It was on March 10 that we realized that our small world of Humboldt County, and specifically our work at Humboldt Wildlife Care Center, was going to be significantly impacted by the novel coronavirus disease called COVID 19. That day we notified our volunteers, the majority of them students at Humboldt State University, that we would prefer that they not travel out of the area for the upcoming Spring Break, since community spread had already started in California’s urban areas. We were clinging to a quaint idea that the fabled Redwood Curtain might screen out the virus and we could somehow dodge the bullet.
Five days after we warned our dedicated volunteers about community spread in the rest of California, we made the difficult, but necessary decision to suspend our volunteer program. The risk to our volunteers, the risk to the Care Center, and the risk to our community added up to a steep reduction in the staffing of HWCC/bax. Within a couple of days, our local officials released a “Shelter in Place” order that slowed or stopped many activities and businesses deemed “non-essential”. With that order, we also suspended our intern program, leaving only 5 of us to keep our dear (and only!) local facility for injured and orphaned wildlife operating all day, every day.
Now more than a month later and the nature of our days at HWCC/bax seem irrevocably changed. In busy times and in slow, wildlife care providers everywhere lean heavily on volunteers – our tasks are many and our resources are often quite scant. We simply don’t have the ability to hire the workforce we need. Without volunteers who generously give their time and labor, our efforts could not be sustained. Yet here we are, going into Spring wild baby season, and our staffing is at the bare minimum.
Of course, while we anxiously await the time when our volunteers can safely resume their roles at our clinic, we’ve taken other measures to keep our facility and our key staff as safe as we can manage.
Some of these measures were easy for us to implement. As a wildlife hospital, cleanliness and sanitization already play a large part in our daily lives! Still we upped our game. Every touched surface (eg, door handles, broom handles, faucets, markers, pens, keys, eyewear, countertops – the list is long!) is ‘spritzed’ with alcohol (70% or greater) multiple times each day. Our trips to stores, the bank, the post office have been reduced from daily to every three days in order to help limit our exposure to possible infection and also to help essential store employees reduce the risk we pose them as possibly asymptomatic carriers of the virus.
The most important addition to our protocols, which we also instituted at the time that community spread was identified in California (March 10) is the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), specifically procedural masks and exam gloves, in situations we cannot control, such as interacting with members of the public who’ve found an injured wild animal, helping people solve the problem of a denning mother raccoon, running errands and working together with patients when we cannot maintain sufficient distance.
Also, the use of masks helps us with another problem that may be more important than we first thought. After tigers held captive in the Brooklyn Zoo showed symptoms of COVID-19 and tested positive, we now realize that our patients may be at risk of catching this virus from us, their care providers.
Other measures we’ve taken to improve HWCC/bax staff safety have been to identify ourselves clearly when we are out rescuing wild animals in trouble. While the Shelter in Place order has been enforced with a fairly light touch in Humboldt County, we see that the need for tighter controls might become necessary. Being able to be indentified from a distance when in public performing our duties is a critical component of all well-managed responses. Responding to wild animals in distress during a global pandemic is something that we learn to do on the job, of course, since nothing of this magnitude has occurred in any of our lifetimes but the few centenarians who walk among us. Still, as emergency responders during other catastrophic events (toxic spills, forest fires, etc) we do have training and experience working inside of incident command structures, and applying that knowledge to this crisis has been a critical part of our work over the last month.
With safety in mind, we now wear uniform t-shirts that clearly identify us as Care Center staff. We have placards that identify our vehicles so that law enforcement officers, agency representatives and concerned citizens can see immediately who we are and what we are doing. Also, uniforms of this type give us the flexibility to don and doff work gear at work so that we are better able to keep any potential virus contaminated items out of our own homes, protecting our families, friends and pets.
Besides our thin procedural masks, which are something we always have on hand, we’ve been working on handmade masks, following a pattern that is based on some degree of research, which suggests that these are better protection for our staff and colleagues. The pattern we use can be found here – it uses a material very similar to what is found in hospital masks, nonwoven polypropelene. Based on our study of various patterns, we believe that this mask offers the best handmade protection.
We’ve been responding as proactively as we can to this constantly changing situation, and through it all, we’ve also been meeting our mission. Spring is coming. It can’t be stopped. You might as well try to stop the world. Over one half of our annual patient admissions occur in the next four months. Each day we admit patients, as we’ve always done. The pandemic has slowed the impacts of human society on the wild, but still, cars, windows, cats, pollution and more continue to take their toll.
Right now, we’ve admitted close to 200 patients this year, and we were running about 20% above 2019. Since the Shelter in Place order, our admissions are down a little over 10%, which is about 20 patients less than this time last year. It’s not easy to tell if this is because less animals are getting injured by people due to the sudden reduction in human activity, or if injured wild animals are being found less often due to people staying home.
Many of our patients at this time of year are struggling seabirds – Common Murres, Surf Scoters, wintering Loons – who are found on area beaches. Their ailments, usually starvation, are considered to be the direct result of declining ocean health, which is due to society’s abuse – agricultural run-off, over-fishing, plastics pollution, acidification, and of course climate chaos. But these are chronic problems decades in the making, and won’t be undone by many of us working from home, and not going to school for a month. So we are presuming that seabirds, at least, are still suffering, but being found less. To address this we have formed one team, prepared with PPE, and a map of the places we most frequently find beached, struggling seabirds, and send them out a few times each week to survey the “hotpsots” for injured wild animals.
Soon after launching this team, they were able to rescue an Aleutian Cackling Goose from the beach in Samoa who was struggling with an injured hip, rolled by the surf, stranded and starving. The goose is improving now, gaining weight while recovering in our waterfowl aviary.
Having a crew in the field regularly is something we’ve been working toward over a period of years. We hope to make this a permament feature, at least some of the hours of the day, as we move forward. The region for which we are responsible is enormous – a response team in the field makes it just a little bit smaller, but it’s a little bit that makes a big difference!
While we strive to improve, there is no question that the economic fallout of this virus is hurting us too. We began 2020 with an ambitious plan to raise funds (see fundraiser here!) to make critical improvements to our patient housing and facility.
Well, our big dreams fundraiser is not going so well, but we have managed to complete the remodel of our “duckling pond”, where we house young waterfowl who still need heat support until they are old enough for our waterfowl aviary! Your support getting this done is greatly appreciated! Thank you!
WILD BABY SEASON!!!
On April 12, Easter Sunday, a dog attacked and killed a mother Opossum (Didelphis virginiana) – five of her tiny babies – each less than 25 grams – survived and were admitted that same day. We’ve already successfully convinced a mother Raccoon to move her den out of a residential crawl space. Spring is here. It’s likely that in 6 weeks we’ll have a hundred young wild animals in our care.
Real Concern
The challenges we routinely face at HWCC/bax are being exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. All of us are impacted, and we all are caught in a sea of uncertainty. It’s been a hundred years since people have dealt with something of this magnitude and our systems seem shaky, fragile, and prone to fail. Our ability to stay open, in any Summer is directly related to the flow of resources that comes form our community of supporters near and far. You are the ones who are still reading this long update! You care about the wild! You love Mother Earth and all her beings. Your support keeps us in action.
The gravity of the situation that the world faces can’t be overstated. It’s that gravity that makes me, as the primary person who asks for support, nervous. The path we walk in the best of times is precarious, and in these times, I worry daily that what we’ve worked to achieve at HWCC/bax over the last nine years, since I’ve been here, but also the legacy of care for wildlife that HWCC began to establish in 1979, is in real jeopardy. The cushion for us to fall back on is about as thin as a dollar bill. With our volunteers safer at home, and our resources on the wane, we are entering into a busy season with nothing in place but our training, our experience and our commitment to excellent care for our wild neighbors.
On social media, just a couple of days ago, as people were carrying weapons at the state capitol of Michigan in protest of quarantine measures, a friend posted a photograph of a lovely stream in her neighborhood, back East. Another person commented, “Nature is healing, but I feel it is only an escape from reality.” One thing I know – nature is the source of everything, it is reality. Our work is small – one small Thrush, one small Opossum, one small care provider at a time – but we strive on behalf of beautiful Mother Earth and all of our wild kith and kin. We work for the real, and we put our whole selves in … it’s really all that we have to invest, anyway.
If you are able, in these difficult days, to help us out, to support us through this trial, it will mean a very lot to us. It may mean everything.
Good luck to you, good luck to us all, stay safe, stay home if you can, and thank you for your enduring love of all that is wild and free.
