It’s not the first time this has happened – a trailer-load of hay from Ashland or Yreka or somewhere else hours away from Humboldt Wildlife Care Center is delivered to a local ranch, only to discover nestling Barn Owls (Tyto alba) hidden with the bales. It’s happened a few times over the decade, in fact. So it wasn’t shocking when that call came in the middle of July – a load of hay just delivered in Eureka that had come down from Siskiyou County brought along the babies of a Barn Owl nest too. We admitted six nestlings that day, dehydrated, hungry and very unhappy.
As nestlings go, these six were pretty far along in their development. Three of them fledged within the first week of care and were moved to an outdoor aviary. Within two weeks, all six owls were flying. Each day each owl was getting at least one “medium” sized rat. (that’s a lot of rats – more on how we pay for it all later).
RIght now, we are helping them prepare for release by learning to hunt. The lessons tend to come pretty easily for them. You could say that they’re naturals. As soon as they demonstrate that they can support themselves, we know the time for their return the Wild is at hand.
Fledgling Barn Owl getting a routine examination while in care at HWCC.
Clinic staff administer fluid therapy on a dehydrated Barn owl nestling.
A young owl’s wing with new feathers that have not yet flown.
They sure fly now, and soon in total freedom.
These six Barn Owls are getting a second chance at wild freedom. They came so close to being among the many untallied victims of a human world that kills randomly and without recognition simply by operating as it was inended – We grow the hay, we store it, we ship it – none of it meant to harm owls, and none of it meant to prevent harm either. It’s in this world that we meet our mission. And we can only do it with your help. We’ve already spent over a thousand dollars on food for these beautiful and innocent wild lives. That’s only example of the real difference your support makes. Your support pays for the heating pads, the fluids, the aviary, the phone and the dedicated and skilled staff it takes to make the whole thing fly. Thank you!!
REMINDER! This is our last year at our curent location. YOur help is needed making this challenging move. Read more about it here and again, your support will help us a lot. It’s getting urgent!
Since we realized that we needed to relocate Humboldt Wildlife Care Center from its current location in Bayside to somewhere suitable and sustainable back in March of 2021, with less than two years to accomplish to the move, there has been a background of stress about our future that has added a layer of urgency to each day of operation – the clock is ticking!
After months of searching and considering multiple scenarios, at last, we’ve settled on a property that is available and accessible and meets most of the criteria we’d established. While the asking price is much more than we have, it’s also the most affordable we’ve been able to find. We’ve come to an agreement with the property owner for the lot, which, happily is nearly 6 times larger than our current leased quarter-acre. With this major step achieved, now we enter the next big challenge: secure the funds!
Sneak peek of future site of HWCC, once we secure the funding!
We don’t have much time now. We need to be on our new site and operating by the first of the new year, as well as have cleared our old site from our soon-to-be-former landlord’s land. This is a very tall order. We will not be successful without the help from our community, especially financially. Still, that we’ve even found a piece of property that we can use is very relieving – it hadn’t been looking too good for too many months!
The new location is in Manila, which has many advantages for our work. I think we will be well-placed to continue and expand our reach in our region. As the Crow flies, we’re just moving across the bay.
Another view of this future diamond in the current rough!
What a year it’s been! As the director of the Care Center, I don’t think we’ve faced a more challenging time – between my health problems (which thankfully are no problem at all now!), the ongoing pandemic, the record number of patients we’ve admitted over the last two years and the challenges of of this relocation, we are in a swirl of difficulties! Yet guiding us, as always, we have our mission – to serve our region’s wild neighbors in need, to serve the field of widlife rehabilitation with workshops, to educate new rehabilitators, and to help our communities develop the resources and perspectives needed to peacefully co-exist with the Wild, and end our society’s war on Nature. Our mission makes our challenges seem quite manageable indeed! And with your support, which has kept has going for over 40 years, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center will move into a new era of stability and growth.
If we had $500,000 dollars, we could purchase the property and fund the costs of rebuilding of our facility. That’s a lot to raise in such a short period. Realistically, we need to plan on having less resources available – we’ll need to creative and committed. Fortunately, we are well versed in accomplishing a lot with very little. I don’t know how we will do it, but I do know that we will.
Thank you for being here always. You’ve made quality care for our wild neighbors possible. If you’d like to support our work, our land purchase, or the costs of rebuilding, and invest in the continued care available for our wild neighbors, please DONATE! Every gift helps.
You can help return an orphaned or injured wild animal to the wild! You can help keep wild families together! You can help keep our facility functional and clean! Volunteers are needed for all tasks. After putting our volunteer program on hold in March of 2020, we’ve been slowly rebuilding it, adding volunteers to our shifts as the pandemic has allowed, and now we are ready to add more.
Volunteers are a crucial element in the field of wildlife rehabilitation. All wildlife rehab facilitities operate on shoestring budgets and without the necessary help from volunteers, we’d never last. The pandemic has been brutal on staff and we are very happy to rebuild our core team of volunteers.
The life of a volunteer: One day you’re helping with an opossum, the next day a Bald Eagle.
Some of the tasks that volunteers help with:
1. Cleaning: First and foremost, from the newest, most inexperienced volunteer to the director of our facility, a major task for all of us is cleaning. Laundry, dishes, sweeping, mopping, sanitizing – these are mission critical in a hospital setting and your experience in your own life will serve here! If you’re new to this kind of maintenance, we can help you and you dont have to get a job in the food service industry to learn it (as many of us did, like me!). We also have to clean the patient housing, which means that you will be trained in how to work around a frightened wild animal, without making the stress much worse.
2. Feeding: Patient food must be prepared at least twice a day. Want to learn what it takes to emulate a diet that a wild diet in the setting of temporary captive care? It’s a great skill to have and it won’t be long before you’lll understand the intricacies, and the principles that support them, of feeding a wild animal a nutritional diet that is familiar and therefore stress reductive.
3. Examinations: Helping staff perform routine examinations of our patients. In order to perform an assessment of the condition of our patients, routine exams are given. Volunteers learn valuable handling skills that protect the caregiver and the patient from harm. Instructions, safety protocols, and personal protective equipment are provided as needed.
4. Transportation: If you can drive from Oregon to Laytonville and sometimes beyond, then you can help us with transportation for patients. The region we serve is huge and we have to travel as many 3 hours away to pick up orphaned and injured wild neighbors. Simply driving all day can be a very big help to an animal who desperately needs a second chance.
5. Rescue: Many times people report an animal in trouble, but they are unable to do anything about it. They call us. We go out on missions to rescue wild animals every day. Even as a new volunteer you can still participate simply by driving. Capturing wild animals in need is a skill, but you will be provided with the training and the safety equipment to be a hero!
6. Releases: Returning an animal to their birthright of wild freedom is a joy beyond compare. Transporting animals to their release site and helping to ensure their safe return to the life that they were born to is one of the regular bits of supreme awesome-osity that can be yours simply by being here helping!
7. Answering the phone: Helping people resolve conflicts with wild animals is an important part of our daily work. Keeping wild families together – in other words preventing wild babies from becoming orphans is a serious task, can be difficult, and largely happens on the phone in conversation with someone who may be at their wit’s end. Learn to advocate for wild animals in an effective manner by answering the phone in our clinic. It can be challenging, but that just makes our successes sweeter!
8. Humane Solutions! Sometimes keeping wild families together requires an intervention. In order to stop a trapper or some other cruel plan to get rid of an unwated wild animal, we go to the scene and work with the people to keep the wild family safe while conving them that it would be ebst if they moved on. This is delicate work that can also take us on an adventure through people’s crawlspaces and attics. Not for everyone, but if it’s for you, you’ll learn valuable skills in humanely solving people’s conflicts with a wild animal.
9. Ambassador: You can be a voice for the rights of Mother Earth and the Wild. Education and outreach are very important parts of our mission. Do you enjoy speaking in public? Do you have a passion for environmental education? Do you want to make people act right toward wildlife? We may be the droids you’re looking for!
Releasing an animal who was going to die without our care is one the greatest joys known to humanity.
These are some of the most common and important ways that we rely on volunteers to meet the challenges of our mission. Just about every wildlife rehabilitator working today began as a volunteer, and many still are volunteers. Many wildlife rehabilitators with their own facilities at their own houses are still volunteers! This is not a well-paid field, unless you factor in the job satisfaction, and in that sense, it’s unparalleled.
But satisfaction isn’t all that you’ll get out of helping us help our wild neighbors. You will get critical training that can be used here or in a larger context. As a member of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network HWCC/bax is your local path toward being qualified to help care for impacted wildlife if there is ever a catastrophic oil spill locally or across the state. Believe me, the only way to make these kinds of disasters less painful is being able to help repair and restore what was broken. Your desire to help begins here!
So if you want to help us help wildlife in a direct hands-on manner, let us know! CLICK HERE TO APPLY
And if your dance card or your plate is already full, you can always help us meet our mission with your generous support. Donations make our world go ’round. Without your financial help, our doors would close forever. PLEASE DONATE HERE
Thank you for your love of the Wild. Love is the most important ingredient in the conservation and protection of our natural home and our wild kin!
One day last year our staff went out on a call about a sick deer. The people who called watched as we put the carrier with the deer into a small hatchback and they hatched a plan of their own. This Spring, when they purchased a new vehicle, they called to see if we could use their old car, a 1996 Volvo Wagon! They were very kind and wanted to be sure we could use the vehicle. We sure can!
The region we serve, Northern Menocino to Oregon, the Pacific Ocean to I-5, is over 20,000 square miles! (nearly twice the size of New Jersey, the state I was born in!) We put on a lot of miles and a reliable rig that is also safe is something we’ve wanted to add to our resources for years. And now we have one!
Now if you see a plain tan Volvo on the road, you never know, we just might be transporting a wild neighbor, who knows, a Northern Alligator Lizard or a Bald Eagle!
Or we might just be on our way to the North Coast Co-op, again, for more supplies for our ever increasing Spring and Summer caseload.
So to Fredyne and Gerald, who so generously passed their ride into our service, thank you!
And you know, not every donation is a car… without many small donations, we wouldnt be able to put gas in the car, or food in our patients’ bellies. If you can, please donate here. Thank you!!
Not just an indignity! For a warm-blooded body the size of a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) to spend the night stuck in can with inches of water on the bottom is life-threatening! Fortunately the landowners found the owl in the morning and got the soggy, angry, owl to our facility in Bayside.
Minor abrasions afflicted the undersides of both of their wings and all over, their feathers were soaked and very ruffled. The owl was also fairly dehydrated. Warmth and fluids helped both problems immensely and soon the owl was much less soggy, but no less angry.
After spending some time in our large aviary, making sure that flight and agility were unimpaired, we took the handsome bird back to McKinleyville and the area where no doubt there are eggs or owlets glad to have both parents back on the case!
After leaving the box, the Great Horned Owl wasted no time putting distance between themself and us.
It’s our community’s support that keeps our doors open, our freezer full of rats, and an aviary suitable for a bird as large and magnificent as a Great Horned Owl. Thank you for making our work possible. If you want to help please donate!
For this post, I’d like to take a more personal approach so that we can acknowledge, thank and just generally celebrate the incredible staff of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center/bax. So while our staff is definitely a part of the neighborhood – everyday people, you might say, they are anything but ordinary people. Our staff are everyday heroes.
Please enjoy while enjoying photos of the incredible staff of HWCC/bax
Many of you may already know that I was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in the middle of May, right at the start of our busy wild baby season. Every year we know that our lives will turn hectic and overworked in the middle of Spring when the season fully arrives in our area. But this year my health really complicated matters. On reduced staffing for over a year, and with our volunteer program only restarted at the end of April after 13 months in suspension, all due to COVID-19, my diagnosis couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Already overworked and underpaid, our staff would be even more burdened by my treatment and hospitalization, which would keep me out of the clinic.
If there ever was an ocassion to rise to, this was it and did they ever rise. The last patient I rescued before my treatment began was a baby Barn Owl, case #21-438, stranded alone on the Hammond Bridge over the Mad River. Since then, our staff has cared for nearly one thousand more patients and prevented harm from coming to hundreds of wild babies through our humane solutions program, which focuses on peaceful co-existence with our wild neighbors, as well as the important work of keeping wild families together.
In keeping with a ten-year trend, 2021 is shaping up to be our busiest year in the 42-year history of HWCC, with a 3% increase over last year’s record setting caseload to date.
Each year our work becomes more vital to our region’s injured and orphaned wild neighbors, and each year our young staff grows in skills and experience. My pride and pleasure in their accomplishments is overwhelming, especially as I’m able to gradually return to a full time schedule and I see what an excellent crew has been forged by their successful navigation of another Spring and Summer, – a time filled with the intense, difficult and emotionally challenging work of wildlife rehabilitation.
It was ten years ago that I became the director of HWCC, when Bird Ally X took on the Care Center with the goal of making it into a top notch wildlife care facility that also trained the wildlife rehabilitators of the future. Watching our staff in action from my sick bed and through my radiation and chemotherapy and through my recovery has been one of the most profound things I’ve ever seen.
The daily phone calls with staff I had while I was in the hospital in June and July were a joy to participate in, as we discussed the caseload. I dont know if they’ll ever know how critical their excellent handling of the season was to my recovery. By competently taking care of business, our staff not only met our mission in difficult times but, on a personal note, they’ve made my recovery possible, sustaining our life-saving work while I could only get on with the business of healing.
Please enjoy these photographs of our dedicated staff in action and join me in thanking them each for their service to our community, a community that is both human and wild.
Courtney Hernandez, an awesome intern, who just recently left us to return to SoCal where her skills she learned at HWCC will hopefully soon be making the lives of wild animals near Big Bear and Riverside better! Courtney was an integral part of our staff for the last four Summers while she completed her degree!
Staff rehabilitators Nora Chatmon (l) and Brooke Brown (r) prepare for a routine examination of these two Barn Owl babies who are nearing readiness for release!
Wildlife rehabilitator, bird ally x board member and full time HSU student, Nora Chatmon puts some warm milk replacer in the belly of this orphaned Raccoon.
Each week all the raccoons in care are given an exam and weight check to make sure everything is going acording to plan! Brooke Brown and staff rehabilator Desiree Vang (facing away) make short work of handling thise fiercely smart little mammals.
New intern Ceshawny Crosby assists with a Rock Pigeon examination. Ceshawny may be new, but she’s rather instantly become a critical member of our crew. She made our Summer better by a mile.
Now and again, after recovering from surgery, I was able to come in and help. Not nearly as much as I would’ve liked!
Our newest staff member, Jen Martin, joined our crew after an internship just in time to cover big gsps in the schedule left by my absence.
Katharine Major, an intern veteran of 4 seasons delicately handles an orphan Gray Fox during a weekly exam. Katharine has filled many roles at HWCC, and we’re lucky to have her on board./
Intern Val Rodriguez (l) and acting Rehabiltation Manager Lucinda Adamson express the happiness that can only come from successfully reuniting a juvenile Peregrine Falcon with their family!
Courtney holds a Sharp-shinned Hawk for an examination.
Desiree and Lucinda wrangle a juvenile male (so small!) Bald Eagle.
Lucinda observes our Barn Swallow patients in the Songbird Aviary. This year we’ve treated more Barn Swallow chicks than any other year previously.
The resumption of our volunteer program means the resumption of training! Leading new and old staff in a discussion of the ethical practice of our work is one of my favorite tasks – one I’m glad I was still able to perform!
One last shot of Brooke Brown, here examing a Common Murre chick with another of our terrific interns Bekah Kline. Brooke is leaving HWCC after nearly two years on staff and one year as an intern. In their time with us, Brooke took on our Humane Solutions program and nearly single handedly kept dozens of baby Raccoons safely with their mothers, as well as successfully resolving dozens more human/wildlfie conflicts so that no one suffered or was hurt.We’re going to miss Brooke more than we can say and wish them great happiness in all their future adventures.
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Thank you, too!! Your donations at a time when I was unable to ask for them as often as I should made a huge difference. Keeping a wildlife care center afloat is a problem that “throwing money at” really does help! Thank you! And if you’d like to express your gratitude for our excellent staff with a donation today,just click here!
On April 4th, Humbodlt Wildlife Care Center admitted a Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) who’d been found with an injured wing struggling on a gravel bar of the Klamath River, not far from Happy Camp, deep in the mountains of Northern California.
We suspected a fracture in one of the huge raptor’s wrists, – a fracture of a carpal bone. After making sure the Eagle was stable we arranged for transport to BAX co-founder and co-director, and excellent avian orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Shannon Riggs, DVM, who is Director of Animal Services at Pacific Wildlife Care in Morro Bay.
For the story of this wild neighbor’s care and eventual return to home on the Klamath River, check out this video!
Your support is what makes our work possible. It really is that basic. Thank you for keeping our doors open and our lights on.
22 years ago, June 22, 1999, I attended my first volunteer shift at the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) Wildlife Center, just north of Seattle. A couple of weeks prior, at a party in the University District in Seattle, I met a woman who was dating a friend of mine. Jenny Schlieps is her name. We were in the smoking area. I could tell immediately she was a badass, with her army shirt sleeves rolled up tight and an expression that let me know that if she thought you were a fool she might knock you down the stairs. So I struck up a conversation with her. I asked her what she did for work, and she told me she was a wildlife rehabilitator at PAWS.
Three months earlier, I had been watchng the coverage on the Northwest Cable News Network of the wreck of the New Carissa, grounded on the beach in Coos Bay, Oregon. The ship had run aground and the hull was breached and the bunker fuel, one of the lowest grade products of petroleum, had covered the beach. The situation was bad, and I was riveted to the coverage for days. On one of the segments, the network interviewed a man who was riding around on an ATV searching for a small threatened shore bird, the Western Snowy Plover who might be impacted by the toxic spill. I was astonished and thrilled that such an effort was being made. The man’s name was flashed on the screen, Curt Clumpner, and it said he was a wildlife rehabilitator. I turned to my then-partner and said, “did your guidance counseler ever tell you about this profession, mine sure didn’t.” I was 36 years old at the time.
Over the next several weeks I kept looking at an ad in the Opportunities section of the local weekly – “Help return an animal to the wild! Volunteers needed at the PAWS Wildlife Center.” It was intriguing and it had gotten under my skin. So when Jenny told me she was a wildlife rehabilitator at PAWS, I immediately told her that I’d been strongly considering volunteering there. I didn’t tell her that I’d been craving something meaningful and non-bookish for a while, that I was tired of encountering the world through reading and other abstract pursuits. I had been struggling to make it as a short fiction writer – it had been my goal for years. But also, I was hungry for something real, tangible, mineral and concrete, although I couldn’t say what it was. She asked for my address so she could mail me a volunteer application and then we went our separate ways.
Three days later, an application was in my mailbox. I filled it out and put it back in the mailbx with the red flag up. If Jenny could work fast, so could I, I thought.
Bird Ally X co-directors: Marie Travers, January Bill, Shannon Riggs DVM, Monte Merrick, Laura Corsiglia, Vann Masvidal (not pictured)
I was called in for an interview, a short little conversation – I picked a four hour weekly shift – Tuesday 1-5 – and then I committed to come to that orientation on the 22nd, which was coming up soon.
At my orientation I felt as if I’d been there before – things clicked. I went every Tuesday. Within 10 months I was hired for one of the Summer seasonal positions. As a ‘seasonal’ I worked with Peggy Faranda, Corrie Hines, and others. The permanent staff, Jenny, Kathleen Foley, Jen Szucs, John Huckabee, Jennifer Convy, Laurie Johnson, Lauren Glickman and more, quickly became friends. My first Summer there as an employee I couldn’t believe I got paid for taking care of baby Squirrels, Opossums, Raccoons, and songbirds more numerous and diverse than I had ever realized.
It’s a remarkable thing to fall into something new that feels like has always been yours. But that was exactly what happened. My first day as a volunteer I met a guy, Ken Brewer, who was building a songbird aviary. It turned out that Ken had worked on the New Carissa spill. He told me it had been a blast and described a lot of the aspects of the work in detail. I wanted to know more. I asked him how to get a job doing what he does. He said, “everybody wants my job, but there are only like 20 of us in the world, so not much of a chance.”
Well, here we are now, 22 years later. I ended up working with Ken on spills around the continent, from the Bering Sea to the Kalamazoo River. I’ve been part of the care of tens of thousands of injured, orphaned, and oil impacted wild animals. Now, I’m the director of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, a part of Bird Ally X, a collective of wildlife caregivers of which I’m a co-founder, along with Laura Corsiglia, Shannon Riggs DVM, January Bill, Marie Travers and Vann Masvidal. And now, after nearly ten years at HWCC, I’ve had the unbelievable privilege of training a whole new generation of wildlife rehabilitators, several of whom now make up HWCC’s intensely talented and dedicated staff: Lucinda Adamson, Brooke Brown, Desiree Vang, Nora Chatmon, Jen Martin. Over 60 interns, mostly brilliant young women, have passed though our program.
I had wanted to have a big party this year – something I’ve looked forward to for a long time, my 22nd anniversary on the 22nd of June (it was the same with my birthday, turning 11 on the 11th back in 1973 had been a fantastic thrill!!) but that is not what fate had in store for me. Instead, for the first Summer since my first Summer, I’m not at work. I’m writing this in a hospital bed, being treated for cancer – not immediately life threatening, but pretty serious all the same.
Hopefully today, but if not then soon, I’ll be transferred to another facility in San Francisco for reconstructive surgery. When that is over, I come home for radiation treatment and very likely chemotherapy too.
But no matter. Even if this disease kills me, I’ve had the incredible privilege of helping so many wild animals, either by caring for them until they can be released, or ending their suffering and getting them out of the horrible jam of having thier lives be completely over, yet still being alive.
I am so thankful for all of the people who I’ve worked with over the last 22 years: mentors, colleagues, friends. This has been a crazy ride and if I get another 22 years to work I’ll take them. When I’m 80 and I’ve been at this 44 years, please can we have a days long rager to celebrate my 44th on the 22nd?
Thanks to our community for voting for HWCC/bax to be a recipient of the North Coast Co-op‘s awesome Seeds for Change program. Every month a local non-profit organization working in our community is selected to receive the rounded-up donations of shoppers. It’s a terrific program that generates much needed resources for local organizations that are often underfunded and overworked – just like Humboldt Wildlife Care Center! And this month it’s our turn. Thank you!
All you have to do to support us is round up your purchase to the nearest dollar when shopping at the Co-op and that will go directly to us, which means directly to our wild patients – and at this time of year, that means orphans by the carload!!
15 of this year’s baby Opossums getting their regular checkup today.
Already this year we have 32 Opossum babies in care. Opossums, as you may know, are North America’s only marsupial! For years considered to have been introduced by ‘settlers’ in the American West, more recent science has demonstrated that Opossums expanded their range north into California from Mexico on their own steam! The name Opossum is derived from the Algonquin word “apasum”, which is said to mean “white animal”. Opossum babies are most commonly orphaned through one of two tragedies: their mom is hit by a car and they survive in her pouch, or a dog attacks a mom and kills her, leaving her babies in her pouch. With litter sizes routinely between 8 and 12 babies, it’s very easy for our Opo (our shorthand name) caseload to climb.
Caring for our regions orphaned and injured wild animals is a privilege, but it isnt cheap! The support we’ll receive from shoppers rounding up in the month of May will help us immensely as our caseload increases to epic proportions this baby season!
And if you dont shop at the Co-op, you can still support our work by donating directly to help injured and orphaned wild neighbors in need!
