A quick video made at day’s end, the beginning of September, reflecting on our current state and our needs….
Your support makes everything we do possible. We need you. Thank you
At the End of the Day
Tag: Keep Wild Families Together
September Morn with Barn Swallows in Care [VIDEO+]
Look! A soundtrack!
First feeding of the morning, 7:45 am.
Your support means everything. We’ve already treated, cared for, raised and released 25 Swallows in 2025 (Barn, Violet-green, Cliff; family, Hirundinidae) and these 5 Barn Swallows still in care will most likely be the last Swallow babies of the year. Just in staff time alone, these babies are dear, but they’re dearness is most reliably measured in the joy they express in flight. At the end of Summer, we’re running on fumes. We need you. Please help.
A Summer of Many Baby Crows!
Until this year, our statistically normal number of Crows (technically, American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) that we admit annually has fluctuated between 20 and 30, with about 75% of them being juveniles, fledglings, nestlings or hatchlings – in other words only about 1 in 4 are adults. But this year has been extraordinary. So far, we’ve already admitted 53 crows, and an astonishing 87% of them have been this year’s babies!
Crows are perhaps the best animal ever to come down the pike. What a thrill it is to help them reach their adulthood! It’s a shame of course, as all orphans are a tragedy – yet the privilege of helping these incredible beings overcome the horrifying setback of losing their parents is a joy beyond compare.
As is always the case with our patients, their wildness, their freedom and their autonomy must be respected. It’s good for people to practice this kind of respect toward other living beings in their daily lives. It’s salvific.
Often, juvenile crows make a few mistakes – perfectly normal for adventurous and bright adolescents to run astray – which separate them from their family. In such cases, if they come to us, we can sometimes get them home. Re-uniting a crow baby with crow parents is the best possible outcome. Of course that’s not always possible. In which case, we have an aviary and diet that will have to do, until they can be released, able to be independent, able to be an adult crow. Learning how to do this effectively is a life-long journey.
What pays for the process, what makes the process possible, what gives these incredible and intelligent wild neighbors the second chance they need and deserve – no matter how many we admit! – is your support. Thank you for getting us this far. Thank you for taking us further.
Raccoons of 2025! First orphans released!
The first baby raccoons of our 2025 wild orphan season were admitted on May 25. For the baby raccoons who come to us so young that their eyes are still closed, they will be in care for at least four months before they are able to be released back to their wild freedom. Our first babies released this year were a little older when admitted so they spent less time in care, only 3 months! From eyes just opening, only having a milk replace, to a 3+ kilogram omnivore with a strong desire to soak their food in water, the journey with orphaned raccoons is a privilege to share – they are smart, inventive, curious, bold, cautious, and more – and given the chance (which we never give) they could probably beat us at checkers.
Because raccoons are so smart we have to take very positive steps during their time in care to protect their wildness, respect their privacy and ensure that they each have a healthy fear of people. (If you’ve ever met a person, you can probably imagine why this fear is necessary.)
Almost every baby raccoon we admit lost their mother due to trapping. People see an adult raccoon around their property, or under their house, and they trap her and take her far away, or they kill her. In either case, they leave behind babies who will die without her unless they are rescued. Please, if you ever have a problem with a raccoon, or any wild animal, call us! We can help resolve the situation in a way that everyone, you, the raccoon mother and the raccoon babies can be satisfied – and the wild family can be kept together.
Treating wild orphans is tricky business. It requires a trained staff and it takes plenty of resources. Your support provides these crucial elements. Thank you! Thank you for making sure our region has a place that wild animals in need can be helped. We wouldn’t be here, 365 days a year (366 in leap year!) without your support.
Wood Duck orphans get Second Chance!
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.
Eight is Enough Baby Bats
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!!!
The Foxes of Summer 2025
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!
Want to help?
photos: Laura Corsiglia/BAX
Our Summer Newsletter
Our Summer newsletter went out late June to our “snail mail” list. Here it is, if you haven’t seen it!
Please donate.
We need your help.
So Many Babies!
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.
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!!!
Enjoy these photos of our recent patients!
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!!!
Pacific Wren Siblings Evade a Tragic But Common Fate.
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.
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.
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!!
photos/video Laura Corsiglia/bird ally x
