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.