One day last year our staff went out on a call about a sick deer. The people who called watched as we put the carrier with the deer into a small hatchback and they hatched a plan of their own. This Spring, when they purchased a new vehicle, they called to see if we could use their old car, a 1996 Volvo Wagon! They were very kind and wanted to be sure we could use the vehicle. We sure can!
The region we serve, Northern Menocino to Oregon, the Pacific Ocean to I-5, is over 20,000 square miles! (nearly twice the size of New Jersey, the state I was born in!) We put on a lot of miles and a reliable rig that is also safe is something we’ve wanted to add to our resources for years. And now we have one!
Now if you see a plain tan Volvo on the road, you never know, we just might be transporting a wild neighbor, who knows, a Northern Alligator Lizard or a Bald Eagle!
Or we might just be on our way to the North Coast Co-op, again, for more supplies for our ever increasing Spring and Summer caseload.
So to Fredyne and Gerald, who so generously passed their ride into our service, thank you!
And you know, not every donation is a car… without many small donations, we wouldnt be able to put gas in the car, or food in our patients’ bellies. If you can, please donate here. Thank you!!
Not just an indignity! For a warm-blooded body the size of a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) to spend the night stuck in can with inches of water on the bottom is life-threatening! Fortunately the landowners found the owl in the morning and got the soggy, angry, owl to our facility in Bayside.
Minor abrasions afflicted the undersides of both of their wings and all over, their feathers were soaked and very ruffled. The owl was also fairly dehydrated. Warmth and fluids helped both problems immensely and soon the owl was much less soggy, but no less angry.
After spending some time in our large aviary, making sure that flight and agility were unimpaired, we took the handsome bird back to McKinleyville and the area where no doubt there are eggs or owlets glad to have both parents back on the case!
After leaving the box, the Great Horned Owl wasted no time putting distance between themself and us.
It’s our community’s support that keeps our doors open, our freezer full of rats, and an aviary suitable for a bird as large and magnificent as a Great Horned Owl. Thank you for making our work possible. If you want to help please donate!
For this post, I’d like to take a more personal approach so that we can acknowledge, thank and just generally celebrate the incredible staff of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax. So while our staff is definitely a part of the neighborhood – everyday people, you might say, they are anything but ordinary people. Our staff are everyday heroes.
Please enjoy while enjoying photos of the incredible staff of HWCC/bax
Many of you may already know that I was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in the middle of May, right at the start of our busy wild baby season. Every year we know that our lives will turn hectic and overworked in the middle of Spring when the season fully arrives in our area. But this year my health really complicated matters. On reduced staffing for over a year, and with our volunteer program only restarted at the end of April after 13 months in suspension, all due to COVID-19, my diagnosis couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Already overworked and underpaid, our staff would be even more burdened by my treatment and hospitalization, which would keep me out of the clinic.
If there ever was an ocassion to rise to, this was it and did they ever rise. The last patient I rescued before my treatment began was a baby Barn Owl, case #21-438, stranded alone on the Hammond Bridge over the Mad River. Since then, our staff has cared for nearly one thousand more patients and prevented harm from coming to hundreds of wild babies through our humane solutions program, which focuses on peaceful co-existence with our wild neighbors, as well as the important work of keeping wild families together.
In keeping with a ten-year trend, 2021 is shaping up to be our busiest year in the 42-year history of HWCC, with a 3% increase over last year’s record setting caseload to date.
Each year our work becomes more vital to our region’s injured and orphaned wild neighbors, and each year our young staff grows in skills and experience. My pride and pleasure in their accomplishments is overwhelming, especially as I’m able to gradually return to a full time schedule and I see what an excellent crew has been forged by their successful navigation of another Spring and Summer, – a time filled with the intense, difficult and emotionally challenging work of wildlife rehabilitation.
It was ten years ago that I became the director of HWCC, when Bird Ally X took on the Care Center with the goal of making it into a top notch wildlife care facility that also trained the wildlife rehabilitators of the future. Watching our staff in action from my sick bed and through my radiation and chemotherapy and through my recovery has been one of the most profound things I’ve ever seen.
The daily phone calls with staff I had while I was in the hospital in June and July were a joy to participate in, as we discussed the caseload. I dont know if they’ll ever know how critical their excellent handling of the season was to my recovery. By competently taking care of business, our staff not only met our mission in difficult times but, on a personal note, they’ve made my recovery possible, sustaining our life-saving work while I could only get on with the business of healing.
Please enjoy these photographs of our dedicated staff in action and join me in thanking them each for their service to our community, a community that is both human and wild.
Courtney Hernandez, an awesome intern, who just recently left us to return to SoCal where her skills she learned at HWCC will hopefully soon be making the lives of wild animals near Big Bear and Riverside better! Courtney was an integral part of our staff for the last four Summers while she completed her degree!
Staff rehabilitators Nora Chatmon (l) and Brooke Brown (r) prepare for a routine examination of these two Barn Owl babies who are nearing readiness for release!
Wildlife rehabilitator, bird ally x board member and full time HSU student, Nora Chatmon puts some warm milk replacer in the belly of this orphaned Raccoon.
Each week all the raccoons in care are given an exam and weight check to make sure everything is going acording to plan! Brooke Brown and staff rehabilator Desiree Vang (facing away) make short work of handling thise fiercely smart little mammals.
New intern Ceshawny Crosby assists with a Rock Pigeon examination. Ceshawny may be new, but she’s rather instantly become a critical member of our crew. She made our Summer better by a mile.
Now and again, after recovering from surgery, I was able to come in and help. Not nearly as much as I would’ve liked!
Our newest staff member, Jen Martin, joined our crew after an internship just in time to cover big gsps in the schedule left by my absence.
Katharine Major, an intern veteran of 4 seasons delicately handles an orphan Gray Fox during a weekly exam. Katharine has filled many roles at HWCC, and we’re lucky to have her on board./
Intern Val Rodriguez (l) and acting Rehabiltation Manager Lucinda Adamson express the happiness that can only come from successfully reuniting a juvenile Peregrine Falcon with their family!
Courtney holds a Sharp-shinned Hawk for an examination.
Desiree and Lucinda wrangle a juvenile male (so small!) Bald Eagle.
Lucinda observes our Barn Swallow patients in the Songbird Aviary. This year we’ve treated more Barn Swallow chicks than any other year previously.
The resumption of our volunteer program means the resumption of training! Leading new and old staff in a discussion of the ethical practice of our work is one of my favorite tasks – one I’m glad I was still able to perform!
One last shot of Brooke Brown, here examing a Common Murre chick with another of our terrific interns Bekah Kline. Brooke is leaving HWCC after nearly two years on staff and one year as an intern. In their time with us, Brooke took on our Humane Solutions program and nearly single handedly kept dozens of baby Raccoons safely with their mothers, as well as successfully resolving dozens more human/wildlfie conflicts so that no one suffered or was hurt.We’re going to miss Brooke more than we can say and wish them great happiness in all their future adventures.
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Thank you, too!! Your donations at a time when I was unable to ask for them as often as I should made a huge difference. Keeping a wildlife care center afloat is a problem that “throwing money at” really does help! Thank you! And if you’d like to express your gratitude for our excellent staff with a donation today,just click here!
On April 4th, Humbodlt Wildlife Care Center admitted a Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) who’d been found with an injured wing struggling on a gravel bar of the Klamath River, not far from Happy Camp, deep in the mountains of Northern California.
We suspected a fracture in one of the huge raptor’s wrists, – a fracture of a carpal bone. After making sure the Eagle was stable we arranged for transport to BAX co-founder and co-director, and excellent avian orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Shannon Riggs, DVM, who is Director of Animal Services at Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay.
For the story of this wild neighbor’s care and eventual return to home on the Klamath River, check out this video!
Your support is what makes our work possible. It really is that basic. Thank you for keeping our doors open and our lights on.
22 years ago, June 22, 1999, I attended my first volunteer shift at the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) Wildlife Center, just north of Seattle. A couple of weeks prior, at a party in the University District in Seattle, I met a woman who was dating a friend of mine. Jenny Schlieps is her name. We were in the smoking area. I could tell immediately she was a badass, with her army shirt sleeves rolled up tight and an expression that let me know that if she thought you were a fool she might knock you down the stairs. So I struck up a conversation with her. I asked her what she did for work, and she told me she was a wildlife rehabilitator at PAWS.
Three months earlier, I had been watchng the coverage on the Northwest Cable News Network of the wreck of the New Carissa, grounded on the beach in Coos Bay, Oregon. The ship had run aground and the hull was breached and the bunker fuel, one of the lowest grade products of petroleum, had covered the beach. The situation was bad, and I was riveted to the coverage for days. On one of the segments, the network interviewed a man who was riding around on an ATV searching for a small threatened shore bird, the Western Snowy Plover who might be impacted by the toxic spill. I was astonished and thrilled that such an effort was being made. The man’s name was flashed on the screen, Curt Clumpner, and it said he was a wildlife rehabilitator. I turned to my then-partner and said, “did your guidance counseler ever tell you about this profession, mine sure didn’t.” I was 36 years old at the time.
Over the next several weeks I kept looking at an ad in the Opportunities section of the local weekly – “Help return an animal to the wild! Volunteers needed at the PAWS Wildlife Center.” It was intriguing and it had gotten under my skin. So when Jenny told me she was a wildlife rehabilitator at PAWS, I immediately told her that I’d been strongly considering volunteering there. I didn’t tell her that I’d been craving something meaningful and non-bookish for a while, that I was tired of encountering the world through reading and other abstract pursuits. I had been struggling to make it as a short fiction writer – it had been my goal for years. But also, I was hungry for something real, tangible, mineral and concrete, although I couldn’t say what it was. She asked for my address so she could mail me a volunteer application and then we went our separate ways.
Three days later, an application was in my mailbox. I filled it out and put it back in the mailbx with the red flag up. If Jenny could work fast, so could I, I thought.
Bird Ally X co-directors: Marie Travers, January Bill, Shannon Riggs DVM, Monte Merrick, Laura Corsiglia, Vann Masvidal (not pictured)
I was called in for an interview, a short little conversation – I picked a four hour weekly shift – Tuesday 1-5 – and then I committed to come to that orientation on the 22nd, which was coming up soon.
At my orientation I felt as if I’d been there before – things clicked. I went every Tuesday. Within 10 months I was hired for one of the Summer seasonal positions. As a ‘seasonal’ I worked with Peggy Faranda, Corrie Hines, and others. The permanent staff, Jenny, Kathleen Foley, Jen Szucs, John Huckabee, Jennifer Convy, Laurie Johnson, Lauren Glickman and more, quickly became friends. My first Summer there as an employee I couldn’t believe I got paid for taking care of baby Squirrels, Opossums, Raccoons, and songbirds more numerous and diverse than I had ever realized.
It’s a remarkable thing to fall into something new that feels like has always been yours. But that was exactly what happened. My first day as a volunteer I met a guy, Ken Brewer, who was building a songbird aviary. It turned out that Ken had worked on the New Carissa spill. He told me it had been a blast and described a lot of the aspects of the work in detail. I wanted to know more. I asked him how to get a job doing what he does. He said, “everybody wants my job, but there are only like 20 of us in the world, so not much of a chance.”
Well, here we are now, 22 years later. I ended up working with Ken on spills around the continent, from the Bering Sea to the Kalamazoo River. I’ve been part of the care of tens of thousands of injured, orphaned, and oil impacted wild animals. Now, I’m the director of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, a part of Bird Ally X, a collective of wildlife caregivers of which I’m a co-founder, along with Laura Corsiglia, Shannon Riggs DVM, January Bill, Marie Travers and Vann Masvidal. And now, after nearly ten years at HWCC, I’ve had the unbelievable privilege of training a whole new generation of wildlife rehabilitators, several of whom now make up HWCC’s intensely talented and dedicated staff: Lucinda Adamson, Brooke Brown, Desiree Vang, Nora Chatmon, Jen Martin. Over 60 interns, mostly brilliant young women, have passed though our program.
I had wanted to have a big party this year – something I’ve looked forward to for a long time, my 22nd anniversary on the 22nd of June (it was the same with my birthday, turning 11 on the 11th back in 1973 had been a fantastic thrill!!) but that is not what fate had in store for me. Instead, for the first Summer since my first Summer, I’m not at work. I’m writing this in a hospital bed, being treated for cancer – not immediately life threatening, but pretty serious all the same.
Hopefully today, but if not then soon, I’ll be transferred to another facility in San Francisco for reconstructive surgery. When that is over, I come home for radiation treatment and very likely chemotherapy too.
But no matter. Even if this disease kills me, I’ve had the incredible privilege of helping so many wild animals, either by caring for them until they can be released, or ending their suffering and getting them out of the horrible jam of having thier lives be completely over, yet still being alive.
I am so thankful for all of the people who I’ve worked with over the last 22 years: mentors, colleagues, friends. This has been a crazy ride and if I get another 22 years to work I’ll take them. When I’m 80 and I’ve been at this 44 years, please can we have a days long rager to celebrate my 44th on the 22nd?
Thanks to our community for voting for HWCC/bax to be a recipient of the North Coast Co-op‘s awesome Seeds for Change program. Every month a local non-profit organization working in our community is selected to receive the rounded-up donations of shoppers. It’s a terrific program that generates much needed resources for local organizations that are often underfunded and overworked – just like Humboldt Wildlife Care Center! And this month it’s our turn. Thank you!
All you have to do to support us is round up your purchase to the nearest dollar when shopping at the Co-op and that will go directly to us, which means directly to our wild patients – and at this time of year, that means orphans by the carload!!
15 of this year’s baby Opossums getting their regular checkup today.
Already this year we have 32 Opossum babies in care. Opossums, as you may know, are North America’s only marsupial! For years considered to have been introduced by ‘settlers’ in the American West, more recent science has demonstrated that Opossums expanded their range north into California from Mexico on their own steam! The name Opossum is derived from the Algonquin word “apasum”, which is said to mean “white animal”. Opossum babies are most commonly orphaned through one of two tragedies: their mom is hit by a car and they survive in her pouch, or a dog attacks a mom and kills her, leaving her babies in her pouch. With litter sizes routinely between 8 and 12 babies, it’s very easy for our Opo (our shorthand name) caseload to climb.
Caring for our regions orphaned and injured wild animals is a privilege, but it isnt cheap! The support we’ll receive from shoppers rounding up in the month of May will help us immensely as our caseload increases to epic proportions this baby season!
And if you dont shop at the Co-op, you can still support our work by donating directly to help injured and orphaned wild neighbors in need!
A passing motorist crossing the top of Berry Summit, about 30 miles East of Humboldt Bay, witnessed a hawk getting hit by a car. She pulled over quickly and found the bird, who was stunned, unable to stand, let alone fly. She took the hawk home to Hoopa, and contacted Hoopa Tribal Forestry’s wildlife department. The injured raptor, a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) was brought to us by staff at the tribal Forestry agency.
Fortunately, the youngster hadn’t suffered any broken bones. WIthin a couple of days, he was standing and eating. Soon after we moved him outdoors where he made a few tentative flights. Unlike with illnesses, where the patient has suffered a chronic disability for an extended time, this Hawk, other than his disorientation and lethargy from the traumatic blow, was in decent physical condition. After nearly two weeks, he was moved to a larger aviary where we could better assess his flight.
RIght out of the box, the young Hawk surveys his new situation… a situation called restored freeedom...
We gave him another week of thawed rats and room to fly before we felt he was ready to go. With his blood parameters in good shape, his physical condition strong and his attitude fully returned, we took him back to Berry Summit.
Your support is what keeps our doors open, ready to receive injured wildlife from all over our region. From Oregon to Willits, from Weaverville to the sea, we are here for our wild neighbors in need. Thank you for making our work possible.
It’s been nearly 15 years since HWCC put its first center for wildlife care on the property of the Jacoby Creek Land Trust. Over the course of those years we’ve cared for neary 20,000 wild neighbors in distress! We helped ten times as many animals over the phone!
In 2020, HWCC cared for six orphaned Gray Foxes, from multiple families.Our seabird pools have been online since 2012. Half of HWCC’s patients are aquatic birds!Every year is diifferent: in 2019 we treated 21 adult Common Murres and no fledglings at all. In 2020, we treated 90 Common Murres, only ten of whom were adults, while 80 were stranded babies.
When BAX took over managing HWCC in 2011, we were able to use this small underfunded facility (still small! still underfunded!) to demonstrate that highly effective patient housing can be built on a shoestring budget. The methods and techniques we developed here have gone into workshops and trainings for wildlife caregivers around the state and around the world. Helping our colleagues meet the challenge of providing excellent care on very little money is a major part of our mission.
Every day we’ve rolled up the driveway to open our clinic to injured and orphaned wild neighbors in need, covering a region that extends from Southern Oregon to Northern Mendocino, from Mount Lassen to the Pacific. We’ve built patient housing and a reputation for care that has allowed other facilities from around the state send us “problem” patients, so that we could help get them on track for release to the wild.
This Osprey was nearly condemned to a life in captivity after being raised as an orphan at a small facility south of Sacramento. Because of our purpose-built housing we were able to take her on, giving her the time and care needed to prove she could make it on her own. She was released after two months of care, back to her wild freedom above the lakes and rivers of the San Joaquin Valley, in the company of an adult Osprey in our care from a fire who’d taken this youngster under her wing.
More than 60 interns – mostly recruited from students at Humboldt State University, but not all – have passed through our program, many using their experience here as a springboard into their careers, including field work and wildlife care. HWCC’s entire staff are graduates of our intern program.
Lucinda Adamson completed an internship at HWCC/bax in 2012. Hired in 2013, she is now Assistant Rehabilitation Manager.Desiree Vang started at HWCC as a volunteer many years ago. After completing an internship, she joined our staff and is now a mission critical member of our crew.Nora Chatmon, a vet tech, volunteered for years at HWCC and is now a staff rehabilitator as well as a member of our Board of Directors.Brooke Brown began as a volunteer, completed an internship and was hired to our staff in January 2020. Besides helping care for our wild patients, Brooke is also HWCC’s humane solutions tech, helping people solve willdife conflicts in ways that put the life and safety of the wild animal first.
In short, we’re proud of what we built here; we’re grateful for the physical location that gave our patients the first need in a second chance, a place to heal.
But our growth must continue, and to do so we must find a better location with room to meet the demands of our increasingly chaotic natural world. There are things we’ll never be able to do at our current location – for example reahbilitate our region’s orphaned Black Bear cubs, who currently go to Lake Tahoe! We need the security of owning the land on which we operate, or at least the security of guaranteed access to it for a very long time. We need more space than our current quarter acre.
“How do you rebuild a ship at sea? One board at a time.”
Still, we’ll have two more Summers in our current location. No matter how intensive the labor of relocating our facility is, we will continue be at our clinic 7 days a week, every day of the year, as usual, ready to help wildlife in need.
Our first step is finding a suitable location. Ideally this location will be at least two acres between Arcata and Eureka, easy to find and centrally located in the heart of the region we serve. After that comes the building.
We will not be able to do this without your help. Soon we will establish a fundraiser to cover the costs of moving.
This is a big project and it won’t happen without the support of our community. You’ve been there for us since 1979 when all patient care was done in people’s homes scattered across the North Coast. In the coming years we’re still going to need you, in fact we’ll need you even more. Thank you for helping us through this period of growth and expanded services to our wild neighbors in need.
Board of directors member and HWCC rehabilitator, Nora Chatmon (r) talks about human/wildlife conflict as Assistant Rehabilitation Manager, Lucinda Adamson (l) listens.
For the latest episode of New Wild Review, four-fifths of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center’s clinic staff got together in February to talk about our Humane Solutions program – a backstage unfiltered eavesdrop as we talk about our work, our frustrations and some of the misconceptions about our wild neighbors that work against peaceful co-existence…
Rehabilitator and Humane Solutions consultant Brooke Brown.
Nora Chatmon, Lucinda Adamson, Monte Merrick and Brooke Brown discuss our Humane Solutions program, in a backstage way…
The discussion took off, lasting much longer than expected. In this epsiode, part one of our staff roundtable discussion, featuring Lucinda Adamson, Nora Chatmon, and Brooke Brown, we cover many of the frustrations – next episode the meaning, the awe and the victories – coming soon, the second half, in S2E3…
We hope you enjoy this discussion and remember! – our successful work keeping wild families together comes from your support! Thank you!
As anyone with a bird feeder in their backyard can tell you, Winter 20/21 was filled to the brim and overflowing into the saucer with Pine Siskins (Spinus pinus), a member of the finch family (Fringillidae).
Irruptions like this aren’t that unusual – happening every few years or so – but over the winter, southern Canada and large parts of the United States saw the largest irruption in ‘recorded history’.*
Irruptions occur when a critical food in a species’ wintering grounds is in short supply – for Pine Siskins this means conifer seeds, and Spruce seeds are a favorite – driving the birds south in search of a meal. Starving and desperate, backyard bird feeders must seem like the luckiest break in the world to them.
A newly admitted Pine Siskin gets an intake examination
Unfortunately, when large numbers of birds are concentrated at feeders, the condition are perfect for the spread of an ordinary bacteria, Salmonella. Carried in the intestines of birds and shed through the feces, the closely grouped finches hungrily foraging are constantly exposing each other to the bacteria. The disease that results from the infection, salmonellosis, is often fatal, causing irreparable harm to each bird’s gastro-intestinal tract. Once visibly sick – unable to fly, lethargic, emaciated – nearly all Siskins die. This is the result we saw all across North America over the Winter.
In response to the enormous flocks of starving Pine Siskins, and the attending salmonellosis outbreak, a massive campaign to stop the infectious spread was mounted, with Federal, State and non-governmental organizations stepping in to recommend that all bird feeders be pulled until the outbreak was over.
Another day, another few Pine Siskins. From our first admission of the irruption on Novemebr 16, 2020 until now, HWCC admitted an average of three Siskins a day
At Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, we admitted our first Pine Siskin of winter on November 16, 2020. He died two days later. By the end of 2020 we admitted 20 Siskins and only one survived to be released, but that bird did not have any symptoms of salmonellosis upon admission after hitting a window. We have now admitted 55 Pine Siskens, between November 16 and today, March 5. Today, we have one Siskin in care, another window strike, who is otherwise in good health. It was early-mid February when dying Siskins stopped coming in to our clinic. Since then, each bird has been cat caught or a window strike. Because the disease seems to have slowed considerably, the birds we’re admitting often have a much better prognosis.
Of the other 54 Siskins, 9 have been released, 7 came in DOA, 22 died in the first 24 hours in care, 3 died after a day had passed, and 13 were humanely euthanized due to the severity of their infection, or wounds caused by window strikes or house cats. Of course there was some overlap between sick Siskins and cat caught Siskins, due to the sick ones being more vulnerable.
HWCC did not join in the chorus of those recommending that bird feeders be taken down, on the simple reasoning that starvation was driving this concentration of birds, and that reducing available food would make it worse, further reducing availble feeding locations and increasing the density of birds, or simply move the tragedy to a place where the death and suffering wouldn’t be seen.
Catching a recovered bird in our aviary can be stressful! This Pine Siskin is looking good and ready to go home!
There is no easy test to determine if our patients have salmonellosis. We rely on clinical symptoms and context. An irruption coupled with Siskins admitted who are very thin, lethargic and sick is the only real diagnosis we have while the patient is alive. While some suggest that euthanasia is the only responsible course of treatment, without solid proof that these birds suffer from the bacteria, that is not a course we could follow.
While there are no studies to support this view, it seems that when hungry refugees show up at your door, the thing to do is provide, not deny, succor. Taking into consideration the unhealthy density of Siskins at feeders leads us to think that other areas could be used to provide more food, in a less concetrated manner than backyard feeders. Why not distribute food freely across parks and refuges? Intervention in nature when nature has been razed, pummeled, roped, when “they’ve tied her with fences and dragged her down” is the only morally responsible thing to do.
Release to Freedom, by any other name, would still be just as sweet!!
For now, the irruption in our region is over. Soon migration will completely make over our world and a whole new cast of characters will be at our feeders, in our yards, singing in our forests and towns. And when the human-modifed world causes our wild neighbors harm, we’ll be here to do what we can that is best for each individual.
Our doors are open each and every day of the year to our region’s injured and orphaned wild neighbors in need. Your support makes that possible. Please DONATE today, if you can! Thank you!!!
