(This is the text from our 2017 holiday card. Want to be on our mailing list? follow this link!)
Season’s Greetings, Friends of Wildlife!
It’s a pleasure to send you this Holiday card! We like to imagine them on refrigerator doors, push pinned to cork boards, tucked into shoeboxes, preserving each year’s portrait of a wild neighbor who’d been in our care! Collect them all! We enjoy the opportunity to thank everyone who generously helped keep our doors open. It gives us a chance to share an individual’s story – which you can multiply by thousands – to show the impact your support has here on the North Coast, as well as everywhere that our education programs travel; – from local schools to distant conferences.
Helping improve the quality of care available for injured and orphaned wild animals and promoting co-existence with the Wild is as important to us as caring for the injured animals we admit each day. It’s a simple irreducible fact: the health of Mother Earth is not a luxury we can do without!
The Long-eared Owl (Asio otus) on this card, recently released, is a thoroughly modern owl. Modern owl families are roughly 30 million years old. Comprehending 30 million years may be hard, but the math is easy enough. Long-eared Owls have been around, as they are today, at least 6 times longer than the most expansive view of humanity’s time on Earth.
Yet, Long-eared Owls are now in decline, listed for the last several years in California as a Bird Species of Special Concern. Long-eared Owls require a healthy forested river, they require open, low-lying fields and wetlands – critical needs that have been rapidly lost in the last 100 years! Among the 250 or so owls we’ve treated in the last five years, this is the third Long-eared Owl. Still Humboldt, Mendocino, Del Norte and Trinity counties, our home, may hold habitat enough to help provide this species a refuge. With your support, the North Coast will always have a place for its wild refugees when they are injured and in need.
This Owl hunted the fields and forests at the confluence of the Van Duzen and Eel rivers. Most likely hit by a car, he was found on the ground, vulnerable and in shock. He’d been seen there for more than a day. A kind stranger scooped him into a box and brought him to our clinic. With medicine, warmth and safety – the care your support provides – he quickly recovered. He’s home now on those river bottoms hunting again, living the second chance your support gave him.
Thank you for your support in 2017, a tough year indeed. All of the staff and volunteers wish you a wonderful Season of gratitude, love and joy as well as a beautiful and bountiful New Year. We look forward to meeting our mission, with your help, in 2018.
In alliance with the Wild,
All of us at BAX/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center
