Dear Friends and Supporters!
Season’s greetings once again! Another year of challenges, growth, griefs and joys! Bird Ally X/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center staff and resources were deeply challenged by record numbers of patients, our busiest summer, very late season babies, and emergency care of birds hit by botulism in the Tulelake National Wildlife Refuge. As climate change and other disasters alter what we thought was immutable, we find our knowledge and comprehension of the world no longer seems to fill in the map.
While our maps are suddenly full of blank spaces, the world has no voids. Each nook and cranny has someone who lives there. From the scorpion in the crevice in a high desert cliff to the salamander family nested beneath an old discarded tire.
For cavity-nesters like the Chestnut-backed chickadees (Poecile rufescens) on this card, a hollow at the top of a utility pole in the middle of Blue Lake, California is a perfectly fine place to raise your babies.
And it would have been a fine place, if PG&E hadn’t needed to replace the pole. Mishaps like these, at various points on the spectrum of preventability, are the inevitable result of the built world taken at face value by the resourceful and always honest wild. No matter where we build and operate the machinery of our times, if we aren’t careful a wild neighbor, a wild family, are going to be harmed. And so often, we aren’t careful.
That’s why BAX/HWCC is here. We admitted five tiny young chickadee babies that day when the big PG&E truck rolled up our driveway. Had they not been seen when their nest was destroyed, the babies would have died. Instead, your support gave them a second chance. We released them a month later, fully fledged and ready for independence, back in Blue Lake, into a flock of their own kind along the banks of the Mad River.
At this time of year, it is common and useful to give thanks for what we have and to express our love and warmth to those who travel though the mysteries with us. It’s enjoyable to imagine a peaceful future, to dream toward it, and to hope that even our smallest wild neighbors are invited to partake in it – a de-escalated war on Mother Earth.
Thank you for dreaming this with us – and for doing something about it. We wish you a warm holiday season and a happy new year! – We’re counting on you in 2019!
