“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.” – Henry Thoreau
When I dreamed up bird ally x in the early spring of 2009 I meant something sly, something covert, something along the lines of Zorro, but leaving an X instead of a Z, as we avenged birds everywhere. If you look in the column to the right at the archives, you’ll see they go back to 2009, when our website was nothing but a blogspot.com thing I kept.
The dream of bird ally x was born in frustration, as many dreams are. Dissatisfaction drives so much. Be thankful for it. The place I worked was incredible in so many ways. When I was hired there it felt like getting called up to the big leagues and I was so young in the field! I’d had a job as a wildlife rehabilitator at that point for 2 years, after a year of being a volunteer. The big leagues was oil spill response and aquatic bird care. During that time, outside of oil spills, most of the birds we admitted for care came from other facilities closer to the coast who transferred them to us, the experts. Sometimes this meant a journey of hundreds of miles to get a bird like a loon or a grebe into treatment.
I wanted to share the skills. We needed to give our colleagues the benefits of our experiences, so that they could provide quality care also. As it turned out I had colleagues who shared that perspective. When Shannon Riggs DVM, Laura Corsiglia, Vann Masvidal, January Bill (at the time with OWCN) and Marie Travers and I, all of of us colleagues in oil spill response, seabird wrecks, harmful algal blooms and more, began working on a workshop to be called an Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation, I saw that we had the crew of the good ship bird ally x already assembled. We had an after work meeting to continue working on our workshop plans one day, September 22, 2009. After we finished working, as we were saying goodbye, Laura and I said “hey, can you guys stay for a minute?” That was the day bird ally x became real.
It’s been 17 years since that day. We meant to build a powerful force in our profession that improved care for all wild patients, we meant to provide reference materials. We meant to advocate for the Wild with our entire being. Providing care for wildlife demands that you renounce your human privilege and think in terms of real freedom with nothing but complete love. This makes you poor company at many sorts of social events. But that’s not why we’ve been less than revolutionary. We’ve been mere people, schooled people, mediated people, nature deficit disordered people, since before any of us alive were born. The temerity of our desire to help the Wild, as members of the species who are the reason the Wild needs help, is astonishing. But we have no other choice. We are all Wallace Shawn (sorry, couldn’t find a link to his interview where explains his ability to be a traitor to his upper class origins.) So we persist. Against all odds we persist. Bird ally x has survived and thrived in 17 years. We haven’t redefined or revolutionized our field, but we’ve contributed. We’ve added significant data points that will reduce the amount of dead reckoning required by them who come after us. By our future selves. We exist.
Thank you for making that possible.
