September 22 2009 several friends sat down at the end of the workday at a seabird hospital to work on an outline for a workshop we’d be presenting at a wildlife rehabilitation conference the following Spring: An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Rehabilitation. At the end of our meeting, we stuck around to talk about a crazy idea – an idea hatched on the shores of Lummi Island Washington and fledged at the edge of the Suisun Marsh, home to 10 percent of the remaining wetlands of California.
The idea was for a collective of wildlife caregivers, who could help other caregivers deal with difficult times and cases, both through directly aiding them, as well as producing reference material, a library of helpful advice.
To me, the idea was slightly embarrassing to propose since it sounded almost cartoon-ish – wildlife rehabilitators’ Super Friends – and the fact that our proposed name didn’t help alleviate that impression also had caused some reticence. But as is so often the case, a foolhardy courage prevailed and Bird Ally X was soon in flight.
Besides the workshop, which we’ve since presented many times across California and the USA, our primary mission was to share the skills and tools necessary to provide effective and ethical aquatic wild bird care. Later we would amend our mission to include all wild animals.
The six of us who produced the original workshop, Shannon Riggs, DVM, January Bill, Marie Travers, Vann Masvidal, Laura Corsiglia, and myself, met as colleagues in oiled wildlife response. In fact we first worked together as a whole on the November 2007 oil spill in San Francisco Bay caused when the Cosco Busan collided with the Bay Bridge in heavy fog, leaking well over 50,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the water. Approximately 1500 aquatic birds were rescued and brought into care by the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, and treated at the San Francisco Bay Oiled Wildlife Care and Education Center, in Fairfield.
Previous to this event each of us had extensive wildlife rehabilitation experience, on other oil spills and at other facilities, working with a variety of species, from songbirds to raccoons, from cougars to hawks. Most of us had worked in less privileged circumstances than we did as oil spill responders due to the lack resources available to the average wildlife rehabilitation facility. Working in oil response provided us the opportunity to develop skills, techniques, and protocols when working with large numbers of aquatic birds that we knew most wildlife rehabilitators simply couldn’t access.
Treating 1500 birds at one time will sharpen your skills quite quickly; repeatedly working in such an environment over the course of years will make you a leader in the field. All of us felt a need to share those skills and de-centralize them. There is far more coast, far more interior land, than the few specialized wildlife hospitals for aquatic birds could ever cover. To ensure that aquatic birds have quality care available when in need requires that we spread the benefits of our own experience and training.
While working at the Oiled Wildlife Care Network in the Bay Area, we routinely received sick and injured aquatic birds from as far away as Humboldt County, which did not yet have the facility or available skilled staff to provide care for aquatic birds. At the San Francisco facility we even once helped 140 seabirds caught in a harmful algal bloom off the coast of Astoria, Oregon. Clearly it would be better for the animals in need, if care was closer than 300-500 miles away.
An aquatic bird care workshop that we could deliver at conferences and on-site at various facilities was our first step toward meeting our mission, complemented by our first publication, An Introduction to Aquatic Bird Care.
In August 2011, we met our first major challenge when we learned that juvenile Brown Pelicans were suffering from contamination by oily fish waste around Humboldt and Del Norte counties. We partnered with Humboldt Wildlife Care Center (HWCC) in Bayside to have a facility to provide care for approximately 50 young Brown pelicans. Over the next few years, we managed the rehabilitation program at HWCC, building its capacity to provide care for more of the wild animals who make their living and home on the North Coast.
In 2014, seeing the opportunity to have an excellent facility that also doubles as a working lab for developing protocols and training future wildlife care providers, BAX took complete responsibility for HWCC, now HWCC/bax. To date nearly 60 interns, predominantly life science students at the nearby Humboldt State University, have passed through our program, with many going on to successful careers in wildlife rehabilitation and other wildlife related work.
As our co-founders no longer work together each day in the same facility, we meet up as often as time permits. Laura and I are here in Humboldt, where I’m the director of HWCC, and Laura continues her role as publications coordinator and art director. January Bill is now in Klamath Falls, Oregon, which puts her in a perfect position to bring excellent protocols and practices to the chronic avian botulism problem on the Lower Klamath Basin Refuge, rescuing and rehabilitating over 700 water birds in the last two years. Marie Travers works closely with January on the avian botulism problem and on their joint work focusing on patient stress in wildlife care. Marie continues her work as an oil spill responder as well.
Shannon Riggs and Vann Masvidal each work with Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay, where they treat thousands of animals each year, many of them seabirds, and they continue to be the backbone of our board of directors.
At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center we’ve added excellent people to our crew. Lucinda Adamson, who was an intern during our second fish waste Pelican crisis in 2012 is now the Assistant Wildlife Rehabilitation Manager. Stephanie Owens, who began as a volunteer in 2014 is now a staff rehabilitator. Ruth Mock is volunteer coordinator.
Recent additions to our permanent gang, who recently completed internships, Brooke Brown who works with our humane solutions program for co-existing with our wild neighbors, and Desiree Vang, another recently graduated intern who is helping us with our membership data and other administrative tasks. Both continue to work in animal care in the clinic as well.
Bird Ally X has a mission that will never be completed, because there will always be more to discover and more to teach. Moreover, it seems obvious that centralized solutions to global problems are a luxury that we won’t be able to afford much longer. Sooner more likely than later, our safety nets will be tested and it’s safe to assume that the well-being of individual wild animals will be ‘de-prioritized’ at the institutional level. But we know that it will be a concern to individual humans that individual animals receive proper treatment when in need.
As its ultimate mission, BAX must help ensure that those people, however burdened, however underfunded, however remote, have access to the best possible techniques to provide care for as many species as they can. Based on today’s degraded environment, we imagine the potential of ecological catastrophe and the damaging impact our foundering industrial society might have on our wild neighbors and we prepare to meet the needs of those who will provide their care.
Whether it’s the hundreds of ducks on the Lower Klamath or the 1200+ wild animals we treat in Humboldt each year, not only are we there for those innocent lives, but we are there are also for the knowledge we can gain to be passed on to our colleagues and future colleagues; – that can be shared with our fellow lovers of the wild – that can be taught to children about the sentience and self-ownership of all that is wild and free – about our own wild freedom that pulses with every beat of our hearts.
Ten years is a long time, yet it is barely a beginning! We’ve met many challenges to get where we are, but we have so many more to overcome. Your support has made our accomplishments (and survival!) possible. With your continued support we will meet our continuing goals, such as fully realizing HWCC/bax as a teaching wildlife hospital, and helping to bring a greater level of compassion to bear on our wild neighbors, and thereby reduce the need for our services.
It’s a dream. It’s a dream you can help make real. Please donate today and let’s help make certain that the next ten years brings us closer to our goal.
