Our summer bills are piling up, our babies need food and we need you! Want to help wild animals in our region? Donate today!
It was four years ago this week that Bird Ally X teamed with Humboldt Wildlife Care Center to rescue over 50 fish waste contaminated juvenile Brown Pelicans found at the public fish cleaning stations at Crescent City and Shelter Cover, on California’s beautiful and rugged Redwood Coast.
What began as an emergency response developed into a permanent partnership, with Bird Ally X and HWCC merging into one organization. This began an intense period of infrastructure building. We’ve added seabird pools, a pelican aviary, a raptor aviary, raccoon housing, other small mammal housing, a waterfowl aviary, renovated our songbird aviary, and more!
We have a permanent full time staff and our clinic is open regular hours every day of the year. These are substantial improvements. Because of these improvements, with these our organization is now a member of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, and we stand more ready to help in the event of an oil spill in our region.
We have advocated for our wild neighbors, promoting co-existence and working with communities and policy makers to reduce the injuries that our society heaps upon the wild and natural world. We have treated nearly 5000 wild animals in these last four years. In short, it has been a period of exponential growth and advancement – none of which would have been possible without your support.
And we still need your support. We rely on your donations to accomplish all that we do. You make it happen. You buy the baby formula. You buy the frozen fish, the frozen rats, that the meat eaters we treat must have. You pay for the electricity that keeps our incubators and pool pumps running. You purchase the medicine. You pay for the gasoline that takes our education team and wild ambassadors to schools all over Humboldt County. You provide the eggs we feed our raccoons. Without your support we wouldn’t have the water for the zucchini patch that all of the omnivores we treat rely on – raccoon babies, skunk babies, and baby opossums. You even pay for the tortilla chips and salsa that we provide for our volunteers, many of whom come in for full day shifts.
Your support is needed now to help us catch up on our summer expenses (water bill! food bill! electric bill!) and prepare for winter and the return of seabirds to our region as well as the season when we can improve and repair housing after the wild babies in our care are old enough and ready to be released.
… and also caring for the wild babies still in our care! Right now we have 23 orphaned raccoons, many of whom will be with us for another couple of months, learning to hunt, forage, and provide for themselves before they will ready for return to the wild. Help us provide the natural diet that they need to learn to be the best raccoons they can!
Raccoon formula keeps the young orphans moving forward. Still, mom would be a lot better, so we work hard to keep wild families together!
After weekly exam, young raccoons are returned to their freshly stocked housing, fish, vegetables, rodents, insects and more!
As soon as staff returns these youngsters to their housing, they get as far from us as they can.
All photos: Bird Ally X
