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.
Thanks to many donors, building our much needed raptor aviary is now underway!
Many supporters contributed with donation since our call went out in August for help. Thank you so much. And very recently, Cal Poly Humboldt professor of marketing Dr. Sarita Ray Chaudhury, who put us over the finish line with a $5000 dollar donation!
Many other donors have provided substantial help rebuilding our facility, a project that still has some distance to go before we are finished! Our colleagues at Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue have generously supported our rebuild as have Julie Buchanan and more!
Our busy Summer is winding to a close and now begins our season of building projects!
Still to come:
A Pelican, Gull and Cormorant Aviary (the PGC!) (estimated cost, $7000)
Small Mammal Housing! (estimated cost $4000)
Specialty Aviary for Swifts and Swallows! (estimated cost $4000)
Laundry facility (estimated cost $6000)
We have big plans and major goals for the future of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center. An on-staff veterinarian with a well equipped surgical suite is a must! Our goal is to have this capability, thereby reducing the number of patients who we must transport to other parts of the state for critical surgical needs, by early 2026 – that’s only 18 months away!
In other words, while great progress is being made, we still have some distance to go. Your support is still needed, and in fact will always be needed! Thank you for helping us meet our mission of rehabilitating injured and orphaned wild animals. And thank you for your love of the wild!
It’s been a very busy wild baby season, even as we continue to rebuild our facility a year after moving to Manila. Your help is critical to our success. Please donate!
Your donation supports everything we do! From rescue of injured and orphaned wildlife, to keeping wild families together, to developing and training the next generation of wildlife care providers. So far 2024 is one of our most demanding years of our history with nearly a thousand patients already treated since January. There is so much more to do and we need your help to make it all happen.
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Reading a draft of an essay on ethics for our profession.
We’ve started building our raccoon housing at our new site, but it’s Summer and our resources are thin! We need your help! Please donate to help us develop our new facility and keep our patients fed – we have nearly 75 orphans in care! Thank you for keeping our doors open and always striving to improve!!!!
Wild Baby Season of 2023 is nearly halfway through as we continue to build our vessel as we sail it. We need your help! Help us feed 10 Fawns, 15 Swallows, 3 Owls, 10 Mallards, 5 Skunks, 10 Raccoons, a Gray Fox and more! Please support our work if you can!
A small bird with a big belly, covered in short blue-gray feathers with hardly a tail to speak of, a pair of big eyes and an impressive pinkish mouth, with a really splendid gravelly voice – this young Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) was found alone on the ground in an alley in Eureka and picked up by a kind member of the public.
Upon examination at our clinic, the little Jay was found to be in good health with no injuries. The only thing we were concerned about was the welfare of the family. The rescuer had wondered if the parents had been killed. The best thing to do would be to return to the site and look for the baby’s family, and if possible, attempt to reunite them with their parents. If no parents were found, the baby would come back to HWCC to be raised as an orphan until they could take care of themselves in the wild.
Like most parents, Steller’s Jays don’t abandon their babies. But tragedy can occur in a world full of cars, cats, windows, and natural predators – we treat nearly 200 orphaned songbirds each year!
We followed the address deep into Eureka, armed with binoculars and carrying the baby in a box lined with a soft pillowcase. We arrived at the site and proceeded to watch for Jays.
It’s awesome that this Jay’s mother and father were still present and that the youngster could return to their family. Of course, many young birds are actually orphaned and do need our care. While you can read on the internet that intervention may be the wrong thing, and that if you don’t know, you shouldn’t act, we can easily turn this reasoning around. In many cases we might not know enough to not act. To decide to do nothing might have consigned this wild animal to a needless death. The kind-hearted people who brought us the baby Jay were not able to tell that the baby wasn’t alone. They observed for a considerable time but didn’t see anything to allay their fears. This is perfectly fine! They aren’t professionals. They did the right thing. They called our clinic and told us what they’d seen. WIth no parents observed and the bird in the middle of an alley, with possible injuries, we suggested that they bring the baby to us. In this way we all played our part in helping protect this bird and gave them a second chance.
Want to help us provide the kind of care and attention that all wild neighbors in need deserve? Please consider donating! Your generosity is what makes our work possible. Without you there would be no one to call, no one to intervene, and no one to make sure that fledglings who’ve wandered far from home will get the attention and care they deserve. Thank you!!!
A video of a recent day at our new facility in Manila!
You can help us stay afloat!! Please donate to help us rebuild, and most importantly, care for the hundreds of wild orphans that are coming our way no matter what! WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT!
Thank you!!
video shot by Monte Merrick and Laura Corsilgia, edited by Soro Cyrene and Laura. (thanks Soro!!!)
Six nestling Barn Owls (Tyto Alba) were admitted to Humboldt Wildlife Care Center mid-July, nestlings who’d been unintentional stowaways on a truckload of hay from Siskiyou county and delivered to Myrtletown.
We’ve posted a story about their care (check out A Half Dozen Barn Owls in a Truckload of Hay). This is the story of their release.
We’d been planning a trip deep into Siskiyou to return these owls to where they were from. In preparation the owls had each shown they could identify, capture and eat prey (a necessary step when rehabilitating orphaned hunters). They were each expert at flight, in excellent condition, and more than anything else, the aviary was clearly the biggest problem they had. It was time for freedom.
As anyone within five hours of Humboldt Bay probably knows, Siskiyou, Eastern Humboldt, and Trinity counties have been suffering from wild fires since early Summer. Unfortunately for these owls, the place on Earth where they came into the word is under a fire threat.
So we found a location that incorporated some of the characteristics of home, and hoped for the best, in a world that is becoming a patchwork, with all of us leaping from slippery rock to rock, trying to keep it going as we cross this torrent.
What a Summer, what a year, what an era!!!! As of today, the 21st of August, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center has treated a thousand wild patients in 2022. Our humane solutions work has kept scores of wild families together. Among the thousand patients, our small facility in Bayside ( right now we only have a quarter-acre!) has provided care for 7 Barn Owl babies, 2 Coyote pups (one from Tule Lake, the other from Round Valley) dozens of Barn Swallows, Cliff Swallows, Violet-green Swallows, House finches, White-crowned Sparrows, and Band-tailed Pigeons. Many Mallards, Raccoon babies and a Ring-tailed cat we’ve had in care sicne she was an infant are still in care today, but soon to be released.
Now, as our caseload lightens up a little (we’re down to 50 patients from 100 two weeks ago currently in treatment) and we’re finally able to breathe a little, we have to focus on the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced – moving our hospital to a new location without interrupting the care we must provide our wild neighbors… I’m certain we’ll make it, but to be completely honest the stress of making sure we do is constant, and tiring. Already understaffed and overworked, it will require a huge amount of community support for us to make this happen. We need you badly right now.
I’ll be asking for contributions nonstop until we’ve made this transition – I hope you understand why!
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As our Summer begins to wind down, and the effort to move looms in the near future, we are in a serious situation. We need your support now.
Every day someone tells us how much they appreciate that we are here. I understand that completely. I appreciate that we are here too! If we weren’t there would be nowhere for wild neighbors to be treated and released – no place to end the suffering of those too wounded to ever be free again, and no place to peacefully resolve human wildlife conflicts in a manner that all parties are satisfied and wild families are kept intact. The service that any wildlife hospital provides its community is pretty far below the radar, but when the need becomes apparent, when someone finds a wild neighbor injured or orphaned by the ordinary everyday operations of our human-built world, it is critical that a facility be there to provide the necessary care. HWCC has been operating in Humboldt County since 1979. I intend that it be here, providing ever better care for innocent wild animals far into the future, far beyond my own lifespan. Your support is the only thing that will make sure that we continue to be here for our wild neighbors now and forever and right now, we need you badly. Please help.
all photos Laura Corsiglia/bax
