American Bittern Recovers in Care (awesome video!)

Posted on March 21, 2020April 26, 2020 by Monte Merrick

Found lying face down along a trail on the Humboldt Bay Wildlife Refuge, this American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus), the secretive cryptically colored cousin to the haughty Herons and elegant Egrets was in rough shape when brought to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center in Bayside. With feathers torn out, puncture wounds, and damaged air sacs (for a quick video tour of avian repsiration, evolved for flight click here ) we were pretty certain the bird had been mauled by a dog.

Fortunately, the Bittern suffered no broken bones. Unfortunately, these birds are very private, and time in captivity is highly stressful for them (it is for all wild animals, but this species especially so.) They often won’t eat. For the first week, we had to “assist feed” our patient, carefully sliding whole fish down their throat. Once the Bittern was stable and able to be moved to a purpose-built outdoor waterfowl aviary, we added live fish to the marsh-like pool and tall reeds for comfort. Immediately, they began to eat all of the live fish we could get. Their condition rapidly improved.

Intern Val Rodriguez prepares to administer oral hydration while Nora Chatmon, long time volunteer and intern, as well as newest member of our Board of Directors, instructs and assists.

After 18 days in care, the Bittern was ready to go home. Two volunteers (this was only a few days before we changed everything for social-dostancing purposes, including suspending our volunteer program) and our newest staff person, Desiree Vang, took the Bittern back to the Wildlife Refuge for release.

Now just a couple of weeks later, everything at our clinic and in our community and in the world has changed due to Coronavirus Disease 19. Our volunteer and intern programs have been suspended at our facility until social distancing and “shelter in place” orders are lifted. We are at the very start of our hectic wild baby season and how this will be impacted we’ve yet to discover. But even with a skeleton crew and reduced resources, we are still here, still open, and in need of your support more than ever… Please contribute something… all donations big and small make a huge difference for our wild neighbors. Thank you for helping us during these difficult times.

DONATE

Humboldt Wildlife Care Center and the novel Coronavirus

Posted on March 15, 2020March 15, 2020 by Monte Merrick

There’s no avoiding this post. It had to be made.

Right now, around the world, borders are closing, air travel is coming to a stand-still, across the country schools are closing, universities are teaching online, weddings and whole sporting seasons are being cancelled, primary elections have even been delayed in some states. The governor of our state, California, like many others, has called for the closure of bars and taverns.

Today in Italy, they suffered the largest single number of deaths, 368, in one day in any country so far, even China. In other words, though we are only in the early stages of this pandemic, it is quite serious, and communities around the world are doing what they can to stop the exponential spread of this virus, including staff at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center.

This is soon to be the time of year when the bounty of nature is expressed in wild babies. This is our busiest season, when our mission to help injured and orphaned wild animals is in most demand. We cannot forsake them. We will remain open.

Precautions we are taking are simple. We’ve temporarily asked our volunteers to not come in, to stay home. We are reducing staff to a skeleton crew. When you bring us wild neighbors who need help, out of respect for you and your health and well-being, we’ll be wearing gloves and facemasks. We are sanitizing our facility multiple times each day.

We don’t have the option to cancel Spring and the rhythms of our beautiful Mother Earth. Our mission to help our wild neighbors in need isn’t rescinded when times get tough. We can’t simply leave orphaned and injured wild animals to suffer and die.

Soon young Raccoons, orphaned for a variety of reasons, will need our care.

So we will be here, proceeding into these uncharted waters, but vigilant! We may further reduce staffing if necessary. But we intend to meet our mission regardless.

Of course, as always, in good times or bad, optimistic or fearful, we won’t do this without your help.

Scores of baby Mallards are gleams intheir parents’ eyes right now, but in 6 weeks will be here due to cars, dogs, cats and more.

This is a time of year when we need to raise more resources, money, food, medicine, than ever – and now we need to purchase much of our summer supplies now, in case shortages make them hard to get when we need them most. We need you now. Anything and everything helps. $5, $10, $25, or more… all of it will go toward making sure we can be here for the hundreds of wild Mallard, Opossum, Raccoon, Barn Swallow, and Owl babies who will be soon in our care.

We aim to get through this crisis while continuing to serve our community of human and wild neighbors, as we always do, with your support. Please help.

Thank you.

DONATE

(podcast) New Wild Review vol 1 ep 4 Letting Nature Take Its Course

Posted on March 5, 2020March 5, 2020 by Monte Merrick

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (29.2MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Email | RSS

In our fourth episode, I read an essay, Letting Nature Take Its Course, which was first published on this website in 2016 and again in the beautiful magazine, Wild Hope in 2019. Also included in this episode is a reading of the poem, Deer Skull.

As always, thank you for supporting our work. I hope you enjoy this episode.

A significant amount of the music in this episode was cmpossed and performed by Erica McCool. more of her incredible music can be found here: https://pezhed1.bandcamp.com/

Our annual Season’s Greeting, coming to your mailbox soon!

Posted on November 17, 2019December 2, 2019 by Monte Merrick

Dear Friends and Supporters,

As the winter skies return and we reflect on the past year, remembering our successes and our sorrows, we are reminded again of our singular and precious existence on this tilted world, slinging us through the wild universe and here on Earth we see the seasons. So regularly ordinary is it to be flung wild and free through a cosmos we’ll never fully grasp, that we might walk past a miracle here, a breathtaking moment of love and poetry there.

It’s a simple observable fact that the wild is boundless and there is no void. Each toehold, every crumb has someone to perch there, someone to feed. If we seek the wild we need look no further than the back of our own hands or the wild red blood cells who swim in our veins.

We can find the wild easily among the litter and chaos of any city street, where a family of Sparrows might be raising their babies, as was the case with the family of White crowned Sparrows on this card.

A fledgling bird separated from her family was found one morning in old town Eureka by a shopkeeper during a street festival. Unsure of what to do, they called us. The day was frantic with festival goers and we had no way of searching for the young bird’s family. So we took her back to our clinic, gave her an exam, made sure she was well hydrated. We offered her some food. The next day, an ordinary busy weekday, but without the festival crowd, we found her family and they found her.

The dunes, marshes and river bottoms of the Humboldt Bay Area have always been perfect habitat for White-crowned Sparrows, and though city-life has encroached on their world, still they make a good go of it in the nasturtium and shrubbery of our landscaping, a place we might be unlikely to call wild, the source of all good things.

Yet here we are – no matter how devastated, no matter how disrupted, no matter how desperate – we live as the Sparrows do, struggling and surviving, living by a wild code, whether we see it or not – as moved by universal forces as this wild family.

Thank you for making our work possible in 2019. We wish you a happy holiday season, and a fulfilling new year.

Thank you for your love of the Wild

All of us at Bird Ally X/Humboldt Wildlife Care Center

**If you’d like to support our work at this time, please** **DONATE HERE**

Short Winter Days Increase Traffic Hazards for Wildlife

Posted on November 16, 2019November 17, 2019 by Monte Merrick

Every year, as we turn the clocks back in Autumn, the evening commute for many takes place at dusk or in the dark. Unfortunately this creates a terrible hazard for nocturnal wild neighbors who are just beginning their workday.

Owls especially, it seems, are the victims of highways filled with cars after the sun goes down. Each Autumn our caseload has a sudden drastic increase in Owls hit by vehicles.

Two patients we’ve recently treated, a Barred Owl (Strix varia) and Northern Saw-whet Owl (Aegolius acadicus) were both hit by cars at the end of the day. Fortunately neither suffered life-ending injuries. They each came in dazed, confused and unable to stand or fly, but soon were recovering and back on their feet, and then back on the wing.

Hit by a car in Crescent City, this Barred Owl was bleeding from mouth and ears when first admitted. After several days in care, she was flying again, strong and agile.

In the early evenings of Autumn, it’s common for a misty fog to lay low across the river bottoms and lowlands, complicating visibility in waning daylight, with oncoming headlights making things worse. Yet the bottoms are prime hunting ground for all manner of nocturnal wild animals, from Owls to Raccoons and Skunks and Opossums.

It’s simply good manners to slow down and be vigilant, as we would in any neighborhood where pedestrian (or wing-borne) travelers are predictably present, crossing the highways as they must.

Northern Saw-whet Owl flies freely once more afer being hit by a car between Crescent City and Klamath.

Right after leaving the box, the tiny owl stopped to look around…

Every late Autumn and Winter we admit scores of wild neighbors who’ve been hit by vehicles. How many more are hit, killed, and never found we may never know… You can help reduce these numbers by keeping our wild neighbors in mind when driving. You can help support their care by supporting our work, keeping our doors open and our facility ready to care for Owls and others who are struck by vehicles, as well as all the wild patients we treat year-round.

Thank you for your love of the wild!

DONATE

all photos: Laura Corsiglia/bax

Working for the Wild in Tough Times

Posted on October 28, 2019October 31, 2019 by Monte Merrick

Right now, at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center we are between two PG&E public safety power shutdowns. At the moment the power is on, the wi-fi is working, and our freezer is cold. 200 miles south, a terrible fire rages, displacing tens of thousands of people. And since the Tubbs Fire that tore through Santa Rosa and across wine country October of 2017, it’s beginning to look like the new world order.

We have concern for our friends and colleagues who are directly in harm’s way. If you live near a wildlife rehabilitator impacted by these fires, winds and power outages, please help them out…

A central piece of the mission of Bird Ally X is to help provide continuity of care that is available for our wild neighbors in times of trouble. A common way we’ve expressed this, in dramatic and frightening terms, is that even should humanity be reduced to a “ragtag” group of wandering shell-shocked refugees of the collapse of the Age of Oil, someone among them will find an injured Robin, or a contaminated Seabird and they will want to help. No matter how dire our circumstances, there will always be people trying help innocent wild victims of human calamity. And they’ll need good information – information that demonstrates how to provide quality care on a very tight budget in difficult circumstances.

When BAX assumed responsibility for Humboldt Wildlife Care Center in 2011, besides the opportunity to serve the injured and orphaned wildlife of the Redwood Coast, we saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate ways and means to accomplish excellence with limited resources. And in fact, just last week, we got the chance to do just that when the Oiled Wildlife Care Network held its biennial conference for California oiled wildlife caregivers in Eureka.

Bird Ally X staff taught multiple workshops on housing, stress reduction, and other aspects of wildlife rehabilitation. Our facility in Bayside became a working lab for the day, with participants from around the state visiting to learn basics of providing housing for the many different species that might be impacted by an oil spill, now that pipelines and rail cars are used more than ever to move oil around the world. In a way, it was a maiden voyage for our wildlife hospital lab. We brought students on board and showed them how we fly it.

Of course, our intern program, working mostly with local college students, has been accomplishing the same goal for the last 7 years, with dozens of participants. All of our staff at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center were once interns.

Preparing for this future by training young people as warrior-nurses has been a long-held mission. It’s a joy to be able to realize it as best we can. We’ve known that hard times lay in our future. Those of us on the front lines of the injuries to the Wild that civilization causes have been able to see it for years, – in the ever increasing frequency of starving seabirds, the species we hardly see any more, the changes to the rhythms of life.

Now, we’re surrounded. Some of us quite terribly so in fires that erupt by the hour, it seems, and many of the rest of us left literally in the dark. Tough times are here. Will they get tougher? Absolutely, no doubt.

So, now we are looking, as are so many others, for ways to take our care center off-grid. We cannot run a wildlife hospital relying on power that may not be there for the next few days several times a month. We must change our way of thinking about energy, about how to accomplish the same goals with a radically different usage.

Humboldt Wildlife Care Center has remained open through the power shutdowns, admitting patients, treating patients and releasing patients. The smallness of our wealth against the largeness of our goals has sharpened our survival skills. As we enter these times together, we will be here, taking care of wild animals in need, and learning on the job and teaching others how to survive in a world like we’ve never before seen.

an abstract graphic of the sun and a red-throated loon with the words thank you for being a part of this life saving work — **If you’d like to help us, please DONATE HERE**

Orphaned Raccoons Live Stream with Brook(e)! PHOTOS!

Posted on September 15, 2019September 15, 2019 by Monte Merrick

Each year we provide care and educational opportunities to several orphaned Northern Raccoon babies (Procyon lotor) – anywhere from a dozen to three dozen of the young, highly inquisitive, intelligent, and iconic mammals, depending on how well our outreach protecting denning mothers works.

This year we had great success helping people peacefully co-exist with neighborhood raccoons or humanely evict raccoon families from raccoon dens in crawl spaces and attics. Because of this success, we’ve admitted less than 20 raccoon babies this year. (to read about our other years, and learn more about our raccoon program check out all of our stories tagged Northern Raccoon)

The following photos our from our first group of raccoons released this year, after four months in care, learning as much about the wild world as they can in care. In these photos, taken by Laura Corsiglia, one our staff, Brooke Brown, releases three raccoons, two sisters and a male who was housed with them. It’s always a joy to see these bright young minds when they are first released into the blaze of reality.

HWCC staffperson, Brooke Brown opens the crates, letting our young patients greet the wild with no barriers between them since they lost their mothers months ago as tiny babies.

These two sisters stick together through thick and thin, brave, resolute and with boundless curiosity

The rocks, rivers and forests of our region are the birthright of our patients

A portrait of a highly sophisticated Earthling.

The two sisters cross the river and climb the opposite tangled bank into their private freedom…

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…”
–Charles Darwin, *The Origin of Species*

Your support makes our work protecting the young of the wild possible. Please help us keep our doors open and our wild neighbors in need with the care they deserve. Thank you.

DONATE

Volunteers Train to Peacefully Solve Wildlife Conflicts

Posted on May 2, 2019May 2, 2019 by Monte Merrick

At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax, we treat well over a thousand orphaned or injured wild animals each year. But we help thousands more without ever getting close to them! Every Spring and Summer day our phone rings dozens of times as people run across wild animals in strange situations. Maybe they are in a conflict with a wild animal who is using their home as a den site, or a nest has been knocked down when limbing a tree.

A sunny warm Sunday in Spring is a perfect time to practice our phone skills! Here one our awesome interns (Erika Espino) plays the role of a caller who has a problem with a denning Raccoon

Many of these problems can be solved on the phone! We’ve helped hundreds of people co-exist with Raccoons by coaching them through convincing a mother Raccoon to den somewhere besides their crawlspace. We’ve assisted hundreds more over the years in getting baby birds back in their nests, or rebuilding their nests if they’ve been unintentionally destroyed.

Solving conflicts over the phone isn’t easy! Often, people who call are very frustrated and a little bit mad at the wild animal trying to use their space. Patience is usually required in order to get through this part of the call. But we always remember: The caller wants our help. They want to do the right thing. That’s why they called us.

And our solutions have to work! There are always those in any community who will leap to the lethal solution. If our program doesn’t get the job done, there is a very good chance that the caller will opt for violence and be forever convinced that humane solutions to conflict aren’t effective.

An HSU wildlife student and one of our wonderful volunteers (Alex Rivera) practices helping resolve denning Raccoon problems.

When you are on the phone with someone who is upset about the actions of a wild animal, and that animal’s life is on the line, the moment can be very stressful. As with all stressful tasks, preparation is critical!

We offer volunteers and staff regular opportunities to sharpen their phone skills with our Phone Workshop, which Bird Ally X developed. Using the details of actual calls, our participants practice helping various callers resolve a conflict or get a wild animal the care they need.
Teaching the next generation of wildlife care providers the skills we’ve all acquired over the decades of practice is an important part of our mission. Operating Humboldt Wildlife Care Center not only provides help for the injured and orphaned wild neighbors of our region, and not only resolves wildlife conflicts peacefully saving perhaps thousands more each year, but our small facility on the edge of Humboldt Bay acts as our lab and ongoing classroom to develop and teach effective ways of caring for our wild neighbors and promoting co-existence with the Wild.

Your support makes this work possible! Thank you! Want to help? Please donate today! DONATE

Improved Fawn Housing this Spring, with Your Help!

Posted on April 16, 2019April 16, 2019 by Monte Merrick

We’re renovating and expanding our fawn housing this month to get ready for the orphaned young deer who will soon be coming our way. Each year we care for 6-12 fawns and our housing needs work!

Expanding the available space for our orphaned fawns will cost about $2000. We need to complete the work by the middle of May in order for it to benefit this year’s orphaned babies.