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.
A young Western Gull (Larus occidentalis) chick, fallen from the platform above the bay where her parents had built their nest, stands on the rocky shore 70 feet from home. She walks along the edge of the water and rocks, stepping through a copious amount of dog shit, visible to the customers eating on the nearby seafood restaurant’s deck. Her parents circle above her calling a threat to any who would harm their baby, but their threats don’t carry much weight. This chick is in a tight spot. Like so many of us.
There is simply no way to avoid the fact that nestling gulls are absurdly adorable.
Nearly every day we have the opportunity to wonder if our actions are in step with our times. Easily, we can imagine that our efforts don’t strike at the heart of the matter. Children are in cages on our borders. Am I making a difference? I’m busy, but am I busy with the right things? Racist crimes are rising. For the first time in recorded history, there is no sea ice touching land in all of Alaska. The last thing I did today at work was give milk replacer to six tiny orphaned opossums, a late-season litter. None of them weigh more than 60 grams.
I think a lot of us must ask that question of ourselves daily. Why do we rescue and treat wild animals in the first place? It’s an easy answer: we see the need and the need must be filled. Yet, the world is burning. The temperature is rising. A whole living world is in jeopardy while psychotic gunmen are let loose in the commons. There’s no shortage of unfilled and unfillable need.
And yet, there is the gull chick at the water’s edge.
Among the hardest places to work, where things can go the most wrong, where simple rescues are made into treacherous crossings, are artificial breakwaters, made of granite rocks, tossed into the surf so that people can make more land. They call it riprap, as if these rocks were carved by the hand of Mother Earth herself and set just so in each mountain stream and along each industrial port so that our poets might have something to ponder. No. They’re ugly. And slimy. And each rock is almost stable. And if you slip and fall, you are going to get hurt. The only question is if you’ll still be able to walk on your twisted ankle. And if you successfully capture the gull chick, you go back across the rocks holding an injured and terrified patient as well.
Her wariness intact, the growing gull is losing her baby feathers.
I carried a long-handled net and worked my way along the edge of the riprap. At a certain point I had to climb up, or the chick would see me. I set the net down and slid it as quietly as I could up the rocks, climbing behind it until I was at the top of the rock. Staying low, I spotted the gull chick about fifteen feet below me.
She was standing on a small rock. She was looking this way and then looking that way. I was still considering the idea that her parents had this situation under control, that I could leave her there at the water’s edge and her parents would feed her, defend her and teach her to fly.
Her feathers, just a couple weeks old, were starting to break. Her stance seemed a little unsteady. In the binoculars I could see that her eyes were a little sunken, that she was dehydrated. And the obvious sign of feces from dogs, feral cats, no doubt skunks, foxes and raccoons too… This chick didn’t stand a chance. I decided to capture her.
Proving she can evade a net while being captured for a routine exam by one of our invaluable interns.A closer view…
She was fifteen feet away and the net has a ten foot handle. I just needed to scooch a little closer. I just needed to get the net in position without the chick seeing me do it. I’ve never known a gull who couldn’t calculate the reach of a net in a moment’s glance.
Fortunately a paddle boarder with a boom box and a dog on board paddled by, giving me plenty of distracting cover to make the last few feet down the rock and push the basket of the net into a good position to quickly capture the gull.
The chick’s parents were in an uproar circling and crying out their frustration, wrath and fear. The boombox was playing the Dead’s Franklin Tower and I swung the net, surprising the chick and swooping her up. I folded the net’s opening over so that she couldn’t escape and ginger-quickly made my way across the piled rock as a lone adult pelican glided across the surface of the bay, his wingtips nearly touching his reflection’s. (It’s been a long time since we’ve treated a Brown Pelican.)
A small blood sample yields a lot of information about the general health of our patient
Struggling to keep knowledge alive in the face of calamity isn’t some new fad. We can’t turn the corner without stepping over the bones of those who were forced by conditions to put some small good thing, a shared language, an important heirloom, a lesson that was learned at great cost, into some kind of basket in hopes it would make it past a barrier – whether death or disaster. We make time capsules containing the best of what we have hoping it will be of use to our grandchildren, to help them know how things are, how they were, and what to not do, at least.
Who can’t sense the danger of an imminent break in continuity? When California Brown Pelicans were driven nearly to extinction in the late 1960s, their population had plummeted from millions when gold was found at Sutter’s place, to 5000 pairs in 120 years later. Think of the storehouse of pelican knowledge that died with those millions of pieces of the great pelican all. And think of the impoverishment of the babies who will soon grotesquely outnumber the grandparents. A pelican might live 40 years! Think of how long it would take for a population to regain its balance with the right number of 40 year olds, of thirty year olds, of teens, of chicks.
Pelicans had been thriving in their current form for over thirty million years. Ice ages had come and gone in that time and still millions of pelicans soared up and down the ever changing coast of this continent, but 120 years of industrial civilization was nearly the end of the species.
Terrible ends of eras that had lasted so long they’d seemed immutable are part and parcel of our daily life.
If we want some piece of our amassed knowledge and skills to make it to our descendants, in other words, if we care about the future, then a contingency is needed that sees our work safely across the abyss of disaster and discontinuity. In times such as ours, we are trying to educate our children, rescue all who we can, preserve hard won knowledge, and leave what we have for those who follow us and who will be aided by our work.
The wild world awaits once you step out of the box….Freedom freshly restored, the young gull surveys her suddenly widened surroundings.
Getting the gull back in her nest would have been the best outcome possible. It would have been easy enough to boat out to the platform and climb up with her, but the danger of disrupting the other siblings was too great. Instead we opted to care for the wayward chick. Once she was able to fly we would return her to her family, where she could learn firsthand the state of the art of gull knowledge of the bay.
One of the most significant tasks in caring for orphaned wildlife is to preserve their wildness. The first step in the preservation of anything is that we love, respect and side with who, or where or what is to be preserved. In the case of young gulls, it is critical that we take the necessary steps to protect the integrity of their wildness. Gulls, from hatching to adulthood, will readily adopt strategies to extract resources from human production – this is a wide ranging problem, often couched in terms of the problem gulls present people, when in fact, it is gulls who suffer. Who’s population is in decline the world over?
So we brought the gull into care. At HWCC we have an aviary purpose-built to accommodate gulls, pelicans, cormorants, and other species who live similarly near the coast – that is, stand around, float some, fly to higher look outs, and eat fish. While the she did not have the immediate company of other gulls, she did have cormorants and egrets as housing mates. Privacy was maintained. Handling was reduced. Fish, supplements and weekly physical examinations kept her on the right track. She grew on schedule.
We’d hoped that once she began to fly it would mean that her siblings back at her nest would also be flighted and that we could reunite her with her family. It was nearly two weeks before she was flying with enough vigor and agility – gull-like! – that we thought we could release her back to her parents’ further care. When we went back to her family’s nest, however, they were gone without a trace. There were no fledgling gulls anywhere. Her family was no longer an option. We’d have to make sure she could fend herself before she could be released.
Birds flying away: is there a sweeter sight than seeing our young take wing?
You can’t build an Earth, or even a coastline. A wild orphaned gull in captivity is missing crucial lessons that we have not been able to replicate. The best piece of our care has to be an orphan’s intact wildness, – a preference for her own kind. The greatest chance of learning what all of us must learn if we are to be wild and free is to have the example of our successful elders. For an orphan to have the teachers she needs, she must accept that she and they belong together. This is something that we can encourage and ensure. We can do everything in our power to keep wild animals wild. It works.
Soon the young gull was as ready as we could help her get. Any more lessons would be learned under the wide sky and above the bay, in the company of her kind.
Flying with strength, she explored.
The future is daunting. The best science of our time tells us that we face a calamity the likes of which industrial society has never known. There have been Pompeiis and Krakatoas in every age, on every shore, but not in the last 65 million years have we known global devastation like that which might loom.
If the human race is severely reduced in numbers and wealth and teeters on the brink of extinction; if we spend our days struggling to protect ourselves, our closest loved ones, feed ourselves; if our lives are consumed by a migration to some livable portion of the north or the south, what we know is that in that time, as in all times, there will be need to provide care for injured and orphaned wild animals, trapped in a destruction not their making, who we encounter along the way. There has never been a time when some people did not dedicate themselves to providing that care, and as long as there are people at all, there always will be.
After circling the area, our former patient finds her place among a mixed flock of other gulls.
I don’t think there is a single wildlife rehabilitator with her feet on the ground who thinks any of us are saving the world from its looming and mounting catastrophes through wildlife care. In fact, we know very well we are not. That knowledge is an ache we all endure, no matter where on the field of love for the wild we find ourselves. For wildcare givers, the Earth upon whom our patients depend is being made barren and still we must do our work. Just as anyone who cares deeply must act when the one for whom they care for is threatened. The day is fraught with the trauma and despair of an environment in chaos and still we must offer this one gull, just as we would offer our sister, a second chance.
It’s the time when this year’s wild babies are first showing their independence, climbing from nests, stepping out on a limb. But one false step, and that independence comes crashing down.
Inside the box, a young owl, a “brancher” who’s left the nest but isn’t ready to fly, waits to be returned to their family.
Late in the afternoon the day before Mother’s Day, such a misstep brought a very young Barred Owl (Strix varia) down to the ground in Sequoia Park. Someone walking among the tall Redwoods saw the young, fluffy bird and gave Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax a call. Clinic staff went to the scene, and found a young “brancher” (a term birders use to describe a young bird after they first leave the nest but before they can fly) who’d lost their footing. Staff decided to bring the owl into our clinic for a quick exam.
With no injuries and in good health, we made plans to return the owl to their family the next day.
HWCC assistant rehabilitation manager, Lucinda Adamson, scans the tall trees for signs of the young owl’s parents.
No matter the species, it is much better to return healthy wild babies and juveniles to their parents when possible. We do a pretty good job of providing care for owlets at HWCC/bax, but no one can provide care the way a parent can. Keeping wild families together is one of our primary goals during the busy wild baby seasons of Spring and Summer.
So with the young owl in a box, our wild reunion team went back to Sequoia Park to return them to their family.
The tree with the nest cavity was located and the owl was given a lift up to the rough bark where they could get a good grasp. The young owl immediately began to climb toward the only home they’ve ever known.“You have to climb before you can fly.” – an old Owl proverb.Twenty feet and climbing!Focused on the ascent, a three week old Owl shows the world what free solo really looks like!Everything happens under the parent’s watchful gaze.
Had this owlet fallen to the ground in a more wild setting than a city park in the center of town, most likely they would have managed getting themselves back into the tree and out of harm’s way. However in a highly used public park, the possibility for the wrong kind of human intervention was simply to great to do nothing.
Every juvenile or baby wild animal that we admit at HWCC/bax is analyzed for the potential for reunion with their family, or even fostering them to another family of the same species. It’s a big relief for all when we are able to successfully reunite wild families. For those who are truly orphans, about half of our patients each year, we have protocols and methods to help them reach true independence with their wildness intact.
You can help! In fact without your help, we’d dry up and blow away like one hit wonders from the 70s! Your support keeps us open, prepared, and available to help all of our wild neighbors when their proximity to civilization leads to trouble. Thank you for helping make sure that our mission is kept on track and our work is supported. Thank you for donating and thank you for your love of the wild.
Fawn calls are the most difficult. When a compassionate person stumbles across a fawn bedded down near a road, or near a construction site, or some other hazard created by people, and with no doe in sight, it can be very hard to think they should just leave the fawn alone. If they call us, we can usually discover through questions and conversation the situation and determine if the fawn needs care. Convincing a concerned person to put a fawn back in what clearly looks like an unprotected location can be challenging, even though in many cases that is exactly what the fawn and the fawn’s mother need. Often however, there is no way to put the fawn back. The caller got the fawn from someone who got the fawn from someone, or a dog dragged the fawn to the porch and no one knows from where, or the person has had the fawn at their house for many days and now the mother is no longer nearby – in these situations, it often means a perfectly healthy family is broken up, but there is nothing we can do but raise the fawn as an orphan. But no matter how difficult these calls can be, the worst is when it is clearly obvious that the fawn needs help. The worst are when the fawn is lying next to her mother, who is dead, hit by a car or a truck.
[Our fawns are all Black-tailed Deer, a subspecies of Mule Deer, the deer of the West]
Fawns who are truly orphaned seem to be traumatized when they arrive at our facility. Sometimes it can take two days before the fawn will express any interest in a bottle of milk-replacer. Convincing a traumatized fawn to take a bottle of milk is the same task as consoling a heartbroken child, so that he can eat, sleep, and resume his life. In a way it forces the wildlife care provider to form a bond with the newly admitted fawn, an idea that is at the very opposite of wildlife rehabilitation. Keeping wild patients wild, with a healthy fear of people, is as important a piece of our work as providing a proper diet and treating wounds. So warily, we proceed with fawn care.
As soon as a young fawn takes a bottle of milk (in our case, goat milk donated by local goat-keepers – and lots of it! hundreds of gallons! thank you!) we discontinue contact and start to use a bottle rack that puts a barrier between us and our patient. Once a fawn accepts a bottle in a bottle rack, he is ready to join in with our “herd” – the fawns we already have in care who are housed outdoors, and who we rarely see during the four months it takes to wean them from milk to vegetation. But those two days of close contact early on, while the fawn puts them behind her, the care provider cannot forget what it feels like to have a young deer close, who suddenly decides to accept your care and your bottle and drinks hungrily after barely moving from her corner in 48 hours.
[Please help us pay for the expenses of our busiest year ever. Your donation goes directly to the care of our injured and orphaned wild patients. Please, donate today! Thank you!]
In contact only with other fawns, over a period of months our patients are gradually weaned from milk on to vegetation, “browse” we call it, that staff and volunteers collect each day. Young deer eat a lot of leaves! Toward the end of their stay with us this year, we were collecting several wheelbarrow loads each day!
Once weaned and when we are certain that they are eating enough each day to thrive, and their spots are fading fast, we look up from our hectic summer days and see that, yes, indeed it is turning autumnal and a deer release is imminent.
One fawn per crate, each is brought to the release site. We are lucky that a good release site, protected against hunting and full of choice deer habitat is remote but not that far from our clinic. A nearby pond, forest and meadow, and the presence of a deer herd make this a great spot for our youngsters to begin their second chance at wild freedom!
It’s a great moment when the crate’s door is opened and your patient immediately puts distance between you and her!
Once safely away, a newly released fawn stops to consider the change of scenery.
Another fawn bolts for the cover of the trees.
Another fawn turns to assess the danger her caregivers pose…
Six fawns were released!
After this fawn reached the pond he stopped to cautiously consider us.
Zoomed in, it’s easy to see that this guy just doesn’t trust us, even though we delivered him over 200 bottles of milk and scores of wheelbarrow loads of leaves. His mistrust is a terrific sign of our success!
Nothing brings smiles to HWCC/bax volunteers faces like giving our wild neighbors in need a second chance at freedom!
A healthy, independent wild youngster rushing to meet her own destiny on nature’s terms… this is always the best view to be had.
Providing a safe and healthy environment for our wild orphaned patients is a critical part of meeting our mission. Requirements are skill, experience, dedication, hard work and the resources to get it done. We bring what we can to the task, but without your support, your generosity, it would be for nothing. Thank you for making our work possible! Please contribute something today. Each gift matters in the lives of our wild neighbors.
All photos: Bird Ally X
One last picture:
This fawn, burned in the Carr Fire near Redding in July was brought to HWCC/bax for treatment. Sadly, after several days in care, this brave youngster succumbed to her injuries. She tried hard. We’ll always remember her.
So far in 2017 we have admitted for care nearly two times the number of orphaned Mallards as we did by this date in 2016! And 2016 had been a record year for Mallard babies, in which we also saw a dramatic increase over the previous year’s orphaned Mallard caseload!
Mallard chicks are orphaned in any number of ways – most commonly by cars and dogs. A mother Mallard lays her eggs in a hidden nest and when they hatch, she leads her precocial young to water. Along the way the new family must cross roads and backyards, both of which are fraught with danger – cars, dogs, unsupervised kids – the human built world has provided little else but obstacles to our wild neighbors.
Even now, while writing this, a group of Mallards are in the middle of being rescued off US 101 about 20 miles south of our clinic: if their mother can’t be located or doesn’t return, then those ducklings will come to our facility to be cared for and given appropriate housing for them to learn to be adult ducks.
As of today, we have nearly two dozen orphaned Mallards in care. Each day that passes we might admit another 8 or 9 who’ve lost their mothers to a car, a dog, or some other calamity. Your support makes our treatment possible.
In care at only a few days old, these orphaned Mallards find safety under a heat lamp, huddled together with a feather duster as a comfort against the loss of their mother. Old playpens are very useful for small animal housing. They work for Mallard orphans exactly as they do for human children – keeping them safe and contained. Of course for ducklings, some crucial additions are needed – such as a small ‘pond’ filled with the most important diet item we offer – duckweed! Boxed for daily weight checks: before these youngsters can move outside and face cold nights with no mother, they have to gain some body mass. We check them every day to make sure they’re headed in the right direction!
“I weigh about 30 grams when I first leave my egg. I gain 5 to 10 grams a day until I move outside.”
While the intimacy we share with our patients isn’t the reason we help wild orphans make it to adulthood, a side benefit of our work is the closeness to willful, untamed nature that we experience each and every day.
Tracking the progress of each patient is a critical component to providing conscientious care. Weights are recorded in each patient’s record daily, or as needed.
Once ducklings (and goslings too!) are housed outdoors, we handle Mallard orphans a lot less – as they approach their release weight, we check them only once a week. Reduced handling means wildlife stays wild!
Weight check round up! They don’t like it at all, but we do need to make sure that our care is working.
Pre-release: this is the last housing these birds will ever know (hopefully!) Our waterfowl aviary can house up to a dozen young Mallards. If the steady rise in orphaned Mallards continues, we’ll need to increase our capacity.
Raising Mallards isn’t easy. Proper housing and diet are critical. Both of these require a lot of water. Your support keeps the water flowing and the ducklings growing! Losing your mom is pretty bad – most wild babies don’t survive such a tragedy. But at least here in Humboldt County, thanks to you, these young orphans still have a chance to live their free and wild lives. Can you help with their care? If so, donate here. Thank you!
Found on Samoa Beach, this young Pacific Pond Turtle (Actinemys marmorata) was almost kept as a pet. Fortunately he mentioned the turtle to his veterinarian at Sunny Brae Animal Clinic and they cautioned him that the turtle is wild and needs freedom. They called Humboldt Wildlife Care Center and we went over and picked up the curious and active youngster. No injuries or illness were found on his admission exam and he was released to a nearby mucky area that from now on will be known as Turtle’s Delight!
There are so many ways to live on Earth! Some of us spend years wth parental help and supervision on our way to adulthood and others, like this turtle, are born ready
Even though we strive to maintain a professional distance from our patients, sometimes it’s hard not to just be bowled over by the cuteness!
Seriously, though, this young turtle came very close to having his life ruined, spent in a glass box. Fortunately the person agreed to give this turtle his freedom. Also, the turtle was fortunate that the people at Sunny Brae Animal Clinic knew to call us at HWCC.
As we enter Spring and wild babies start to pop up around our community, please let’s help remind each other to keep wild animals wild, and to keep wild families together (even if it’s a family of one turtle!)
Want to help us meet our challenging mission to provide care for injured, orphaned and misplaced wild neighbors? We’ve raised over $4000 toward our March goal of $7000 and need your help! Without you, this turtle and all of our patients would have nowhere to go when the chips are down. You can donate here. Thank you for helping us help our wild neighbors!
One fawn per crate, each is brought to the release site. We are lucky that a good release site, protected against hunting and full of choice deer habitat is remote but not that far from our clinic. A nearby pond, forest and meadow, and the presence of a deer herd make this a great spot for our youngsters to begin their second chance at wild freedom!
It’s a great moment when the crate’s door is opened and your patient immediately puts distance between you and her!
Once safely away, a newly released fawn stops to consider the change of scenery.
Another fawn bolts for the cover of the trees.
Another fawn turns to assess the danger her caregivers pose…
Six fawns were released!
After this fawn reached the pond he stopped to cautiously consider us.
Zoomed in, it’s easy to see that this guy just doesn’t trust us, even though we delivered him over 200 bottles of milk and scores of wheelbarrow loads of leaves. His mistrust is a terrific sign of our success!
Nothing brings smiles to HWCC/bax volunteers faces like giving our wild neighbors in need a second chance at freedom!
A healthy, independent wild youngster rushing to meet her own destiny on nature’s terms… this is always the best view to be had.
In care at only a few days old, these orphaned Mallards find safety under a heat lamp, huddled together with a feather duster as a comfort against the loss of their mother.
Old playpens are very useful for small animal housing. They work for Mallard orphans exactly as they do for human children – keeping them safe and contained. Of course for ducklings, some crucial additions are needed – such as a small ‘pond’ filled with the most important diet item we offer – duckweed!
Boxed for daily weight checks: before these youngsters can move outside and face cold nights with no mother, they have to gain some body mass. We check them every day to make sure they’re headed in the right direction!
“I weigh about 30 grams when I first leave my egg. I gain 5 to 10 grams a day until I move outside.” 
While the intimacy we share with our patients isn’t the reason we help wild orphans make it to adulthood, a side benefit of our work is the closeness to willful, untamed nature that we experience each and every day. 
Tracking the progress of each patient is a critical component to providing conscientious care. Weights are recorded in each patient’s record daily, or as needed.
Once ducklings (and goslings too!) are housed outdoors, we handle Mallard orphans a lot less – as they approach their release weight, we check them only once a week. Reduced handling means wildlife stays wild! 
Weight check round up! They don’t like it at all, but we do need to make sure that our care is working.
Pre-release: this is the last housing these birds will ever know (hopefully!) Our waterfowl aviary can house up to a dozen young Mallards. If the steady rise in orphaned Mallards continues, we’ll need to increase our capacity. 
