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!!!
2021 and hopefully new hope are here! For the first podcast of the new season, here’s New Wild Review, vol 2 ep 1; – in which first we look at post release studies, and the limitations our obligations as caregivers place on invasive practices. Then we turn our attention to protecting wild families by protecting wild mothers – in this case skunks looking for mates and dens during the winter. Hope you find it informative and useful!
Thank you for helping us get through a difficult year!!! DONATE today to help us rescue injured and orphaned wild neighbors.
Want one? We have them at HWCC for $10. Like every year, this mug was drwan by our in-house artst, Laura Corsiglia! Your support goes directly toward keeping our clinic open, ready to help our regions wildlife in need, especially during this global pandemic!
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.
We’ve fallen behind in reporting on our hectic Summer season, due in part to the global coronavirus pandemic, and also to our sudden huge increase in patients over previous Summers. So let us take a breath, slip away from the clinic and our never-ending tasks and catch you up with some of our cases and releases from over the hectic baby season. Here’s a little tune to accompany you.
https://youtu.be/UdYGRnM8JN4
Three of the six young Gray Foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) we provided care for at Humboldt Wildlfie Care Center, Summer 2020.A young fox surveys their freedom after release.Orphaned Gray Fox at release performs the title song from the smash hit Broadway musical, Into the Woods. No Zoom app required.Two nestling Great Blue Herons (Ardea herodias), blown from their tree during a late Spring wind storm, get the hang of eating human caregiver delivered fish.In the early days of the Herons’ care we offered their fish on long hemostats. Quickly they began picking up their fish all by themselves. Soon after that they were hunting live fish in a pool.Launching into flight at the release site, just south of the Hoopa Reservation, where the two Herons came from. Covid 19 restrictions kept us from taking them all the way home, so a few miles from home would have to suffice.Great Blue Heron puts a lot of distance between themself and the humans who tried their best to provide good care. We did our jobs. But the stench of humanity still lingers…Caspian Tern (Hydroprogne caspia) in care: This Tern was found struggling in the surf. Without any injuries and in good body condition, we presumed the problem was an accidental dunking. After a few days of fish and rest, this bird who barks like a cat was raring to go!Released back to Humboldt Bay, where a large colony of Caspian Terns raise their young every year, this beautiful bird was one good tern…As the saying goes, one good Tern photo deserves another. Each year mother Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) make their nests near Humboldt Bay and other bodies of water and every year when they lead their precocial babies to that water they have to cross roads. Mayhem ensues. Of the 24 orphaned Mallards we treated this year, 16 of them were found on the highway with their dead mother. Caring for Mallard babies until they can be released is a privilege, but returning them to the wild that is a lustrous green carpet of duckeed is one of life’s marvels. The Arcata Marsh, home to many ducks and aquatic birds, is rich with nutritious and natural duck food.Nature is perfect.A juvenile Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis), very thin and full of lice was admitted this Summer after she turned up on a farm in Arcata (very out of place). Here she is being checked out after 27 days in care. A release exam is given to all our patients before we return them to their wild freedom. Dylan says that ‘to live outside the law you must be honest’ – well, maybe so, but you also must be as fit as a fiddle.In our Pelican Aviary, this 3 months old female is flying well again!After being found in a field with dairy cows in the Arcata Bottoms, our former patient is ready for a world of flight, salt water, diving and the company of her kind.
There is no getting around that 2020 has been a very difficult year, for our clinic, for our staff, for our community, for our nation, for the world. Yet, in these really difficult days, we’ve treated, as of this writing, September 10, 1,227 patients. Right now we’ve treated 300 more patients, year to date, in our small hospital on Humboldt Bay than any year in our 41 year history.
In March, as the pandemic was first hitting, it seemed entirely possible that our mission would be crushed under the weight of so much turmoil and uncertainty. It seemed possible that we wouldn’t make it through the Summer. But in fact, we’ve not only kept our doors open, we’ve managed to handle thousands of phone calls that often are better than the hands-on care we provide since these consultations and house calls prevent injuries and keep wild families together. We’ve learned as we went along how to do our work with a skeleton crew and with a shoestring budget. We’ve learned how to communicate effectively, how to keep our cool, how to appreciate the beauty and humor of life without seeing each other’s smiles or laughter. And none of this would have been possible without your support.
By the end of this month we will have treated more patients at HWCC than any previous year and we’ll still have three months to go. We have no idea how disastrous the rest of the year might be, or if we’ll ever return to what used to be normal. But as we’ve all been learning, we’ll keep on keeping on. Our wild neighbors will continue to have a place where they can be treated, cared for, and when possible, released back to their wild freedom. This is our commitment and promise and with your continued support we’ll keep it.
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.
