feel this way about the world and our responsibilities to it. And that’s why we count on you to help us do what’s right, right now.
Your support is critical. Please help. Click on the link and choose botulism response. Time is of the essence.
“Nobody wants to hear that you don’t like skunks or the way they smell. No one wants to hear your complaints about the odor. Countless skunks are killed by your stupid cars across our region and the world everyday and their only defense against your 2 ton mayhem is a musky spray. So shut up already about how that smell offends you. Really.”
Okay, that’s a way to let off steam. We can hold a fisher-price toy phone to our ear and say this into the bathroom mirror if we have to. As the song says, there are lots of things you can do alone, like being very brave on the phone.
Instead, advocating for the safety of some of our wild neighbors sometimes requires us to not fully speak our minds when speaking with a human member of our community who is mad at a skunk member. As a bunch of wildlife care supporting bunny huggers, you folks might not know this, but against skunks in general, the populace at large feels a significant amount of antipathy. Searching for resolutions can get quarrelsome when the caller has the skunk in a trap and wants us to take them away.
Each of us faces these sorts of problems daily. We live in an industrial, machined world, all putting our shoulders to the wheel. Of course it rubs us the wrong way. The wild freedom that inspires us and even heals us, can drive some of us mad with spite and envy. That’s how it looks to me sometimes, anyway.
Skunk babies start coming out of dens and getting into trouble around the middle of the June. The babies we admit before that time are usually neonatal, meaning that besides still nursing, their eyes are still closed. They’re less than four weeks old. Babies this young are admitted almost always because a person has somehow disrupted the den, a person or their proxy, such as the family dog.
Our first skunk baby this year was unusual. Someone opened their shed door and behold! there was a skunk mama carrying a baby. She just happened to be passing through the shed at that moment. Bad timing. Frightened, she dropped her baby and ran. The person felt terrible. They placed the baby in safe spot and left the shed hoping she would come back, but she never did. She probably had many more babies to worry about. We often see litters of six.
The person brought the baby in the next morning.
It would be ridiculous to pretend that the joy of being so near to someone as adorable as a baby skunk is a mere side effect of the work. Joy is always more than a side effect.
After weaning, the baby skunks in our care have several weeks in specially built housing that is for their family only. We call it the Mephitidary, after their family name, Mephitidae.
We tell you about the skunks we treat, this year, last year, years before because we can, because we have a front row seat to this work and we must share it. Our love fuels our work and we know that your love will too. Our love is in labor, yours in support. John Brown was not John Brown without the Secret Six supporting him. Sharing the stories with you of the individuals who pass through our care is at the heart of our mission. We want you to see the patients your support saves and gives another chance. As much as we get thrill at the delight of each young skunk who grows to carry on the mission of their kind, and pay for that thrill with the occasional need to shower, or leave our car windows open for a few days after going on a skunk rescue, what you put into our work entitles you to hear about the details and see their faces and love them as we do, with care and concern for their wildness, for their autonomy, for their right to be here as residents of Earth, made and spun into being by the same forces and out of the same stuff that makes us. The privilege of providing care for family Mephitidae is profound as well as broad. Every skunk opens into the realm we already inhabit – and every skunk invites us to consider these steps, the Skunk Dance – to dance as a skunk does through this world is the most important dream to consider when imagining what their care must include.
It is good for us to imagine deeply other lives, but to imagine other lives is not a good reason to become a wildlife caregiver – the only good reason to become a caregiver is to give care. It just so happens that in giving excellent care opportunities for this imaginitive work are abundant and necessity demands that we do it. The second chances we provide our patients are created in the admixture of your support and our broad palette of labors.
Thank you for making all aspects of our work possible.
Speaking of joy, one of the joys of this blog is writing for our supporters. This is not a neutral blog, we are allies of the Wild, after all. Bird Ally X was founded on the idea that the battles the Wild must wage against the machine are also our battles. We share the same enemies. We are fighting the same war, the war for the real, the war for the imagination, the war for the great collaborative world, the tapestry of vertebrae and femurs and cell walls and daydreams and the warmth of this ray of sun on my silky black fur and the passions of yesterday that will still thrill us tomorrow. Dear AI assistant, please don’t bother me about how to make that last sentence more concise. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but discursive love is what endures.
photos/video: Laura Corsiglia
Just about all of us were born into the world of the swallows’ return to Capistrano as a symbol of the return of hope. Such small birds carrying all our dreams of love and our need for renewal and even redemption. We know of this return before we even know what swallows are, it seems. And then you meet swallows: Barn Swallows, Cliff Swallows, Tree Swallows, Bank Swallows, even Northern Rough-winged Swallows, and of course, Violet-green Swallows. Most wildlife rehabilitators begin this profession as a volunteer. Many of us learn these birds up close, as care providers before we really know who they are when they are free. But for all of us no matter when we begin to learn Swallows and find them in the air and in nests, our society has us prepared for their glory.
The swallows referred to in the song are the Cliff Swallows who migrate from Argentina to San Juan Capistrano in southern California, arriving right at the beginning of Spring. here in Humboldt, they arrive a short while later, repairing old nests, building new ones.
Over the last 14 years the first Cliff Swallow nestlings we admit each year (we’ve admitted 128 since 2012, which is as far back as our digital records go*) have come in between the second week of June and the first week of July – the number one cause for admittance is nest destruction. The mud nests are often destroyed by people who don’t want them on their buildings, or who find the birds to be some kind of bother, it happens accidentally, and sometimes it’s just an act of nature. Of course their nests are protected by law and international treaty, but once the nest is down it’s down. At that point, the best that can happen is that somehow surviving babies are brought to us.
Although they usually are, Cliff Swallows weren’t our first swallow babies of the 2026 though! That distinction belongs to a pair of Barn Swallow nestlings who fell to the ground in a horse barn in Ferndale. They came in May 25 – which incidentally is a full month earlier than we’ve ever admitted a nestling Barn Swallow. In fact, the same trend is holding true for our other swallow species in care. Nestling Cliff Swallows and Violet-green Swallows we’re treating began coming in three weeks earlier than has been the norm.
No matter though – even if climate chaos totally disrupts the breeding season, there will be a breeding season of some sort as long as the Earth still supports life such as we share with the Swallows. And we will be here for it as long as the Earth still supports our efforts. You know, as long as we can get goat milk, eggs and zucchini or some such suitable substitute as needed.
Speaking of resources, Swallow babies in care eat a lot of mealworms. As it turns out, tariffs and other financial obstacles to the mealworm supplier in Southern California we’ve used for the last 15 years have really made things difficult for them, which has caused us to seek other outlets- including locally when necessary, which is significantly more costly. At last we’ve secured another vendor, who produces quality insects and ships them quickly and with excellent survival rate! But the cost is twice what we’re accustomed to…
In any case, these are the tribulations of caring for these purely magical birds. I am not speaking hyperbolically or figuratively. One steps into an aviary of Swallows to provide some aspect of care as one steps into any arena of grace. The arc of the line of their wing, the arc of the path they fly, the swirl of aviatrixes and aviators in the morning marine layer agitated and also ready for breakfast – in the moment they consent to snatch a worm from the hemostats I’m holding high as they fly by. Indeed it is a tragedy that provides this proximity I have to these birds, – and I wish they were home getting moths by the minute from ma and pa Swallow, but they are here and so am I and in these moments I lean very hard into the grace they provide – whether it is deserved or not. I catch them all up in the morning for weight checks and other treatments and put them in boxes and I spray all of the poop back into the Earth.
You cannot find redemption in good deeds. I think that gets covered plenty in the literature and the songbook of Johnny Cash. These swallows aren’t giving this away anyway. “Redemption schmedemption, nobody is a coupon,” says every swallow everywhere. It’s their beauty that we can have for free. So far so good, right? – because we don’t need redemption. We need beauty. Nothing but beauty can bind us to our place here, – not online, not on Mars – here, in the unprecedented, where none of us have really ever done it before. Yet each day we rely on the evidence found in the lengthening record and our own sense of what ought and ought not be to guide us. What else can we do?
According to records we still have many swallows to go before this season ends. We are in the very heart of it now. In the past, most Barn Swallow babies we’ve admitted have been from late July through August. We cannot predict the future, still preparedness must include the probable and routine as well as the urgent yet more rare. Sourcing mealworms continues!
As always, it is your support that keeps us going. Your support is the most needed ingredient, even in, especially in, these difficult financial times. I can tell you that at this time of year, when we go through 20,000 mealworms a week and each 20,000 costs $300 and that’s just for these guys. We’ve had a daily caseload of 60-80 patients since the middle of April. We need your support as they say, now more than ever. And truly, thank you for keeping us here, keeping our lights on. We work hard for our patients’ wellbeing and we do it on your behalf.
NOW MORE THAN EVER!
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* As of this writing we’ve admitted 641 Swallow babies since Spring 2012: 329 Barn Swallows, 184 Violet-green Swallows, 128 Cliff Swallows.
At a traveler’s lodge along the Trinidad bluff overlooking the sea, some staff were cleaning an emptied cabin. As they worked, in hopped a small inspector, a troublemaker in-training, a fledgling Steller’s Jay.
To keep him safe, they put him in a box and kept an eye out for parents. After a few hours, they hadn’t seen any, so they brought the little guy to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bird ally x. It was late on Friday, close to our closing time.
We examined the bird – he was well hydrated, in good body condition, no injuries, no parasites – in short; he was the portrait of well-cared for baby, meaning, it was likely that we could find his family and reunite them.
We kept him overnight, set up with our special diet for all corvids, a blend of hard boiled egg yolk, shredded squash, fish cut into small bits, blueberries and mealworms – simply irresistable!
He ate some overnight.
In the morning, we took him back to the location he was found. Permit me a brief digression to note that when the day’s workplace is just about anywhere outdoors in our region, it’s a day spent in beauty. When it comes to magnificent landscapes, Trinidad is all of that and a bag of chips.
When we arrived at the site, we took a look around, not seeing any adult Jays at first. I walked up the to the office, but no one was at the desk. As I walked back down, Laura, who leads most “reunite” missions, over the years becoming our specialist, was walking up. Just as we were close enough to talk, an adult Jay landed in a tree just above us. And then we saw another land nearby. We went to the car and got the little one out. Taking him out caused him to complain loudly to any who would listen. His cry landed on very sympathetic ears. In less than a minute he was surrounded by family. In less than two minutes they were giving him food. It was nearly celebratory. They joy of the Jays to have their baby back was easy to see.
It’s not an ordinary, everyday task to find a lost baby’s parents and reunite them. It was good that the staff had taken action and got the baby to specialists who would know what to do and be able to do it.
It’s a privilege to be able to help the family of Jays. It’s also a privilege to be able to help people out, when the regular, human-contrived world of work-days and rental cabins, tasks and closing times lead somehow into the blaze of reality, and the situation is ancient and brand new and it’s not clear what to do. It’s a privilege and a joy and also a freighted and worrisome thing to enter that blaze on behalf of people and the wild and for a moment, mend the stitching in the fabric we share. Thank you for supporting our mission and making our work possible.
photos: Laura Corsiglia/bax
The coyote came down from Crescent City. It wasn’t by the ordinary means. No, the coyote wasn’t even that old, just a kid really, but a big kid, an orphan though, you could say. At least he couldn’t say if his parents were alive or dead. He hadn’t seen them lately – it’d been over two months. His eyes were barely open the last time he saw them.
His life was a mystery. And then he went inside, if that’s what you call it. He was in someone’s hands and then he was inside. And then there was a dog to talk to and the dog was not very smart even though he was a lot older. The dog knew a few words and how to pee outdoors. The coyote pup didn’t mind having a pet dog.
It took about eight weeks before the inside was only a memory. Before the hands that held him vanished. Before his pet dog was left behind.
On June 15th a couple pulled into the driveway at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center with a coyote pup in their vehicle. They said they’d gotten him in April from a “homeless guy” in Crescent City. They took him home. They gave him food. They introduced him to their pet dog. They said they thought he was a dog, too. After 8 weeks they knew, this was no mere dog, this was a coyote.
HWCC assistant manager, Lucinda Adamson, had to convince the two that we had many options for this pup to facilitate his rehabilitation and release, even though he’d been with them for two months. They were hesitant to turn him over to us out of fear that he would be immediately euthanized due to habituation.
To be fair, habituation to people can be an insurmountable problem for some wild orphans. And a coyote who has been so wounded psychically that they can’t be released, just as with those who suffer severe physical wounds, euthanasia remains the most humane option – certainly more humane than a life in captivity, destiny denied.
After a physical examination in which we found no problems at all – the youngster was in good body condition, and overall excellent health – we moved him to outdoor housing where we could begin to learn more about his mental state. A first test for him was dietary. Would he eat food that any coyote in the wild would eat. We gave him thawed rats, a pigeon who had been euthanized for an untreatable wing injury, some eggs, and some berries. He devoured it all.
Feeding him, cleaning his housing, doing routine health checks gave us plenty of opportunity to assess his mental state and the level of habituation to people that he suffered. Consistently he showed fear of us, and as his stay lengthened his alarm when we were near only got worse. So we visited less often. After a week in care it was time for a live prey test. Any orphaned predator who we have in care must pass a live prey test. Young wild things have to be able to feed themselves after release, after all.
We offered him a live rat from the pet store who’d been raised and sold as a “feeder” for people who have pets, such as some snakes, who require live food.
At first he didnt know what to make of the rat. We were worried at first that their relationship was less predator/prey than awkward roommates but after a couple of days, the rat was gone. There was only way out of there: through the coyote’s GI tract and out the door as coyote poop, except for the parts of the rat that became coyote – and as coyote of course was another way out the door for the rat.
After two weeks in care, he had demonstrated that he could hunt, he was big enough to be on his own, he distrusted people and he was in good health. This is the same criteria any coyote pup would have to meet for release. Soon he’d be out of all confinement, ready for the big wild world at last.
Being a part of this coyote’s journey home to wild freedom was a joy, – the result of necessity and luck joining forces to help. Without the good fortune of this excellent release site, close to his presumed birth place yet remote from human traffic, and without the need to help – driven by our own ethics and the ethics of our profession – this coyote would likely have never found freedom.
And none of this would have been possible without your support. This year is taxing our resources like never before. We strive daily to do the best work we can. Without your generous contributions we will not exist. Please help us during the most trying time of our year. I understand that economic uncertainty and high prices are ruling the day – these things rule our day too … goat milk is up nearly 25% this year, as one example among many. It hurts. The gas to Crescent City and back is not negligible. Our staff is necessary. Cutting back staff means cutting back care. You are necessary. You make it happen.
Thank you for keeping us afloat. It means the world to us. It means the real world to our patients.
photos: Laura Corsiglia/bird ally x
Thank you for making our work possible. Without your support, we’d evaporate like a summer rain on hot pavement.
Burlington Campground of the Humboldt Redwood State Parks is just south of Weott, along the Avenue of the Giants, about 50 miles south of our facility on Humboldt Bay. It was in the parking lot of Burlington Campground that first one newly flighted Allen’s Hummingbird (Selasphorus sasin, one of the hummingbird species native to the Redwood coast) got into trouble and then soon after so did their twin. Who knows what happened? Maybe they flew too far from their nest site and were lost to their parents. Maybe their parents had done all they could but their condition was too poor for their efforts to save them. In any case first one and then the other had run out of options. They were forced to use human hands to get the help they needed to survive.
The call came in about 10 o’clock in the morning just after our daily morning meeting. A person had picked up a mite-covered hummingbird from under a parked car in the parking lot of Burlington Campground. We don’t know exactly what a hummingbird has to do to make a person stop and see them under a car. But this youngster did it. And soon their sibling was found on the other side of the lot, and in the same condition.
We sent one of our clinic staff down to the campground. The region we serve is enormous! Between Del Norte, Trinity, western Siskiyou and northern Mendocino counties we cover an area the size of New Jersey. So, fifty miles down US 101 is a pretty ordinary trek.
Once at our clinic we gave each tiny bird (3.1 and 3.4 grams!) a thorough exam. Both were capable of flight but lacked the energy. We offered them long sips of the special nectar we prepare that provides a balanced diet for young hummingbirds. We gave them medications to control the feather mites that plagued them. (always especially grateful to hit the shower after dealing with feather parasites!!)
Parasites are usually a pretty good problem to have, mainly because it’s an easy one to solve. Just take the medicine that kills that parasite and boom! – your energy is your own again.
The one who was lighter by three-tenths of a gram was also more lethargic. The bigger bird was enthusiastic about being fed while the weaker had to be encouraged to eat – still it took two days for them to recover sufficiently to be able to thermoregulate, that is maintain a normal temperature, without our help.
A hummingbird, if you haven’t noticed, is a very small bird. As mentioned these guys weigh about three grams. I weigh about seventy thousand grams. The power imbalance is terrifying. They make me feel like a giant clod of mud, a dumb rock ready to roll down the mountain and crush the town. After four days in care, with nectar in a feeder and fresh flowers arranged throughout their aviary, we stopped handling them and allowed them a couple days of recovery without being bothered or, frankly, endangered by our looming gargantuan selves.
After two days of “self-care”, it was time to drive them home.
Hey, you have to live and work somewhere and we have it pretty good. The Avenue of the Giants is takes you into one of the world’s splendors. It’s a great office we have here.
We were short-staffed that day but when our chief photographer, co-founder, expert baby bird reuniter and BAX art director, Laura Corsiglia arrived at the release site needing to open the box and close the shutter over and over again, park staff enthusiastically joined in to help release the young birds – they knew the exact giant Rhododendron that hummingbirds frequent. Check out the pics.
Your support makes our work possible. Thank you for ensuring that our wild neighbors in need have some human hands at their disposal. It means the world to all of us.
photos: Laura Corsiglia
In the early morning, pretty early, 6 o’clock, I go down my back stairs and next door to the clinic to start weighing and feeding baby wild orphans. This year the wild orphan work began on April 3. The two years preceding it began on April 2nd. I can’t remember what day in ’23 we started but maybe you remember that Spring of ’23 was turmoil for the wildlife care center as our sudden need to relocate had us building the facility as we used it. The start of wild baby season coincided with the work of removing our old facility from the leased property and the beginning of construction of our new place. Years in oil spill response had prepared me for the realities of building out a workspace while using it to do the work. Learning and knowing how to do a very difficult thing is about the only way to make that difficult thing easier. And of course, we’ve prevailed thanks to the generosity of our local community who we serve directly and a broader community of supporters who support our work from afar.
I’ve interrupted the story I started telling to mention our supporters and maybe it seems a bit like pandering, but it is not. Our financial supporters make our work possible and they keep our work alive. Living work grows. The advancements in our field would not be possible without material support. I deeply appreciate the means our supporters provide for the work that somehow, for some reason, against all predictions and life dreams before I knew this work was real, I’ve ended up committed to and engaging for 27 years.
That’s a pretty big plank in the platform here. The people who keep our doors open keep our doors open. It’s hard not to insist that such support is the ironwork that makes our building stand. No matter what we face, we are always aware that it is a privilege to be in the game at all.
But none of that is why I’m writing this.
I want to tell about something that happens in the early morning during the feeding and weighing of the baby wild orphans. Orphan, here is a word of convenience. We don’t know if the parent is dead. Or we do. Cases differ of course. But in either case what we have here is a who who is lost without us. And lost with us too. It’s the nature of the business of loving the Wild. So we provide care, and we love our patients, as we must, but we love from behind a wall that protects them from our love, as if they’d been brought aboard our vessel in an alien atmosphere.
Except of course, that we are mammals and we are warm-blooded and we even make eggs. And so a tiny raccoon will try to find solace there in the warmth of my hand as I gently slip a feeding tube along their esophagus to fill their belly with warm milk replacer and I will avoid eye contact – once their eyes open – and I will proceed as quickly as safety allows because infant eyes meet care providers eyes, and for a moment too long, and the baby is lost in the provider’s errant bond. These babies are wild. They are not triflings. They are greater than all of our discoveries combined. They are exactly as building blocks to worlds and they are more real than any worlds – empires, board games, cities, myths – that we’ve built. Maybe if I am resilient, my own rehabilitation will release me into the wild too. But for now, I am a dutiful participant in the world that destroys the Wild. And I have the wounds in verse to prove it, be it good verse or not.
Here on the foggy Northcoast out on the peninsula, as they say, a marine layer often keeps mornings gray, damp and cool. It is delicious. Like everyone else in the world, I wake up a few to several minutes before my alarm no matter what time it’s been set. And also like the rest of us, I often wish there were a few more hours of night which there never are. I get up and start the coffee and get dressed and play wordle with the first hot sips and then toddle down the stairs to see about things. Mix up some formula. Organize the tasks. Back when playing wordle I was also running through our caseload and thinking about who would be fed first (hint: youngest babies first).
One morning a few years ago in the kitchen where no patients could hear, I tried playing music while I worked, as I used to in the olden times of working in restaurants in the early to mid 80s at the freakin’ South Jersey shore of all places. Wildwood to be precise. But I couldn’t do it. I mean, you know music. It tends to amplify things; it encourages sensitivity and this is a job that demands the senses, demands acute awareness, can’t be done without being sensitive – and also you do have to cut up thawed rats with scissors, as an example of something that maybe is a little nicer to be able to tone down the empathic response during and believe you me, music isn’t the medicine for me during such times. I love music more than the water, but staying hydrated during my 3 hour rush from 6 to 9 o’clock is much more conducive to forward motion than three chords and the truth can ever be. You can’t stop to reflect on the nature of the sorrow when making breakfast for the 30 youngest babies of the hundred you have in care. But if you don’t stop to reflect, you die. It’s a bit of a dilemma.
Anyone who helps out animals – human, wild, or otherwise – who’ve been smashed up on the highway has seen too many bits of wet bone poking out into the cool morning air. Opossum babies, you know, are zooming around on their mom like a carnival ride according to some of our best cartoon movies and of course we understand they’re the only extant marsupial native to North America, but what we don’t really think about is that everywhere mom goes they go and when she’s hit by a car, they’re with her. Admitting a barely living opossum mom with a litter in her pouch is an ordinary thing. Some studies have shown that about five percent of us will swerve to hit an animal seen on the side of the road. We pull out her babies from her pouch and we give them case numbers and an examination and none, or a few, or many might be injured as well. The mother is almost always too badly hurt for more than humanely ending (that is, as quickly and painlessly as we can) her suffering. And those babies change our lives. It’s how late winter become early spring. It’s what starts the early morning and what carries us into the late evening. It’s a commonplace known the world over that babies are work.
It’s a commonplace to look into the eyes of your daughter, say, as she is newborn into this world, and hope that she and her cohorts rise above the despair that has been ours since Gilgamesh slew Humbaba. It’s commonplace to heap upon the younger the failed dreams of the elder. As Emerson says, it’s too late to be helped on that score. Nice thing about kids and kittens and puppies and warm slices of apple pie with crême fraiche on top – you don’t have to keep your distance. Your love can include a kind of possession – my daughter is not your daughter after all – neither is my cat your cat – though to be fair I really tend to share my pie – force it on people even.
If I could hand you that warm pie, or cool marine layer so that you might wrap them into your heart and be nourished by them as I am I would. I would love to. I would be thrilled to know you felt it too. And if you haven’t guessed I can tell you that some of what nourishes me, what nourishes us, what nourishes all who need nourishment, is loss. Sorrow is born in matter just as we are. Matter and sorrow are bound to each other. We don’t know another way because there is no other way.
In a way what I want is just to tell you about a flood of emotion that happens in the morning, reliable yet unpredictable – it rushes up nearly every morning but I never know when until I’m awash in it. It’s not melancholy. It’s too quick, too pointed – it’s a gasp, a stab, a sudden sharp intake and a swoon, at the sum of the suffering, the sum of the despair, the awkward strange bulwarks we build against it – even though we know…
We know. For every bird rescued in an oil spill there are ten who are not. Or so go the calculations of loss at the level of financial responsibility and something like a best guess for science. One thing I like to do against the meanness of the odds is make the information I write in Sharpie on the jars of formula I prepare, with date, time and contents, look like an old label from a bottle of soup. A stanchion against loss. A tourniquet on the hemorrhage. A bridge across an abyss of despair. A way to not look down. Plus the jars look better that way.
You know how a slanting northbound sunset in high latitudes can give the ocean a purple cast that tears at your heart and exposes a longing that has been at the core of your life since the beginning of time – a hunger that is fulfilled by more hunger – the endlessly satisfying thirst to feel more. Yes, it has a place in the ordinary tasks of the day – think of how much we enjoy trading witty remarks with the person who tells you how much your trash weighed at the dump. One of life’s wonderful joys. It’s remarkable – isn’t it? – how noticing the unhappy absence of a long gone friend while waiting for a light to change to green and remembering the way your grandmother always liked her cookies placed just so on the plate enter your heart with a pierce that feels sharp and also deep and also like a loss that somehow fulfills.
It’s how you can suddenly lose your breath while cleaning what might be your 200,000th syringe in hot soapy water 30 minutes after dawn and you are glad you are alone because you feel a little foolish tearing up and not a single cut onion in sight – one of the unadvertised benefits to restaurant work.
An opossum baby around 75 grams in size has four little hands and a strong urge to grasp tightly. An opossum this size has probably figured out how to grab the feeding tube and tug it out. They’re a lot to hang on to. They’re hard to handle, as they say in Redding. You have to look at their teeth when feeding a baby opossum who has teeth. A perk hardly anyone mentions.
Every life is full of exquisite joys and sharp moments of anguish; – strange moments of beauty followed by unexpected stabs of surfacing grief. Maybe it’s a mechanism to handle the circumstance, to look for these moments, of all flavors of grief, to see them as offering similar if not the same kind of sustenance as joys. The daily war that the people of our time, us, in other words, wage on the Wild is relentless and thorough and futile in some ways – such as against the strength of singularities, black holes, Babe Ruth, Charlie Parker and the dawn chorus of birds since the beginning of time – is still and without question going very well. The wild is losing very badly at the local level even if back at corporate 75 million lightyears away the loss isn’t felt.
So I make the formula. I slide the tube over her tongue and down her throat and fill her tiny warm belly with warmth and nutrition and if she gains some comfort in her terrible misfortune and loss from the soft gentle cup of my hand who am I to know – I don’t. I hold her small right hand from grabbing the tube as tenderly as I can. I look at her brand new whiskers, only days old, and feel the ache of every failure, every opossum who didn’t survive my care. I imagine her a year from now, in the river bottom or the backyard, with a pouch full of babies of her own.
The cool morning, the softly damp air against my face, the 30 or so babies I’m going to weigh to make sure they’re growing, gaining weight, advancing, getting stronger, becoming who they were meant to be even in their loss, even in their setback, even in their despair – I do this every morning, such is the privilege of my life. Every morning, like the sunrise, I do too. It’s an astonishing point of view.,
Thank you for supporting our work. we have nearly 100 wild orphans in care and its only the middle of May. Please help if you can. Thank you so much for all that you do.
We need your support. As always. As ever. We currently have 68 wild babies in care and it’s the first of May. We’re going to be skating the surface of controlled chaos unti the end of September. We still have things to finish before the season truly begins. Your help helps the most. Please donate.
