Reverend Gary Davis is right, we do have to move. It’s been 18 months since HWCC decided that we had to move our facility. Our current lease ends at the end of this year. It took us until this Summer to locate a property that we can afford and make work. By afford, I mean, that its sale price to us is a very good deal and significantly less than any other property we’ve considered. I do not mean that we have the money. We don’t.
But this property is a rare opportunity and I do believe that we will be able to secure some kind of financing – both the property and Humboldt Wildlife Care Center are good bets.
But the costs of moving is going to come from people we ask to help. There is no other way. The amount we need to raise by the end of this year in order to complete this transition – in essence a transformation – is more than any goal we’ve ever set, by far. I don’t see another path forward.
We simply need to raise this money – it’s hard for me announce this goal, so apprehensive I am, but what else is there to be done? A downpayment, the cost of getting enough infrastructure up and running at our new facility – including all the administrative tasks – so that our work continues without interruption, while we dismantle and clear the facility we currently occupy – money and volunteer labor will be the only thngs that get us through.
So here we go! If you are reading this, you may be a person we need. We may need your physical help, we made need your financial backing, we may need your expertise. We definitely need you to root hard for us.
In every wildlife project I’ve worked on before Bird Ally X merged with HWCC, there were people who worked all day on the logistics, the paperwork, the fundraising and the budgeting. I was a wildlife rehabilitator – I specialized in oil spill response, seabird wrecks, orphan-rearing, care, innovating patient housing, and training volunteers – other highly skilled people did the work to make sure I had the tools and resources needed to do all of those things. Their contribution to those efforts is so terrific – I’ve known that forever, but when I came to HWCC, it wasn’t long before I needed to learn to do that job too.
So, yes, in fact it is frightening to embark on a project this big, this critical, this necessary and with such high stakes that failure is, as they say, not an option. Especially when it’s just some punk from New Jersey who wound up on the west coast leading the way. So I thought some background was in order.
I want to tell you the origins of Bird Ally X, how our mission led us to HWCC, and tell you what I see on the other side of this transformation – I want to tell you what we are building together and show you some of the foundation of that vision.
However, if you already know you support our work and don’t need to read about BAX history from my perspective, maybe you would like to me cut to the chase, tell you that our goal is $150,000 (which is roughly the amount of one year in our budget!) and donate now.
For the rest of you who would like to know more about BAX’ beginnings and how we got here, and where we’re headed, well read on….
Bird Ally X – who we are and how we got this way
Since this website’s first incarnation at blogspot.com in 2009, the voice speaking to you from this platform has mostly been mine. Making the website was a gamble. Only Laura Corsiglia, my beloved and co-inventer of the idea of Bird Ally X knew about it – BAX was an idea whose time was about to come but hadn’t quite.
But it did come. On September 22, 2009, Bird Ally X was founded as a collective by six of us. Shannon RIggs, DVM (currently the Director of Anaimal Care at Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay), Vann Masvidal (currently the Center Director also at PWC in Morro Bay) January Bill and Marie Travers (both currently leading our Botulism Response Program in the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge), and Laura (currently BAX art director as well as a logistical support for HWCC, and chief photographer and also my beloved) and me. Our first task: to develop a workshop that we could take to conferences that gave people a place to start learning how to effectively rehabilitate aquatic birds.
Athough we each had a lot of experience rehabilitating wildlife in general, oil spill response had given us each a strong specailization in aquatic bird rehabilitation, with deeper specialization among us – for example, Shannon is a gifted surgeon, Laura has a genius eye, Vann is extremely sensitive, Marie has perserverance and mad skills, January is methodical and precise and deeply committed to excellence. I don’t mean these people have common traits that you might identify among your friends, not unless your friends happen to be super heroes, which is what my five co-founders all have in common. Let’s face it, I met them in the middle of an oil spill response where we were all far from home, working 16 hour days amid hundreds of suffering wild birds, doing what we could to keep them alive and help them recover. I was amazed by them. Truly super heroes. And when we founded Bird Ally X, we thought it would be great to help other super heroes learn how to effectively rehabilitate aquatic bIrds too.
Making this workshop led to an expanded mission: to publish instructional materials for wildlife rehabilitators everywhere. Many rehabilitators work at a very small scale, usually in their own homes or in their own backyards. who are remote yet still deserve to learn the most current techniques of our field, also to help small facilities at times when they face an influx of patients that overwhelm them or are unfamiliar – most rehabilitators don’t get frequent chances to learn how to handle a sudden seabird mortality event, and need help if it happens in their area, as an example.
In the end, our mission statement included providing direct care to wild animals in need, providing educational materials and opportunities to wildlife rehabilitators and the general public, and also, and no less important, to advocate for our patients, not as stewards but as allies in the ongoing and undeniable war on nature and the wild, of which we are also a product, recognizing where our side truly is, just as Allied forces fought their war against fascist destruction.
All of this was, you could say, a tall order.
After the workshop was complete and had been delviered a few times, we wrote a book, An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation. You can buy it here. We’ve sold several hundred, maybe a thousand. We keep the price low. The last few printings have been done beautifully at the local and fantastic Bug Press.
The book came out of that first workshop that we put together, called by the same name. Our first version of the book was a ‘zine styled handout, about 50 pages long, and offered with our workshop. The second iteration was still a free handout, but had grown to over a hundred pages. At last in 2012, we published the book in its current form, 150 pages and available for $38USD. Now, ten years later, we are planning its first revisions.
In 2011, a year after receiving our 501(c)3, most of the six co-founders had been scattered by life’s circumstances (work, family, the usual) to different parts of the state and country. For example, Laura and I spent the last 6 months of 2010 in MIchigan responding to the massive spill of Alberta tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River from a ruptured Enbridge pipeline, where we provided care for hundreds of birds and thousands of aquatic turtles. (At points during that response, I was responsible for the entire wildlife response! eek! talk about sleepless nights!)
Come August of 2011, with three of us (Laura, myself and January) in Humboldt County for various reasons not related to BAX, a small disaster that had been unfolding for months, if not years, came to our attention. Juvenile Brown Pelicans were being seen at fish cleaning stations at public boat launches and docks, completely soaked and suffering because of it.
Fish waste, greasy and non-soluble, poses a significant problem for aquatic birds the world over. THe impact of fish waste on feathers is the same as the imapct of petroleum products – that is, it completely disrupts the waterproofing that a bird’s feathers provide by disrupting the arrangement of feathers and allowing water to penetrate to the body. Like most birds, an aquatic bird’s temperature runs from about 39˚to 41˚C (102-106˚F) and being waterproof is what allows them to thrive on water that may only be 10˚C (50˚F). If the water gets through to their skin it’s not unlike a diver who suddenly finds they have a hole in thier drysuit. If they don’t leave the water they will soon succumb to hypothermia. For our unfortunate human diver, simply pulling them back to the boat and giving them hot tea may suffice, but for an aquatic bird, leaving water means leaving home – where the food is , where the water is, where life is… stranded they will soon die.
Read more about fish waste and our responses in 2011 and 2012
After a couple days of reconnaisance, we found wet, struggling fish waste contaminated juvenile Brown Pelicans from Crescent CIty to Shelter Cove, a span of nearly 200 miles. We captured close to ten immediately, and over the next month in 2011 rescued and treated more than 50 individuals.
In 2012, the situation was not necessarily worse, but we learned about it sooner, in early July and began our response then. We ended up treated over 250 birds that year, mostly Pelicans, but also about a dozen gulls of different species, but mostly Heermann’s Gulls, who are closely associated with Brown Pelicans.
The 2011 response began our relationship with HWCC, at the time a very small clinic treating far less than a thousand patients each year, with one staff person and no business hours, only a hotline. We worked with HWCC to develop thier facility into a true hospital and rasied funds so that our project of caring for the impacted Pelicans did not disrupt their meager finances (our finances are STILL meager!)
Developing HWCC’s infrastructure did create another challenge. There was no one on the staff who could operate what we’d built. Pools are a complex tool to us in treating wildlife, and the inexperiences care giver is at a marked disadvantage. without a good working knowledge of a pool’s usse and maintenance, they become a danger to the patient, not a benefit. HWCC asked BAX staff to stay on as managers of their facility in the winter of 2011/12 and we did.
As I mentioned above, 2012 saw a much larger fish waste crisis with 5 times the patients of 2011. A response of this magnitude required help from out of our region. Staff from the Oiled Wildlife Care Network (OWCN), staff from the Calfornia Department of Fish and WIldlife (CDFW) and rehabilitators from around the state came to Humboldt to lend a hand.
Besides for developing our facility to handle this level of response, we had to develop our core group of volunteers. During this time we realized that we had an incredible opportunity to build not only a facility that could provide high quality care, but, given our proximity to Cal Poly Humboldt, one of the premier wildlife studies universities in the West, a hospital that could also train current and future wildlife care providers.
A teaching hospital is something you can start right away while you spend a lifetime making it better, and we did start right away. Over the last ten years our internship program has helped nearly 75 young people, mostly students at Cal Poly, advance their skills and ready them for employment in the field of wildlife care. The five current members of our staff are graduates of the program! As we move into the future, a major goal is to further exapnd the eduactional opportunites ofr our volunteers, interns and staff, and help contribute to a cultiure of excellence in our field. A sturdy and sustainable foundation will always be a crucial ingredient for success, and this is where support from the community plays a huge role, making our goals achievable.
The goal of converting Humboldt Wildlife Care Center into a teaching hospital led us to merging with HWCC in 2013, -a move that was completed in 2014. In 2014 HWCC merged with BAX. Taking complete responsibility for this facility has allowed us to use it, not only asa hospital that treats 1500 patients each year, providing second chances to innocent wild animals caught in the myriad snares of human infrastructure, but also a laboratory to develop techniques and strategies that can be used by wildlife rehabilitators anywhere who suffer from the very typical scenario of being terribly overworked while being shockingly underfunded. (Take our budget as an example, last year we took in about $150,000 and treated 1,612 patients. That amounts to $93 per patient. Now that’s not the whole story, many of those patients were very long term, like an orphaned raccoon who requires 4 months of care, compared to Fox Sparrow who hit a window and is ready for release in 24 hours – obviously patient needs can differ extremely – but still, we maintain a staff and facility on very little money – our excellence is found in resilience, innovation, sacrifice and a willingness to use what’s available to achieve the impossible!)
Still, the simple truth is that we have been able to develop much needed training materials and workshops becuaes we’ve had the opportunity to use real world development (something we might call trail and error) – this opportunity is golden, and we want to continue in this vein for as long as wildlife rehabilitation is a needed service.
The Pelican fish waste response also led us into a much more active role as advocates for our patients, including protecting our wild neighbors from becoming patients. In fact I was the inaugural chair of the Advocacy committee for the California Council for Wildlife Rehabilitators, a professional organization of rehabilitators in our state that hosts an annual Symposium and supports the improvement of available care.
It became quite obvious that those of us on the frontlines of the war between society and nature had an important perspective and important specific knowledge that could help policy makers make decisions and take actions that were inaccordance with the critical needs of wild animals. Some policies are easy to enact, like putting on lid on the fishwaste bins so that juvenile Pelicans can’t forage in them, while other solutions require changing hearts and minds, like banning cruel traps, stopping abominations like bear hounding and killing contests and promoting use of nonlethal measures instead of senseless slaughter to protect property from damages caused by wild animals.
Advocacy work can be problematic. Political divisions are readily apparent when you attend a public meeting. Advocating for wild animals automatically puts on one side of the aisle and on the other side are the agricultural and “hook and bullet” lobbyists, as they are often called. Well, ranchers and farmers, hunters and anglers, are real people, not lobbyists, and they help to make up our community. Ranchers, farmers hunters and anglers may encounter a wild animal in need and require our help – ranching, farming, hunting and fishing don’t automatically preclude compassion. So we must be careful not to alienate those who may need our help. It’s a line that we walk everyday if we are being true to our mission in all of its implications and ramifications. And in fact, learning to walk this line is fitting and proper – we are here to serve all of our community when they need us. Being able to persuade an angler to help us stop fish waste pollution is critical! We need more allies, not more enemies. Learning to walk this line is the right thing to do. And we have no other choice; our responsibility to our patients and the wildlife we serve demand it.
To that end, we intitiated our “humane solutions” program, in which we help people solve any conflict they might have with a wild animal in a manner that is respectful of the rights and needs of the animal, and effectively protects the property and safety of the people involved. With this program we have intervened in thousands of conflicts over the last eleven years, keeping wild families together, and preserving hundreds, if not thousands, of wild lives.
The big stories, of course, from the last 11 years, are our patients. As I write this, Wednesday, September 28th at 5pm our database says that we’ve admitted 13,544 wild animals since January 2012. That’s 13,544 wild animals in need. Suffering animals who would’ve had nowhere to turn, no-one to relieve their suffering if it weren’t for you and your support of our work.
And while I’m not the leader of our botulism project in the Lower Klamath, two of our six co-founders are. You can read all about their work caring for botulism-infected shorebirds and waterfowl during the last four years.
The immediate future and what comes next.
Our intention for the future is to continue what we’ve been doing, and to always seek improvement. Right now, this is easier said than done, but in fact it always is.
I dream of an internship program that can house and pay our interns, even if it’s only a small stipend. There is nothing that being able to afford working without compensation qualifies a person for, and many potentially gifted caregivers cuold be denied opportunity because they don’t have the resources to sustain working without pay. I’d like to change that and widen the reach we have by deepening the pool we draw from.
Right now, in California Black Bear cub and Mountain Lion kitten rehabilitation is done only by a few organizations, (if at all in the case of Mountain Lion kittens). Every Black Bear cub admitted from Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte, Sikiyou, Shasta, or Mendocino Counties is sent to Sacramento and then to Lake Tahoe for rehabilitation, but often into permanent captivity. I would like to change this, and establish a legitmate bear cub rehabilitation program here so that the region’s bears can be treated and released at home. This is a long term goal, but one we never lose sight of …
A fully functional medical clinic, with the capacity to make radiographs and a veterinarian on staff are developments that we must pursue. Volunteer veterinarians, and long distance consulting with wildlife specific veterinarians gets the job done, but better is needed, even if for the benefit of our staff. I’ve had the privilege of working with some very gifted wildlife vets at the various places I’ve been on staff over the last 23 years and I want to ensure that the staff of HWCC has the same benefit.
Expanded service and an increase in our preventative programs are in the works, from education programs at all levels (schoolchildren, governing boards) to practical efforts like beach patrols, increased capacity for interventions in conflicts, and late night availability for emergency response. We know these are things we can build, given the time and materials.
In short, we must always expand our capacity and raise our standards. A capacity reduced, a standard lowered are poisonous. Our mission, our patients, our vocation all demand excellence. We strive to meet that demand.
I do wish we had more time to make this critical move. But that’s never been possible, and ensuing circumstances didn’t help, such as my health problems that took up a significant part of last year. All that we’ve built does feel jeopardized right now – and what we’ve built has signifcant value – losing it would be catastrophic – so we must preserve it, and we must do so in a way that allows us to continue to build on what we’ve accomplished.
That’s what makes this property in Manila a “rare opportunity.” Let me count the ways.
- It exists. We’ve been looking for suitable property that we can envision purchasing, meaning, that we can even entertain the idea of raising the funds. Many incredible properties are available for those with the resources to buy them. This property in Manila is offered to us because we know the owner, who understands how we will use it, and has generously lowered the price.
- Maybe we can afford it.
- Location: like our current location in Bayside, Manila is well situated in Humboldt County to make it it accessible for the many communities North and South. Staying between Eureka and Arcata seems important. We routinely make trips to Crescent City and Garberville. Arcata Bay is a good spot for us.
- Size: although I had dreamed of something larger, in truth we’ll be increasing the space we have available by at least four times. This will improve what we can set up for our patients. Yes, it may be the only option we have, but it’s also a good option to have.
The wild animals of Northern California and beyond need us to thrive, and to do so we must survive. If we fail to acquire this property we will have nowhere to go when our lease ends at the end of this year. Even acquiring that property tomorrow means we have only three months to get it ready for us to use it (certainly not to bring it to it’s full capacity, that may take a couple years) at the same time that we must dismantle our current facility and clear it from the land.
We need your help. Wildlife of our enormous and beautiful and necessary region in need, need you. Please help. Donate to our move and future.
