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/
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
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.
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.
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.Exploring the real Earth.These two sisters stick together through thick and thin, brave, resolute and with boundless curiosityThe rocks, rivers and forests of our region are the birthright of our patientsA portrait of a highly sophisticated Earthling.The two sisters cross the river and climb the opposite tangled bank into their private freedom…The male soon follows them….“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.
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
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.
Every Spring and Summer, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center treats as many as 90 orphaned Opossums (Didelphis virginiana). We usually begin to admit them in mid-April – just around the corner! Nearly all of these young marsupials are brought to us after being found in the pouch of their mother, who’d been hit by a car. The second biggest human threat Opossums and their babies face that we see is being attacked by the family dog.
Sometimes, although rarely, the mother Opossum survives being hit by a car without life-threatening injuries. At times like these we are able to keep the wild family together.
There are people who run Opossums down on the road on purpose. Who hasn’t heard some yahoo bragging about this very fact. Who hasn’t heard an endless array of roadkill jokes, complete with point systems for keeping score? In fact, both informal and rigorous studies have demonstrated that somewhere between 3 and 6 per cent of drivers will swerve to intentionally hit an animal on the side of the road. The number of animals who are killed intentionally when no swerving is required remains unstudied.
Our education committee is always working on new ways to show people the Awesome Opossum. Here HWCC/bax volunteer coordinator, Ruth Mock, makes some very important points about Opossums using puppets, science and the warmth of our kinship. These go a long way toward promoting co-existence with Opossums and all of our wild neighbors!
Now, the simple act of driving puts all of us at risk of unintentionally colliding with others, other cars, pedestrians, wild neighbors, family dogs and house cats. It is very distressing to unintentionally kill with our cars and most of us have probably done so, and we can all commiserate together.
Still, it seems obvious that many of the Opossums who are hit by vehicles, since they are large and easily seen in headlights (their name, “Opossum”, is an Algonquin word, purported to mean “white animal” or “white dog”), are hit intentionally.
A growing orphan gets their weight checked and progress noted! Opossums are among the fastest maturing orphaned mammals that HWCC/bax treats. Opossums live short lives, by our standards, and they make up for it by producing a lot of babies! A mother may have as many as 12 babies in her pouch!
Opossums, according to the internet, are very useful animals. That they eat a large number of ticks seems to be the chief reason to let them be… That a fellow traveler on this one green and blue Earth needs to have utility to human civilization in order that they be spared the worst our kind has to offer is perhaps the real lesson in that strategy of advocacy.
Intentionally running down Opossums may be hard to stop through education. Is it really simple, curable ignorance that would cause a person to act with such wanton destructiveness? Seems unlikely.
A very young Opossum, only recently separated from his mother who’d been hit by a car.
That makes it incumbent on us to find ways to protect Opossums where we can. Road designs that prevent small animals from entering the roadway and offer crossing sites that are easy and natural to use are a great idea, but expensive to implement everywhere that they’re needed. Being extra-vigilant and remembering that in a region like ours, with many rural highways following streams and criss-crossing the bottoms, wild neighbors are likely to be seen – to expect to see wild animals and be prepared to give them safe passage.
Also, we need to remember that wild neighbors have a right to move freely through the terrain, without being confronted by dogs. Supervising our family dogs’ night-time potty excursions is our responsibility.
An Opossum has quite the weaponry on board in the event of such a confrontation. First, they can hiss and show teeth. Opossums have a lot of pointy teeth. Second, if that doesn’t work, they can pretend to be dead and allow a foul smelling secretion to ooze from their rectum. Deadly.
In other words, Opossums present absolutely no threat to human households, other than the occasional ocurrence of an Opossum coming in through the cat door for some cat food.
And finally, when all else fails, if you find an Opossum who has been attacked by dogs, or hit by a car, even if apparently dead, check to see if she is a mother with live babies in her pouch. At least we can give these little ones a second chance.
Opossums have been a part of North America for a very long time – they have a right to be here. They exist from sea to sea, their range limited only by snow and winter cold.
Two young Opossums on the day of their release, exploring the wide-world for the first time.
Each Opossum we raise, of the 80 or so we admit each year, costs a certain amount. Milk replacer formula, heating pads, solid food, housing rent, caregivers, all of it is provided by your generous support. Without your help, we would not be here. Without your help, none of our wild neighbors would get a second chance. With your help, we can prevent some of these injuries and the need for a second chance, and with your support we’ll be here when care is necessary.
Thank you for your love of our wild neighbors! Thank you helping us all co-exist peacefully.
Late Winter storms were tough on our region. Rain seemed to fall for days without ceasing and many of us suffered from chronic wet socks and an unshakeable chill. And that endless rain was tough on more than the human community.
In the last two weeks of February, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center admitted 8 birds of prey who were found struggling, their hunting grounds covered in water, or other challenges that caused more than a few area raptors to go hungry.
Young Peregrine Falcon found near Crescent City, mildly anemic and thin. Two weeks of domestic quail (purchased frozen from a supplier in Southern California) and a safe place to recover and he was ready to get back into action
A Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) was found struggling near Lake Earl outside of Crescent City, too weak to fly, as well as two Red-tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) from the same area, Crescent City and Brookings, Oregon, just north of Crescent City.
Found in Ferndale, covered in mud and with a deep cut on one of her toes, this Red-tailed Hawk gained over 300 grams (approximately 25% of her body mass) in the month she was in our care. That’s a lot of rats. (about 60 of them actually)Red-shouldered Hawk, found in the middle of a gravel road near Ferndale wastes no time leaping back into his wild freedom after a little bit more than a week in care.This adult female Red-tailed Hawk, found in Crescent City grounded with her feathers caked in mud, was a fierce and formidable patient. She refused to eat for the first few days, so un-accepting was she of the indignity of captivity. So we cut her rats in half and she was appetized beyond the reach of her principled disgust with all things human. She started eating. She was released after 10 days in care.
As the Eel River began to flood we admitted five hawks, four Red-tailed Hawks and one Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus), from its bottom lands, all of them displaced, wet, cold and hungry.
We can only surmise that there were other wild neighbors who didn’t survive the drenching storms of this winter. The last two weeks of February, during the rains, we admitted 31 wild animals for care, including several songbirds, ducks and gulls. During storms, simply because fewer people are outside, fewer struggling wild animals are found.
Another adult Red-tailed Hawk, found in Brookings after the storms. He was so thin and anemic at the time of his rescue that we weren’t sure he would recover, but here he is a month later, healthy, whole and back at home in the wide sky.
Right now, we are preparing for our busy season, yet also having a busy winter. Already our caseload is up 20% over last year, which was our busiest year so far. We need to raise $50,000 by April 30 to be able to stay open, with our staff and housing ready to meet whatever comes our way. These are trying times for many, and it’s no less true for our wild neighbors. We need to be here for them when they need us. Only your support will make that happen. Please donate today. Thank you for your love of the wild!! DONATE HERE
