Wild Baby Season is off to hectic start this year! If it was a competition (it isn’t!) we’d be in the lead for busiest year on record already! We’re currently running 18% above last year! As of today we have nearly 50 wild babies in care. From duckling and goslings to helplessly small baby opossums, and even some very young Brown pelicans! We need your help, as always, but especially now!
Please donate today to help us help our wild neighbors in need! We are desperate for your help. Here’s me saying the same thing on video!
Thank you for keeping our doors open, our incubators warm, and our patients’ bellies full.
After 16 years of building our digital community of support, it’s time for us to reimagine and recreate a less toxic environment that reaches more people to secure the success of our mission!
Bird Ally X co-founder and Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax director, (me) talks about the successes of the past, the challenges of our present moment, and our commitment to the future.
Your support is critical. Without you, we are nearly paralyzed. Please help us meet this years;a challenges – wild baby season is well under way!
Thank you for everything, especially your love for the Wild, and of course, our Wild Neighbors.
Join us on New Wild Review for a conversation with Napa Wildlife Rescue’s Director of Animal Care and Operations, Linnaea Furlong. (please check out the awesome work of Napa Wildlife Rescue)
A recent social media post by Linnaea struck a chord with New Wild Review. She wrote:
“It’s surreal, watching all the systems breaking from above in the world, and wondering how it’s going to turn out, but at the same time, now I need to feed baby squirrels, now I need to bathe the raccoon child with mange, now I need to put worms in the glowing orange gapes of phoebes, now I need to train the new hotline person. Things are falling apart and staying the same at once and I am just taking it squirrel by squirrel.”
In our conversation, we talk about what it means to provide care across boundaries during chaotic and dangerous times.
Your support for Bird Ally X, and all of our projects, from Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, to our Botulism Response Team to this podcast, is deeply appreciated. It’s your generosity that makes it all happen. We need you now very much. Please donate if you can.
On Friday a private water tower in Fort Dick, north of Crescent City, close to the Oregon State Line, collapsed unexpectedly. Unfortunately it was the nest site for a pair of Barn Owls (Tyto furcata). The property owner found of the owlet nestlings alive, buried in the debris. They called Humboldt Wildlife Care Center to find out what could be done.
With help from our volunteer transport team, we brought the babies 90 miles south to our facility on Humboldt Bay admitting them on Saturday morning.
Three Barn Owl nestlings in our incubator – a remarkable size difference between them!The largest of the three Barn Owl nestlings sleeps peacefully.
Considering their mishap, three of the babies are in surprisingly good shape, although the other three of their siblings didn’t survive.
There is a chance that we can build a nest box and return them to their parents, and the options for that are still being explored. If we can’t, then our raptor aviary currently under construction may have these three young raptors as its first patients.
Regardless, it’s your support that makes their second chance possible. Thank you for donating to their care. It takes a lot of mice and rats for these youngsters to become free and wild adults!
Thank you for supporting our work! Without you we wouldn’t exist. Please contribute if you can! The wild babies are coming as surely as Spring leads to Summer.
On the second of April, right after we opened, we admitted the first wild orphans of 2025. A student walking to school in Weott found an Opossum who had been hit by a car. In her pouch they found six tiny babies, eyes still closed, who were alive. They took the babies and wrapped them in a sweater and kept them warm. Until the babies could be brought to our clinic in Manila.
They’re doing well now, hydrated and becoming accustomed to a replacement milk. Thanks to this resourceful young person, these six babies have an excellent chance of getting a second chance at wild freedom.
These are the first six of several hundred wild orphans that Humboldt Wildlife Care Center will admit this season. we could really use your support. Without the donations of our human neighbors we would never be able to provide quality care for our wild neighbors. Please help! Thank you!!
A good looking gull regains helath and freedomLucinda Adamson weighs Baby raccoons A Northern Fulmar released after a month in care!A fawn release is always special.Who flies like a champ? You do, Pigeon.A Bald Eagle released in Arcata!Ash Shields helps with Eagle exam!Another Awesome Opossum!Common Loon, uncommonly gorgeous!Bufflehead Released!Sara Moran preparing medicine.
A lot happened in 2024. We treated 1,577 patients! We answered thousands of phone calls! We gave hundreds of second chances to our wild neighbors.
And it was with your help, your support, your generosity, that we could do any of it.
Thank you for making our second busiest year of all time a successful year. And please, if you can, support us going in to the future. Who knows what the new year will bring, but with your support, we’ll be ready!
Our annual holiday card! Just mailed out today! You’re support is so important to us – you make everything possible! Thank for another beuatiful year caring for our region’s orphaned and injured wild animals. It’s been a good one. It’s been a tough one. Please help if you can.
It was the evening of March 31 that we were having a class on hatchling and nestling care for our staff and volunteers. Part of the material in the class was the approximate dates that we tend to start admitting certain species. Roughly, we had until the last few days of April, most years, before Mallard ducklings would begin to emerge. Nestling and fledgling songbirds start coming in about two weeks later.
As an aside to that, we talked about things that we would prioritize to complete in the next few weeks in preparation for the season before all of our time would be taken up by patient care.
The season had other plans. Three days later, April 2, our first hatchling ducks started to come in.
I often tell staff that the two gods I pray to are Necessity and Dumb Luck. I love them both. Necessity tells me what’s next and Dumb Luck helps make it happen sometimes, maybe, you can hope. Necessity said next up is a duckling pond for baby ducks old enough to be housed outside but who still need the heat support that would have been provided by their mother. Necessity also gave us a week to build it.
The part needed that isn’t Necessity or Dumb Luck is no god. That’s where each of us comes in. Elbow grease. Commitment. Community support. By the end of April we finished putting up a waterfowl aviary and adjacent smaller duckling pond, our first since moving to Manila in March of 2023. Maybe what I mean by Dumb Luck is the aspect of our work that requires us to believe that what is necessary will be done, because it must be done. In hindsight, after the accomplishment, one feels enormous gratitude, and also very lucky.
As it happened, the season just got busier and busier from April 2 on – by the end of the week, were getting very tiny Virginia Opossum babies whose mothers had been killed by cars or dogs. By April 11 we had tiny raccoon babies, who had been taken from their mother when their den was uprooted during some “brush removal” in Del Norte County, 80 miles north of us. With neonatal mammals, the feedings are as close to around the clock as we can manage – an inescapable part of parenting, as every parent knows – that we recreate as best as we are able.
So here we are, just past the midway point of the Season of wild orphans – we’ve been working 14 hour days for more than three months now. We still have about two months to go. The fact that we’ve even made it his far is in every way because of your support. Support that stays critical. We still have so much more to come this Season, and we still have a lot to complete to bring our facility back to its proper capacity. Your help is going to keep being needed, hopefully forever. If you can please donate to keep our season going, our doors open, our utilities paid, our food delivered, our medicines covered – our needs met. We do a lot on a little – we can do even more on more. Thank you!!!
Please take a look at our slide show of photographs from what so far has been, it cannot be denied, a WILD WILD BABY SEASON.
Our duckling pond and waterfowl aviary were completed just in time for the 30 Mallards and 6 Gadwalls we’ve treated so far this year! These Mallards are being released into the same lake where we gatherd the duckweed we offered them while in care.
We treated 11 Canada goslings this year! Each baby is big!!
Mid-May we admitted a Pigeon Guillemot who had derelict fishing line tangled around their body. After removing the line providing some time in our new seabird pool, we took them back to Trinidad to resume the baby season, no doubt an important member of the baby feeding team.
Every now and again we admit Western Spotted Skunks! These young skunks were found in Del Norte County and through a series of volunteer drivers, were transported to our clinic on Humboldt Bay. We had them in care for a month until they were ready to face the wild on their own. We took them back to Crescent City.
After a month in care these orphaned Western Spotted Skunks were released near the location they had been originally found.
Re-uniting fledgling songbirds with their families is one of our important tasks all Season long. This Cedar Waxwing fledgling was soon the object of great concern when we brought the young bird back to their nest’s location. Adult Waxwings immediately took charge of the situation.
An adult Cedar Waxwing watches with great interest when weput a Waxwing fledgling we believe is their baby back where the rescuer found them.
Soon after realizing their baby was back, the parents immediately began to offer food!
There is no joy like the joy of reuniting families.
A juvenile Steller’s Jay is released back into the Community Forest where they were found as a nestling on the ground. All corvids are challenging patients in the same way as all gifted and talented children. This Jay was no different – bold, bright and curious!
Every year we provide care for a few to half a dozen orphaned Gray Fox kits. They eat a lot of rats! Frozen rats cost anywhere from two to four dollars each. When the kits are eating 6 a day, that adds up fast!
Two brother foxes, who came in when they were still fluffballs with their eyes only recently opened, were released in Mid-July.
Foxes are amazing animals. They climb like cats, look like dogs, and bark and hiss and scream. Once while we were picking these guys up to do a routine examination, a wild and free adult Gray Fox came near our outdoor fox housing to see what was the matter. Thanks to your suppoort we were able to provide them their needs while they learned to hunt and care for themselves.
A Red-shouldered hawk, no doubt with a nest and parental duties, was struck by a car on 299, near North Bank Rd. Amazingly the raptor had no injuries! After a day of observation, we returned the hawk to their neighborhood along the Batowat just north of Arcata.
We’ve treated over half a dozen Brown Pelicans, in a small mirror of the pelican mortality event that occurred in much greater numbers further South, from the Bay area to San Diego. This juvenile Pelican came in emaciated and very cold. Once stable and ready to be housed outdoors, we converted our recently completed waterfowl aviary to meet the needs of a recovering Pelican. After three weeks of rest and plenty of fish, the big young bird was ready to return to Humbold Bay and beyond. The photos that follow are the in sequence of his release on the Samoa Penminsula.
A month ago, a biologist working out past Willow Creek found a Trukey Vulture baby on the ground in the forest. We’ve had the bird in care for a month now, and let’s just say it takes a lot of carrion to make a grown up Turkey vulture! For a short time, we were able to house this baby with an adult Turkey vulture. The arrangement seemed to work out for both of them.
An adult Turkey Vulture was found by the side of the road in Fortuna. When our staff arrived on the scene, the bird was very lethargic, barely able to move. Several times over the first few days of care, it seemed they were about to die. But with fluids, nutrition and rest, soon the vulture was awake and alert. Within a week they were strong enough to feed themself. After three weeks, they were ready for the open sky!
We took the Vulture back to Fortuna and released them by the banks of the Eel River.
Every once in a while we get a call about a Bald Eagle in trouble. Even less frequently, the animal in trouble actually is an eagle! Grounded, with minor injuries in the woods just east of Arcata, we beleive this adult, presumably male Bald Eagle had tangled with an Osprey over the rightful ownership of some fish.
Staff member Ash Shields, in the moment when they are holding an injured eagle for an exam for the first time in their life. The occasion is momentous.
The chance to examine any wild patient is also a chance to teach and to learn. Every patient has something to teach us. This Bald Eagle was no different.
Because our facility isn’t finished being rebuilt after our move last year, we transferred the Eagle to Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue for further recuperation in their large aviary. When the handsome fellow is ready for release, he will come back to Humboldt. Members of Arcata’s dedicated birding community have reached out to us, hoping to be reassured about the his prognosis. While nothing is certain until release, we beleive that this Eagle has a very excellent chance of soaring again soon over Humboldt Bay. Meanwhile, we are hoping to begin building a new large aviary here by the end of Summer. Your help will make that possible!
We really need your help to keep going this Summer. We still have 2 months or more left of the Season and several hundred animals to admit. Please help us help our wild neighbiors in need! Thank you so much!!!!
Baby season is upon us and we need your help. Please donate if you can. Ducklings and skunk babies and raccoon orphans need you! Please help if you can. Thank you!!
