New babies only a few days oldWeight checks are a regular part of careIn the aviaryDuckweed is a blessing.Frightened by human care providers, the ducklings huddle in fear.Release evaluation day!On the way to freedomA flotilla of Wood Ducks sets sail into their wild and free destiny!
In mid-May, a mother Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) crossing US 101 near King Salmon was killed by a car and her babies scattered into the adjacent wetland. This has been a common occurrence for the last hundred years, ever since the rise of the worst thing to ever happen to the real world – the automobile. We posted a story about the babies in May. (which you can see here)
After six weeks in care, and many weight checks, and a lot of duckweed, the babies were at last old enough to be on their own. We took them to a nice little pond where they could get accustomed to their restored freedom and when ready, launch into the sky.
Your support, of course, is why we had staff at the ready to rescue these orphaned Wood Ducks. Your support bought the heat lamp and paid for the laundry soap that cleaned the linens we use in the duckling care. Your support provided the waterfowl aviary all our injured and orphaned ducks, geese, gulls, egrets and more use to recover. Thank you! You make our work possible. If you can please support us now. As Summer winds down our coffers are empty and we still have nearly 50 patients in care, and we still have another 400 animals we are likely to admit before the year ends. Please help.
It’s rare that we admit orphaned baby bats at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. We haven’t had any baby bats in care since 2017, but this June we admittted eight Little Brown Bats (Myotis lucifugus)!
The little furry soon to be flying mammals fell from their colony in an outbuilding on the trail to the Headwaters Preserve. First we admitted three, but soon five more came in! Feeding baby bats is skill that you can’t really learn unitl you need to do it, so it had been a while since our staff had gotten any real practice. But it turns out it is like riding a bike, except you don’t have to pedal and you don’t need a helmet!
However protective gear is still required. While very rare in bats, especially bats so young, rabies is a real concern and all staff must wear protective gloves when handling bats. This protocol protects the patient and the care provider – any bat who is able to bite a person must be sent in for rabies testing, and this can only be done on a dead bat. So we make sure not to force that outcome.
Still, rabies is very rare. We’ve treated 400 bats at HWCC in the last thirteen years – and we’ve sent dozens in for testing because they’d scratched or bitten a member of the public – only bat that we’ve sent for testing has come back positive for rabies. All the same, we take the virus very seriously and we protect ourselves from transmission.
After a few weeks in care, a few had died, but the rest began to fly! Soon it was time to release. We took them back to the Redwood surrounding the building where their colony had been so that they could rejoin their community, ready for wild freedom and shouldering their task to help rid the world of mosquitoes. Go bats go!
Your support is what makes the care we provide possible. Thank you!!!
Summer 2025 has been very busy – so far the busiest on record! Humboldt Wildlife Care Center has treated over 1100 patients already this year. And this year has also brought in the most Gray Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) kits on record. So far we’ve admitted had 8 kits from all around Humboldt County. Four were orphaned when their mother was shot. Two were sick babies who we were able to treat over the course of a few weeks and then return to their mother. Two were each found as individual lost babies, sick, near death, and starving.
Smart, hungry and with boundless curiousity, they are a challenge and a privilege to shepherd into wild and free adulthood! Please enjoy these photos, made as discreetly as possible during the course of their care. We respect their privacy, we protect their wildness and we make sure they can hunt and forage – this is at the heart of raising all orphaned wild babies. It’s serious work, filled with physical, mental and emotional challenges. It also takes cold hard cash. Thank you for helping us give these 8 Gray Fox kits the second chance they needed and deserved.
2025 has been a heck of year, so far and we still have months to go. As is true every Summer, it’s at this point of the year that we really need you. Our coffers are low and the need is still high!
A 5 gram baby Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) whose nest fell. We tried to get the nest back up, but the parents had already left the site. Now the baby will be with us until old enough for release.
We are deep in the middle of Wild Baby Season! In the few months from the end of May to the end of August we admit half of the patients we’ll treat all year and 95% of these patients are orphaned babies. Yes, it’s a lot of mouths to feed. Yes, without your help, we’d be unable to meet the challenge. Yes, being able to help so many innocent your animals get a second chance at wild freedom is a joy and a privilege beyond measure.
Mallard ducklings (Anas platyrhynchos) we admitted when they were 30 gram yellow puffballs, now 700 grams and ready for duckweed in the Wild!
In the Wild!
The madness has been underway since early April, but now we’re really cooking. The busiest weeks are just ahead. We really do need your help. Please donate if you can. Our facility, our staff, our utility providers, and most of all, our patients, are depending on you!!!
Tree squirrels, in this case a Western Gray (Sciurus griseus), are semi-flighted!
At release, the ground wasn’t on this Western Gray Squirrel’s list of things to do.
Canada goslings (Branta canadensis) old enough to be on their own make their way out of the transport crates/
These orphaned goslings have each other, which is more than many wild orphans have. Helping wild babies reach maturity is easier if they have some buddies, or conspecifics, as we call them professionally.
Your support is critical always, but especially now. The next 10 weeks we will need to feed hundreds of wild babies, buy a lot of medicine, a lot of electricity, a lot of water, a lot telephone and a lot of staff hours. Your donation goes directly to the care we provide. Please help! Thank you so much!!!
A mom goes out for food. “I’ll be right back,” she tells her kids … but she doesn’t comes back. Her kids keep getting hungrier. Still, she doesn’t come back. Eventually, in desperation, they go out, maybe to look for her, or maybe out of confusion. But now they’re lost. And still she doesn’t come back.
This scenario unfolds across the season, across the years, across the history of mothers and children everywhere over time. Usually it ends in the death of the family. Unless someone intervenes.
At a facilities building on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus, earlier in May, a person who works there found two young Pacific Wrens (Troglodytes pacificus), who’d left the nest a little too soon. Nearby he found a dead adult wren.
Two young Pacific Wrens, just before learning to fly, admitted to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center
When we admitted them into care at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, both young birds were dehydrated. They were also pretty excited about the mealworms we offered them. One of the babies was nearly flighted and the other wasn’t far behind. We set them up in our baby bird nursery and put them on a regular feeding schedule every 30 minutes. As soon as we could we went back to the rescue site to see if the second parent was present, so we could return the babies to them, but sadly, there were no living adults to be seen. The care of these youngsters was in our hands
Because they were so close to being able to fly it wasn’t long before their attempts produced actual lift and the old magic of leaving the ground under your own power was new again.
The siblings left the temporary housing we have for baby birds about to fledge directly into one of our songbird aviaries. Here we continued to feed them mealworms every 45 mintues to an hour until they were finding the food all by themselves. As soon as their flight was strong and they were feeding themselves completely, we took them back to the place where they were found, a little bit deeper into the nearby forest, and they were free.
“How did I get up here? I flew!!” said the fledgling Wren.
“Please release me, let me go!!!”
Cryptic coloring matches the west coast forests perfectly!
The loss of parents is usually a tragedy that a nest of babies doesn’t survive, but this time, thanks to someone who saw the problem and who called us, the young were given a second chance at the wild freedom for which they were intended. Your support is why there is a facility in our region that make these second chances possible. Your support is why there are mealworms in Manila! Your support built the songbird aviary that provided the security and opportunity to learn that would have been provided by their parents. Your support makes this work possible! Thank you!!
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!
