Mid-summer at HWCC; the Pandemic Year. part one.

It’s a chaotic time in the world and in America especially, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic striking right when public leadership at the highest level in this country is at odds with public health. Every single day Humboldt Wildife Care Center/bird ally x opens our doors to the needs of our wild neighbors and no matter how frightening the times, our dedicated staff show up and get the job done. This is the first in a series of quick posts to catch up the news of our mission.

Here we are, past mid-July, and our pandemic year is only intensifying. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to take the time to write about our work. We rarely have time for more than a brief social media post to keep our supporters aware of how things are going. Our volunteer program remains in hiatus – to protect them, but also to protect our clinic and our mission. Our small wildlife hospital on Humboldt Bay is the only thing of its kind across three counties and we must stay covid-free. Most days we are grossly understaffed. On top of that our caseload is greater than ever – we’ve already provided care for nearly 900 wild neighbors this year to date! Since its founding in 1979, HWCC has not treated so many patients in one 6 and a half month period. In 2013 we treated just over 900 animals for the whole year!

Through our humane solutions program, we’ve helped keep dozens of wild families together, preventing senseless deaths of mother raccoons and skunks, and protecting their babies from becoming orphans. Still, even with these efforts, we currently have more than 75 orphaned wild babies in care.

Right now we are caring for 11 Black-tailed Deer fawns, 14 baby Raccoons, a dozen Striped Skunk babies. Two days we ago released four young American Robins we’d cared for since they were nestlings. We’ve treated Western Gray Squirrels, Deer mice, Opossums, various species of Swallows. Today or tomorrow we’ll be releasing 2 young Great Blue Herons whose nest was destroyed in the windstorm of mid-May. Now they are fully grown and able to hunt for their own fish. We’ll be taking them back to the Trinity River.

For the last two months, four young Gray foxes have been growing up in our care. The stage where we provide them live crickets to begin their lessons in providing their own meals has begun. The joy of helping these young intelligent predators reach their true destiny is indescribable. Pictures help!

Four Gray fox kits warily watch their caregiver as she prepares to capture them for their weekly examination. Keeping these wild predators wild is critical to their successful release!

Currently we also have 3 baby Common Murres in care, and several more brought to us as they were dying. Sad as this is, it might be a good sign for the local population of Common Murres, as the last few years their breeding colonies had largely failed, and this might mean that there are more babies making it to sea this year.

Not only our increased workload with decreased staffing has cost us, though; a huge stress has been the funding. As the pandemic has hit our human economy hard, it has taken a toll on the resources available for our wild neighbors, wild neighbors who are in our care because of what the human built world has done to them. It’s been hard to ask for financial support during a time of such economic stress, but we aren’t going to be run on magic forever. We do have a real electric bill, water bill, rent bill, fish bill, staff wages and more to pay. Right now we need your help. It’s critical.

To all who’ve been supporting us through this, thank you. Your contributions are more than material. You lift our spirits too.

Please contribute if you can. Every little bit helps.

Thank you for helping keep our doors open!

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Bored and socially distant? Hie you to the nearest body of water and start picking up discarded and derelict fishing gear! The life you save will probably be Wild.

Fish hooks and fishing line cause uncountable wildlife injuries. The toll fishing gear takes on marine birds, reptiles, and mammals (not to mention the targeted species!) numbers in the thousands along the California coast alone each year. (see study here) According to the Humane Society of the United States (link here) over a million marine animals are killed each year by “longline” fishing at sea.

From “ghost nets” that sweep silently through the sea, lost from their vessel, killing whales, dolphins, sea turtles, seabirds, fish and more, to wads of monofilament line that litter the shores of rivers and lakes ensnaring chickadees and egrets, this pollution problem is a source of untold, unknowable suffering for our wild neighbors.

In the last 8 years we’ve treated nearly 200 animals at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax who’ve been injured or entangled by discarded fishing gear. We have no idea how many, locally, are injured and never rescued, but that number is significantly higher than the relatively lucky few who are found and treated.

Sadly in the last week we’ve had three patients entangled in fishing line with hook injuries – a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias), and two Western Gulls (Larus occidentalis).

In the case of the heron, we received a call in the late morning that one of these unmistakable large birds was struggling on the bank of the Mad River where it flows through Blue Lake, a few miles inland from Humboldt Bay. When staff arrived on the scene, they found the heron, entangled in line.

The rescued is heron is taken back to the vehicle.

Fortunately, the injuries the heron suffered were minimal, within a few days the bold and pointed argument he made was let me out of here or somebody gets it. Other than imminent death by entaglement, there was nothing at all wrong – a very strong, large, and healthy individual – it would have been a tragedy no matter who suffers, but for such a remarkably successful individual to perish from something that violates the universal contract – the laws of natural selection, fitness, and adaptability – seems especially cruel – just as when a magnificently healthy songbird is brought to us with fatal injuries from a car or a cat. Fishing line, hooks, lures, nets, etc, are not agents of evolution, targeting the least fit among us – they are simply an injustice – a thoughtless or callous disregard.

After several days we took the rightfully indignant truly Great Blue Heron back to the Mad River, and wild freedom.

HWCC/bax Assistant Rehab Manager Lucinda Adamson and staff member Desiree Vang remove hook and line form Great Blue Heronwatch to see the Heron’s release!

Soon after releasing the heron, HWCC received an early morning message from Shelter Cove, nearly two hours south of our clinic by car. A gull was dangling by fishing line from a bluff above Black Sands beach. At first we tried to find someone closer to the scene who could help, but the current pandemic has reduced available resources… So we launched staff on resuce mission. When our staff reached the gull, the bird was dead, hanging from line.

Photograph texted to HWCC/bax in the early morning hours of a gull entangled in fishing line at Black Sands Beach in Shelter Cove.
ex-HWCC/bax intern and generally awesome climber and animal care giver Savannah Shore scrambles up the bluff to retrieve the bird.
The gull had been ensnared in this old gear.
take a moment

A few days before the gull died on that bluff, we admitted another hooked and entangled Western Gull, this bird found in Field’s Landing, right on Humboldt Bay. Unfortunately he had swallowed a hook. He was spitting up blood around a long piece of filament that reached further down his throat than we could see. This gull would need a wildlife surgeon.

We reached out to Bird Ally X co-founder and skilled wildlife veterinarian, Dr. Shannon Riggs, in Morro Bay where she is the Director of Animal Services for Pacific Wildlife Care. (listen to a conversation with Dr Riggs on our podcast) Shannon agreed to treat the bird and long relay (with awkward social distancing) was set up for transport. Jen Martin, an HWCC/bax intern who is not able to come to the clinic for shifts currently due to the pandemic, drove the gull down to Native Songbird Care and Conservation (NSCC) in Sebastopol, near Santa Rosa. BAX co-founder Marie Travers, volunteers at NSCC occasionally and was able to be there to receive the gull. Marie transported the gull to the Salinas area, where a Pacific Wildlife Care volunteer met her to take the bird on the last leg of the journey.

Radiographs of the gull with hook lodge in esophagus. Can you spot the offending piece of barbed metal?

The day after the gull arrived in Morro Bay (May 6, which as we all know is the anniversary of the day Henry Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of 44), Dr Riggs texted me the pictures of the radiographs she had made of the hook’s location. She added this comment to the images: “Well, it’s not in the worst place possible, but pretty damned close.  Will try to get it tomorrow, but not very optimistic.”

A good ‘doc’ doesn’t deliver false hope or promises and Shannon is a very good doctor. I’ve worked with her since 2007 and I trust her completely – I replied: Good Luck! – confident that the bird was in the best hands possible.

The hook that was caught in the gull’s esophagus
Our patient, post-op.

The next day we learned that the surgery was successful and that the gull was recovering well. Getting the above pictures, of the hook and the standing gull, post-op, were wonderful moments in a day of animal care, with losses, exhaustion, grief and joy. No animal still in captive care is out of the woods yet, so cautiously we celebrate his recovery. Soon we’ll be coordinating the trip back north so the gull can return to his home on Humboldt Bay, free and ready again for the wild challenges.

While at the release site for the Great Blue Heron above, this crap was picked up and brought back to the clinic by HCC/bax staff.

Everywhere that people go, fishing hooks and line are sure to follow. With our non-essential business on stand-still in many places, wouldn’t this be a good time to assign yourself some essential work? Namely, helping to clean this junk out of our local environs. It’s literally everywhere. If you go to beach, the river, a lake, a bay, a slough – carry a trash bag with you and pick up what others have left behind. You may never learn of the tragedy that you’ve averted, but every scrap removed from the environment is a scrap that won’t kill an innocent victim.

None of our work would happen as well as it does, with as many successes as we have, without your support. I say this all the time, because it true. Your generosity makes everything possible for wildlife care in our region, our state, and our world. Thank you.

DONATE TODAY TO HELP RESCUE ORPHANED AND INJURED WILD NEIGHBORS

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Masked but not Anonymous

https://youtu.be/CdPxpCjnVDo

Dear Friends and Supporters;

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,

Monte

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[podcast] New Wild Review vol 1 ep 5 Wildlife Care with the World Upended

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.

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American Bittern Recovers in Care (awesome video!)

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.

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Humboldt Wildlife Care Center and the novel Coronavirus

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.

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

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/

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

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
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Short Winter Days Increase Traffic Hazards for Wildlife

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.
Back home.

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…
And then off into the forest…

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!

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all photos: Laura Corsiglia/bax

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Working for the Wild in Tough Times

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.

A orphaned fawn’s release, 2019
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
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