A soundtrack to wild orphan season and our work… enjoy.
It happens a lot. A duck’s eggs hatch and her precocial chicks must be led to water… and far too often, instead they are led to slaughter – decimated on one of the worst things ever invented, the auto-route.
Often the whole family is lost, but sometimes only the mother is killed. Her babies scatter. Passing motorists (practitioners of motorism, the religion of mechanized movement) will report the mayhem to us at Humboldt Wildife Care Center… sometimes we need help with traffic from CHP to make the rescue safe, sometimes it means a voyage into a mucky marsh by the side of the highway. Such was the case on a late Saturday afternoon in mid-May.
The mother Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) was crossing US 101 south of Eureka, near King Salmon. She didn’t make it. Her babies, newly hatched, scattered in all directions. A person driving by saw it happen and called our facility. A team was prepared and dispatched to the scene.
The ducklings had scattered around a slough between the highway and the bay at low tide. It was a lot of muck. After an hour of searching – and getting pretty dirty – our intrepid team recovered a dozen healthy tiny wood ducklings.
To provide an environment and the care that protects, supports and teaches any young wild orphan until they’re able to provide for themselves is, to say the least, a specialized endeavor. First the young ducklings must be kept safe and warm, with access to food and water, and not just to drink, but swim in. Precocial birds must encounter the world they will live in immediately; but without a parent that world would kill them. So our heat lamps and small pools and collected duckweed must stand in for everything their mother would’ve given them. Obviously we are not the same, and that’s why no one would ever choose to be an orphan. But here we are.
HWCC/bax staff rehabilitator Alondra Cardena notes the weights of the tiny Wood Ducklings.
These ducklings are doing well. They weighed about 22 grams on admission and now they are close to 200 grams. They’ll be 600 grams by the time we are considering them for release. By then they will have graduated from several types of housing meant to keep them safe and help them thrive and learn and grow. We cannot replace their mother – no one can – but with skill, empathy, and knowledge we can offer them a second chance at their wild and free destiny that the highways of the world are hell bent on taking awa
Each of our patients requires complex consideration and treatment. They need a facility purpose built to provide these things, and a skilled staff to operate. Your support is what makes all of it happen. Please donate to give our wild neighbors in need the second chance they deserve. Thank you for everything!
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!
Thank you for supporting our work! Without you we wouldn’t exist. Please contribute if you can! The wild babies are coming as surely as Spring leads to Summer.
On the second of April, right after we opened, we admitted the first wild orphans of 2025. A student walking to school in Weott found an Opossum who had been hit by a car. In her pouch they found six tiny babies, eyes still closed, who were alive. They took the babies and wrapped them in a sweater and kept them warm. Until the babies could be brought to our clinic in Manila.
They’re doing well now, hydrated and becoming accustomed to a replacement milk. Thanks to this resourceful young person, these six babies have an excellent chance of getting a second chance at wild freedom.
These are the first six of several hundred wild orphans that Humboldt Wildlife Care Center will admit this season. we could really use your support. Without the donations of our human neighbors we would never be able to provide quality care for our wild neighbors. Please help! Thank you!!
I have been working as a wildlife rehabilitator for 26 years. I will tell you briefly why. One day in the late 90s I looked up from the book I was reading – I had been studying the westward expansion of the US, and reading women’s diaries of the overland crossing, the details surrounding the “ill-fated” Donner Party, and of course the genocide of Native Americans that was part and parcel of so-called Manifest Destiny.
I looked up from the book, which was filled with nightmarish suffering, and looked outside – it was 4 am. In the eastern sky the last quarter moon was rising over the Cascades, Venus was just below and behind the mountains the sky was beginning to glow with the coming dawn. Suddenly the dome of sky was a vast expanse, and here I was, in it. In the mix with the Earth, the moon, Venus and the Sun. The mountains jagged in a mountainous perfection and all of the known world before me.
At breakfast later, I was reading the Seattle Weekly – an ad for the PAWS Wildlife Center asked “Want to Help Return and Animal to the Wild?” and I knew in my heart, in my gut as they say, that this ad was for me. I needed the real world, unmediated by books, just as I had seen at 4 am… real, concrete, actionable. And action, not study, is what I needed.
Even then, 1999, the world was in grave danger. The greenhouse effect had supplanted nuclear winter as the thing that was going to get us all in the end in the late 80s. By 1999 we were already calling that phenomenon ‘climate change’.
I had moved to Seattle from New Jersey in 1993. It was the aftermath of the forest wars. As a reader, of course I had caught up with the science and political skirmishes surrounding ancient forests and old-growth logging. Timothy Egan’s book The Good Rain was an excellent introduction to the Pacific Northwest and offered a concise history of the region including the battles to save the forests, and the most famous indicator species of forest health, the Spotted Owl. My reading had walked me right up to that moment at 4 am, and there I stood at the window, dissolved by the real and reassembled in an instant … In an instant the mountains were no longer mountains and the stars no longer stars and then they were, mountains mountains and stars stars again.
While I still had and still have so much to learn, it was then that I graduated into my real work. I needed to help with the ordinary grueling work of rescue. Rescuing what our world was treating as so much “overburden” – the forest and wild community that sits inconveniently above all that valuable mineral wealth, whether is is coal, or gold, or a good location for a billionaire’s golf course.
Like most of us currently topside, I was born into a world that had a doomsday clock ticking. It has been a feature of daily recognition that bad times were coming, if we didn’t change our ways and for over twenty we’ve largely known that it was too late. It was probably the nineties when it last seemed possible that we could have a future watching our great great grandchildren grow on a green Earth from our little corner of the afterlife.
From the vivid protests against the World Trade Organization, November of ’99 to the launch of the destruction of Iraq in March of 2003 the prevailing idea, in America at least, was that the future was going to be a lot worse than it had to be. Avarice had outflanked prudence and care. The world was less profitable saved than burned. Money had spoken.
In the twenty some years since, we’ve lived through hope and dread in a cycle almost as dependable as the tides. But even our hopes, our accomplishments, such as marriage equality, the occasional killer cop who is charged with homicide, and so on, even these in each election since 2008 have been grounded in the inescapable realities of climate disruption and environmental catastrophe that we’d have to deal with – no matter how much reform and transformation we bring to the still pressing injustices of our daily world, the collapse of our world was coming and we could either do it in cooperation, or we could destroy ourselves along with the world.
When Joe Biden won in 2020, it was a relief but not a surprise. By 2020, the only people who still supported that wreck of a human soul, Trump, were the fools and the wicked. Most people are neither. Biden’s administration was a surprise to me. At the start of the primary season, I had said that I’d take any democrat over Biden – Kamala Harris then Elizabeth Warren then anybody but Biden but certainly Biden over Trump.- those were my preferences. In my online world and in my daily life, I met many of my kind. Trump’s handling of COVID and the rise of the Proud Boys and neo-Nazis under Trump, as well as every other single thing about the man, whether politician, celebrity, or real estate conman. I’ve been despising Donald Trump since his first casino was built in Atlantic City in the Anti-Christ fashion, a skyscraper with his name at the top in in thirty foot tall red-letters, as if he were Damien Thorne. As my great-grandmother, my grandmother and mother said to me many times, if you walk like a duck and talk like a duck and … well you just might be the devil on earth.
When Biden won in 2020, the simple relief of Trump not being president was astonishingly restful. COVID was still a problem, but because of our work, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center staff were able to receive the vaccine just a week after his inauguration, We managed in other words, we did the things, wore the masks, tried to stay current on latest developments as scientists, representatives, healthcare providers, teachers, administrators, neighbors all of us all over the world wrangled with the pandemic.
We made it through. Here we are.
I used to say during the worst of the pandemic in America, with lockdown protests and sane people turning into lunatics believing things like the pandemic was a planned attack, that the vaccine was a trap, that masks don’t work, – i said that the pandemic was breaking America, and it did. But I didn’t think it was breaking the whole world. I thought the world was learning that cooperation and shared experience saved lives and made the world a better place. For every relationship strained by a zoom meeting maybe there’s one born that would’ve been otherwise impossible. I came out of the pandemic believing that maybe there was still a chance to navigate the coming turmoil with more grace and less despair, while avoiding the unnecessary turmoil of a descent into fascism.
That we strengthen bonds during turbulent times is as natural as battening a hatch. We secure hitches. We tighten straps. We call our neighbors or our parent across the sea – we grasp onto what endures – door jambs, granite, deeply rooted things, our friendships, our dreams.
When tiktokers outsmarted the cacodemon and made him believe he had a big crowd for a campaign rally by reserving all the tickets in a plot hatched in broad daylight, I was uplifted. His dismay walking back from the nearly empty stadium was a joyful occasion and in that light he looked already defeated, and he was. Had he not been, I would’ve been thrown into dismay – but a crushing one, because it would have meant that I was wrong and that my hope that he was but a dumbass immoral debauched and depraved villain yes, but one who could be defeated was wrong too. But he lost. He lost and in losing, lost even more, debasing himself even further with his ridiculous inability to concede losses.
I did not believe that he was going to win in 2016 and I was wrong. Simply put I didn’t think that poorly of my neighbors.
I did not believe there was a snowball’s chance in hell that he would win in 2024. I had some fairly negative opinions about the MAGA crowd, but I thought their numbers too small – and nobody with a brain or a conscience would vote for him – stopping him seemed like it was everybody’s agreed upon assignment. The tent was huge – it included Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney and Beyoncé. We all know that.
Now here we are, the same unavoidable environmental crisis, which is an existential threat to humanity and whole lot of other lives too, and instead of working together, instead of tightening bonds, instead of investing in our world and opening our hearts to what is real, loving it and saving what we can and looking to find a new way forward that doesn’t kill the road we walk, instead we’re going to be fighting idiotic morons who know neither the value or price of anything who on whim can put a luxury car in orbit around Mars – impractical, vainglorious, puerile and avaricious – arrogant sadists who claim to want a better world and the only way to attain it is by destroying this one, the only world we have.
Now here we are, seven weeks since Donald Trump returned to the White House and the wreckage that surrounds is nearly impossible to catalogue. Tens of thousands of federal employees, from weather scientists, to wildlife biologists, to disease experts and more, just erased, and all of their work too. Purges of departments to rid them of references to accomplishments of people of color and women. We’ve endured cruel and vicious attacks on trans people, gays, lesbians, and more. – Abandonment and betrayal of allies in apparent service to our adversaries. The elimination of critical aid around the world that will result in untold death and suffering. Government programs have been scrubbed of references to to climate science while the head of the EPA recommends reversing the finding from 2009 that fossil fuels are an endangerment. Yesterday it was reported that criminal investigations into organizations because they applied for and were awarded federal grants from the EPA to do climate work were underway. Habitat for Humanity, for example, is one of the organizations named.
It’s a lot to take in.
The chaos and destruction have already caused harm to our work, just by destabilizing day to day life. Bird Ally X does not receive federal funding, thankfully, but many of our colleagues and partners do. The work of everyone who is on the frontlines of conservation and restoration and rehabilitation is being thrown into question.
It’s more than it feels like we can bear, even though we must. We must bear it and also keep our strength to fight back and to prevail. Despair must be managed. And we are all learning to do so, but the biggest problem, – my biggest problem, is that I was barely able to imagine us collectively arresting the environmental collapse that has been speeding toward us for decades. The hope that we might prevail, that we might turn this rig around, that has surfaced and been subsumed to surface again seems likely to be lost forever.
The effort to stop what has to be seen as a hostile takeover of our society must win, but will it eat the only time that we had remaining on the clock? For my part, I will say this. I’m an interventionist. Every rehabilitator is. Every caregiver is. I will continue to intervene until I am dead. Frankly, I hope, after death, to be an intervening phantom. Our patients will need us no matter the state of the world.
For so many people who deeply love the Wild, human civilization has almost completely played the villain’s role in the fight to preserve and conserve Nature. But here we are. Conservationists, caregivers, people who simply want an ocean to play in that won’t make them sick, piscavores and vegans, farmers, fishers, and clerks, we’re all served by a society and a rule of law that provides a means to improvement, that is accountable to us – that is us. A government is not a business, and our world is not a balance sheet. Yes, it’s ironic that in order to save the Wild we now must rescue society, but unsurprising. Since as a species we made the first poisons that would outlast us we’ve known. We are on the hook. We have have to prevail. Civilization is too dangerous of a thing to leave in the hands of billionaires and dictators or left to decay into a river without interference.
I tell our new staff, I tell anyone who wants to listen, that what we are is who we are. If we are refugees trying to reach some of the last inhabitable land on Earth, some of us will still bend over to give aid to the struggling Raccoon, or the broken-winged Robin. If our vessel is approaching the falls and all seems lost, wildlife rehabilitators won’t stop rowing until we simply no longer can.
Your support keeps our facility open no matter what. Please donate if you can. Thank you so much!!!
A good looking gull regains helath and freedomLucinda Adamson weighs Baby raccoons A Northern Fulmar released after a month in care!A fawn release is always special.Who flies like a champ? You do, Pigeon.A Bald Eagle released in Arcata!Ash Shields helps with Eagle exam!Another Awesome Opossum!Common Loon, uncommonly gorgeous!Bufflehead Released!Sara Moran preparing medicine.
A lot happened in 2024. We treated 1,577 patients! We answered thousands of phone calls! We gave hundreds of second chances to our wild neighbors.
And it was with your help, your support, your generosity, that we could do any of it.
Thank you for making our second busiest year of all time a successful year. And please, if you can, support us going in to the future. Who knows what the new year will bring, but with your support, we’ll be ready!