Want to hear about all the trials and tribulations we endured to meet our mission during this fitful year?
Me neither!
This was a tough year for everyone in our commuity (the world), but for the most part, we came through the last ten months stronger, more resilient, and more able to meet the challneges of providing care to our wild neighbors in need and promoting co-existence with the Wild (the highest reality).
So instead of touring through our troubles, here are some photographs of our patients and staff as we did our jobs, all of which was made possible by your generous support – a critical feature of all that we do, and the most necessary thing that’ll get us through whatever 2021 has in store. We need you like an orphaned family of raccoon babies needs Humboldt Wildlife Care Center.
Some of the pools at the BAX Botulism Response field hospital
From Mountain Lion Kittens orphaned by forest fire, to dozens of orphaned Common Murre chicks, from orphaned Gray fox kits to Great Blue Heron chicks blown from their high nest in a freak Summer storm, from caring for 3000 ducks and shorebirds driven to near death by botulism in the Lower Klamath Refuge to cleaning 14 fawn bottles three times a day until all the fawns are weaned and released, staff was ready, pandemic protocols in place, to do the job we’ve always done – helping our wild neighbors in need.
All of us at HWCC/bax thank you deeply for all that you did to help us durvive this year. We wish you a much better 2021, and a return to good graces with nature, Mother Earth, and the wild.
The Pandemic year is putting our facility at risk. As our human community grapples with the health and economic challenges of COVID19, donations have fallen sharply even as our admissions of wild animals in need is up nearly 20% over last year! WE NEED YOUR HELP BADLY!
2020 began in turmoil. First of all, as wildlife centered caregivers, the fires in Australia, with their incalculable toll on wild animals was difficult to watch without understanding that climate chaos threatened all that we hold closest to our hearts, all that gives life on our beautiful green Earth meaning.
Second of all, our fundraising in 2019 did not keep pace with our caseload, which had increased over 2018 by nearly 15%! We finished the year, down $8000 from our usual yearly amount, and short of our actual needs.
And then, in February, it became apparent that the novel coronavirus, COVID 19, was going to impact our daily lives here in Humboldt County.
In early March we put our volunteer and intern programs on haitus, reducing clinic staffing to the few members of our paid part-time crew, and myself, the director. We hoped, naively, that a few weeks would see us return to our usual Spring and Summer.
Needless to say, its been anything but usual.
Our caseload is heavier than any year in HWCC history. We wondered how the pandemic would impact our work, speculating that people might not be out and about as much and therefore finding fewer orphaned or injured wild animals. But such is not the case at all. As I write this, just past noon on July 28, we’ve admitted 940 patients this year so far, about 170 more patients than last year to this date. 170 is the number of patients we typically admit in our busiest months, June and July – so this year it’s like we got an extra June thrown in with our regular June.
This year we are treating well over a dozen orphaned seabirds, mostly Common Murres and Rhinoceros Auklets, over a dozen Black-tailed Deer fawns, we’ve cared for and released two dozen orphaned Mallard ducklings and nearly a dozen Canada Goslings – many House Finches, White crowned Sparrows, Violet Green Swallows, – we’ve provided care and housing to more baby Robins this year than the last 8 years combined! With our masks on and hearts engaged we’ve helped nearly 30 homeowners and renters peacefully resolve a wildlife conflict, keeping wild families together.
Our staff is well-trained, dedicated, and willing to make sacrifices. The long hours are part of the job, as are the joys and the heartbreaks. But this pandemic year is asking more than we are able to give. We can summon the energy to rise to the occasion, to meet the challenge of our tasks, but we can’t print our own money. When the electric bill (thankfully shut-offs are postponed during the pandemic) and the water bill come due, no amount of staff member sacrifice will be accepted as currency. We need money.
I don’t particularly like discussing the details. But they go like this. Every year we set a goal for our fundraising. Every year we fall short. In 2011, when I came to HWCC, we had an annual budget of about $50,000 a year, one paid staff member and almost no patient housing, no pools for seabirds, no aviaries for raptors or ravens, no place for raccoons or opossums, no waterfowl aviary for ducks and geese.
Since 2015, we’ve raised about $110,000 each year, with which we developed our facility as best as we can within our space and financial limits, and added part-time staff to our crew. Our caseload has risen from 900 animals per year in 2010 to last year’s high of 1332 wild animals in need. We’ve added important services which reduce the number of injured and orphaned wild neighbors, such as advocating for policies that protect the Wild, and most critically, our humane solutions program which peacefully resolves human/wild conflicts keeping wild families together – this helps stop illegal trapping of wild mothers, like Raccoons, and stops their babies from becoming orphans.
Now here we are, the end of July, and we are more than $22,000 behind our most recent years. This is serious. We cannot sustain such a deficit for long.
Every day when people bring us injured wild animals they’ve found, they often say, “Oh my god, we’re so glad you’re here, we didn’t know what to do.” When this pandemic started, and businesses were first being closed, and medical supplies became hard to get, I voiced to close friends my private fear that the turmoil caused by the novel coronavirus could swamp our small wildlife hospital and few would even mourn our passing in the greater losses all around us.
But we are still here, and we have a hundered patients currently in our care, and probably another five hundred coming before this year is over. We cannot disappear! I promise that I and the rest of HWCC/bax staff and interns (we brought a few back in June) will be here – caring for our patients as best we can. Quality care though, depends on people who are able to help us out with the things that we can only get with money. Please donate! Please dont let the only wildlife hospital serving Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte and Mendocino counties be another casualty of COVID19.
I hope that in this time of Sheltering in Place in order to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus that is wreaking havoc around the world, that each of you is safe and healthy. I know that none of us are untouched by the global pandemic, and I also know that many of us will be touched very hard.
Nothing like this has happened in anyone’s memory. Certainly we’ve lived through epidemics, bad flu seasons, and worse – the US government’s response to the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s was horrible for those impacted, who lost lives, lovers, friends and family – but none of those crises is preparation for a life in lockdown while we hush, hoping the monster passes our door.
Our world is upended. We hope that most of us staying home will restore normalcy and minimize our losses sooner than later, but the fact is that we are sailing uncharted seas.
Uncharted waters are fun for explorers, and we all love voyages of discovery, but in keeping our wildlife hospital afloat and on course, we need to be able to navigate. Navigation without charts is unnerving to say the least. How will this pandemic impact our work? Will the resources we need to meet our mission be available? Will the community still support care for injured and orphaned wild neighbors in the midst of a human-centered crisis? How will we provide care for our patients in these uncharted waters?
Humboldt Wildlife Care Center staff, and skeleton crew takes a socially distant break. left to right, Lucinda Adamson, assistant rehabilitation manager; Brooke Brown, rehabilitation tech; and Desiree Vang, rehabilitation tech.Monte Merrick (me) Humboldt Wildlife Care Center director.
Needless to say, these questions, which we don’t have answers for, cause us some anxiety. Of course a lot of what happens next is up to us. Our commitment to providing our wild neighbors with quality care is not even slightly reduced by the COVID 19 pandemic.
Our commitment to providing quality care is the most mission-critical piece of the puzzle, no doubt. But we cannot meet our mission without the people who keep our doors open with their support. Right now, donations have fallen so far that it makes us wonder if the pandemic is going to swallow us whole.
We are entering the busiest season of our year – wild baby season. Just today, Saturday, April 4, we performed the first of many house calls to come, identifying a Raccoon mother’s den under a bathtub. Now we’ll be able to help the homeowner humanely convince the new mother to take her babies elsewhere.
An orphaned raccoon about to receive milk replacer.
By the time the season has ended, based on previous years (possibly not that helpful of a reference) we will have helped homeowners protect their property and hundreds of raccoon, skunk, swallow, and sparrow families stay together, – learning, growing and becoming part of our natural community.
Spring and Mother Earth’s northern renewal are here – they won’t stop for our crisis, and human society, even as most of us are staying home, will continue to injure wild animals, through passive, chronic problems like pollution, habitat loss and general environmental degradation as well as acute and aggressive agents, such as cars, abuse, and other violent conflicts from which no wild animal is safe.
Our work is never going to be unnecessary, at least not in our lifetimes. And it will always fall to those who care the most to make the deepest sacrifices, to do the work if able, and otherwise to provide moral and financial support. We’ve gained a lot of ground in the last nine years at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. We’ve built not one but several excellent crews, with many individuals dispersed throughout the world of wildlife care, doing good work. I sincerely hope that we can count on you to keep us going – keep our doors open, our electricity on, the phone functional and our staff stable.
Right now, our fundraiser to pay for necessary repairs to our facility is languishing, as are our general resources. We operate on a shoestring budget without a cushion for lean times. We just tighten our belts and do what we can. Without your support, our belts will have never been so tight. Please help us get through this uncertain time. Our wild neighbors depend on you. Thank you for your love of the wild.
With warmth, gratitude and a profound wish for all of us to emerge from this pandemic with health and happiness,
In our latest episode of New Wild Review we look at the sudden changes the global pandemic caused by the outbreak of coronavirus disease – 19. As states, counties and municipalities move to slow the spread of the virus, through shelter in place orders and social distancing, essential services, including wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, continue. How does the pandemic effect our work? How will the pandemic effect wildlife? We don’t know. But we can ponder it while we work.
If you’re at a facility that is open and admitting patients, check out this World Health Organization document on preparing your workplace to keep yourself and co-workers safe.
