Bird Ally X: New Wild Review: Recent Episodes
Monte Merrick
Our latest episode of our podcast in which our host recounts two epic releases, and how they demonstrate release as last item of care for our patients.
Your support makes our work possible. Every year we treat and release hundeds of wild animals thank to your generosity.
DONATE
Our latest podcast! In which the ways in which being a modern human who provides care for wild animals is nearly as deranged as a robot being wild.
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.
DONATE
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!!!
DONATE
In the first podcast of 2025, we look at the essay by Loren Eiseley, “The Star Thrower”, first published in his book The Unexpected Universe (1969). This essay has been paraphrased in numerous ways over the years, telling a simple story of a man encountering another person throwing Sea Stars into the ocean after they’d been heaved onto a beach by a storm. The man usually says something to the effect of “but there are so many, your efforts won’t matter.” No matter how the essay is paraphrased, it ends with the thrower telling the man that “it mattered to this one!”
While many find the little story thus paraphrased useful, the essay is so much more than that – in fact the phrase “it mattered to this one” isn’t even in the orirginal text. Rather the essay is about the natural and proper work of beating back against the odds and loving the world. Eiseley writes of coming to realize that compassion, which in his time was considered anti-science, is as much a part of human nature as the fierce competitive aspect of living in the actual world which has been the presumption since Darwin. It’s a magnificent and deeply reasoned piece of writing. You can listen to it here, in the latest edition of New Wild Review.
As always, thank you for your support! Your donations are what make our work possible. Thank you!
DONATE
On the day I met Laura Corsiglia, I knew. Who else would I ever be able to talk with about wildlife and reality and necessity the way we could. Here’s a bit of what I mean
Want to help us meet the incredible challenges of our mission. Donate today!
Our latest episode of New Wild Review with guest Lucinda Adamson, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center’s Assistant Rehabilitation Manager.
Our latest podcast, at last – an update on Summer, a big thank you to our supporters fro helping us out in our time of need, an avian botulism outbreak in the central valley, and a warming ocean spells disaster for us all…. stream or down load New Wild Reveiw, vol 4 episode 1!
Want to help us rebuild our facility and continue our pursuit of excellence in wildlife care?
Donate Today
Some links related to information in the podcast:
local coverage of leptospirosis outbreak in California Sea Lions
https://krcrtv.com/north-coast-news/eureka-local-news/leptospirosis-cases-rise-among-california-sea-lions
the wamring seas
https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/marine-heat-wave-18283742.php
more sick sea lions
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/sick-sea-lions-18357033.php
Oregon Dpet of Fish and Wildlife asks public to ignore suffering Common Murre chicks
https://www.dfw.state.or.us/news/2023/08_Aug/081623.asp
Avian Botulism outbreak in Tulare Lake
https://wildlife.ca.gov/News/Archive/efforts-intensify-to-assist-avian-botulism-affected-birds-at-tulare-lake#gsc.tab=0
This podcast is the recording of a conversation over the internet (please forgive the occasional audio glitch!) with Veronica Bowers the founder and executive director of Native Songbird Care and Conservation in Sebastapol, California. Veronica is a leader in rehabilitative songbird care, a powerful advocate for songbird conservation and protection and a standard setter for excellence in wildlife rehabilitation. It was a great pleasure to sit down and talk with her about achieving excellence, maintaining high standards over time, mentoring those who are new to the field of wildlife rehabilitation and keeping oneself healthy and sane despite the stress, sorrow and trauma that are an inescapable part of this work. Pour yourself a mug of chamomile and settle in for a long chat with Veronica Bowers!
Our latest podcast, in which we discuss treating individuals of a controversial species.
It's been a long time since we've had an new episode of our podcast, for a variety of reasons! Tune in to hear what they are, and join us as we move from this very challenging year to embark on our most challenging year ever!!! The year of our big move! And as always, thank you for your love of the Wild and your support of our wildlife saving work!!!
Board of directors member and HWCC rehabilitator, Nora Chatmon (r) talks about human/wildlife conflict as Assistant Rehabilitation Manager, Lucinda Adamson (l) listens.
For the latest episode of New Wild Review, four-fifths of Humboldt Wildlife Care Center's clinic staff got together in February to talk about our Humane Solutions program - a backstage unfiltered eavesdrop as we talk about our work, our frustrations and some of the misconceptions about our wild neighbors that work against peaceful co-existence...
Rehabilitator and Humane Solutions consultant Brooke Brown.
Nora Chatmon, Lucinda Adamson, Monte Merrick and Brooke Brown discuss our Humane Solutions program, in a backstage way...
The discussion took off, lasting much longer than expected. In this epsiode, part one of our staff roundtable discussion, featuring Lucinda Adamson, Nora Chatmon, and Brooke Brown, we cover many of the frustrations - next episode the meaning, the awe and the victories - coming soon, the second half, in S2E3... We hope you enjoy this discussion and remember! - our successful work keeping wild families together comes from your support! Thank you!
2021 and hopefully new hope are here! For the first podcast of the new season, here's New Wild Review, vol 2 ep 1; - in which first we look at post release studies, and the limitations our obligations as caregivers place on invasive practices. Then we turn our attention to protecting wild families by protecting wild mothers - in this case skunks looking for mates and dens during the winter. Hope you find it informative and useful!
Thank you for helping us get through a difficult year!!! DONATE today to help us rescue injured and orphaned wild neighbors.
Times are hard. Here are some poems about the Wild. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Dismantle whiteness.
In our latest episode of New Wild Review we look at the sudden changes the global pandemic caused by the outbreak of coronavirus disease - 19. As states, counties and municipalities move to slow the spread of the virus, through shelter in place orders and social distancing, essential services, including wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, continue. How does the pandemic effect our work? How will the pandemic effect wildlife? We don't know. But we can ponder it while we work.If you're at a facility that is open and admitting patients, check out this World Health Organization document on preparing your workplace to keep yourself and co-workers safe.
In our fourth episode, I read an essay, Letting Nature Take Its Course, which was first published on this website in 2016 and again in the beautiful magazine, Wild Hope in 2019. Also included in this episode is a reading of the poem, Deer Skull.
As always, thank you for supporting our work. I hope you enjoy this episode.
A significant amount of the music in this episode was cmpossed and performed by Erica McCool. more of her incredible music can be found here: https://pezhed1.bandcamp.com/
For our third episode, I sat down with BAX co-founder and co-director Dr. Shannon Riggs, to talk about her career providing medical care for injured and orphaned wild animals, the past, present and future of wildlife rehabilitation, and the never ending need for financial support.
We also discover a shared opinion on the topic of Rage Against the Machine. Hope you enjoy the episode!
Hi Friends and Lovers of the Wild,
Back in January, I posted a story on our facebook page concerning a study of the Common Murre (Uria aalge) die off that occured in the Eastern Pacific Ocean the the Fall/Winter/Spring of 2015/2016. It's a sad story about the deaths of a million of these remarkable seabirds.
Immediately after posting the story I got a message from a friend and fellow animal rescuer in the Los Angeles area:
"It all seems so heartbreakingly pointless doesn’t it? We’re busting our asses saving one animal at a time and the whole f*g planet is on the brink of extinction. If we don’t blow ourselves up in another war first."
I felt that her despair was real and very familiar. So I wanted to address it without relying on platitudes... It became the instigator of our second podcast for our newy launched Bird Ally X: New Wild Review.
It's a 29 minute "meditation" on our current world and the inevitable nature of despair. No answers are offered, but I hope that those of you in this field who feel hopeless at times are at least offered a branch to cling to...
As always, if you like our content and appreciate our work, please support us.
Thank you for your love of the Wild, and your support of Bird Ally X,Monte Merrick
DONATE
This podcast was written and produced by Monte Merrick. The music used in this podcast is from Dreaming Dead Sea (Uria aalge)
Volume 1, Episode 1 Natural history, daily work, and frequent sightings:
Our first episode of our new podcast! In this premiere episode, we're sharing BAX co-founder Monte Merrick's talk on the importance of understanding the lives of wild animals in order to provide quality care for injured wildlife in care. This is adapted from a talk MM gave at an oil spill conference in 2007.
Earlier this Spring, three very young Allen’s Chipmunks (Tamias senex) were found inside a truck that was being serviced in Oakland, about 300 miles south in the Bay Area. The truck had been in Humboldt County last so when the youngsters were taken to our colleagues at Wildcare in Marin County, they contacted us to see if we could raise them here, closer to their origin. For the next several days Wildcare staff provided 'round-the-clock care for the three babies who still had their eyes closed.
There are thirteen species of chipmunks in our state - Allen’s Chipmunks (also know as the Shadow chipmunk!) are found throughout the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Cascades, but only in our region, between the Klamath and Eel Rivers, do they live along the coast. They needed to come home. Arrangements for travel were easily made and soon they were back in Humboldt County.
Soon after arrival at HWCC, their eyes began to open.
Over the course of five weeks, HWCC/bax staff and volunteers took care of these three little members of squirrel family. As they aged, gradually they were weaned from a milk replacer onto a natural diet. At first they required several feedings throughout the day, with staff trekking back to clinic long past dark to do late night feedings, and arriving earlier than usual to feed them close to dawn. Everyday we make formulas for our patients to replace their mother's milk.
Once a chipmunk knows where the food is, they eat very well.
http://birdallyx.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Chipmunks-April-may-2018-2-of-2.m4v
A unguarded moment.
Besides their nutritional needs and other aspects of their health care, we also had to provide an environment where they could learn to live on their own, find the food they would need, so they could succeed in the world their parents had planned for them - a world where they could meet their own kind, and have a second chance to live their birthright, wild and free.
Once their eyes opened, we began to offer the young forest dwellers remnants of home and an expanded menu.
While out of their housing to be fed, our patients are provided with any treatments they need. Daily weight checks at this time help us track their progress and health.
Your support keeps our doors open and our clinic functioning. Without you, our wild neighbors would have nothing in thier times of distress. Thank you! Please donate what you can.
Not yet fully weaned, they are given even more room, more comforts of home, and more diet options.
For their last week in care, the young chipmunks were fairly independent. We'd moved them to outdoor housing when they were weaned where they were provided extensive privacy and natural foods such as berries, mushrooms, grass seeds and insects. After proving they could thrive in the more challenging environment, they were released.
We released them on the bank of a forest stream. We left them with a small amount of seed to see them through the early stages of exploring their environment. We left them confident that they knew what to do next with their freedom.
A last glimpse... we transported the chipmunks to their release site in the small shelter we'd provided them in their outdoor housing - now when they emerge the only difference will be freedom!
Your support is what makes wildlife rehabilitation possible. Whether you are in Marin County and you support Wildcare, or you are on the North Coast and you support HWCC/bax, or wherever you are, without you the work we do - at home and in partnership with our colleagues across California - would simply not be possible. You make it happen with your generosity. Thank You!!
Interested in becoming a sustaining supporter? click here
Spring is in full swing now and wild babies are showing up in the world, getting found by kids, cats, dogs, and other suburban challenges!
Last week, a youg Black Phoebe, fresh from the nest, was found by students on the ground at East High, an alternative high school in Fortuna. Brought to our clinic, we quickly determined that the young bird was a fledgling, not injured. Although songbirds live among us, closer than almost any other wild animals, many people remain unaware that fledgling birds often spend up to a week not quite ready to fly, but more than ready to jump form the nest. This is a very vulnerable time for these little guys, but it's a time that every adult bird you see has passed through. Of course our modern world, with housecats, dogs, and cars lurking behind every moment, presents some dangers that natural life on Earth doesn't, but still the best place for a fledgling bird is with her or his parents.
After giving this Phoebe an exam and some food, we started to arrange for the best possible plan - reuniting the family.
http://birdallyx.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/feeding-BLPH.mp4
Black Phoebe eating mealworms while in our care ........... (video BAX/Lucinda Adamson)
Two days later, we took the little Phoebe back to Fortuna, back to the exact location where s/he was found. Adult Black Phoebes were flying all over the area. A hole in the wall of an outbuilding appeared to have a Phoebe nest. Our staff placed the young bird as close to the nest as possible, off the ground and hopefully out of danger.
Black Phoebe adults in flight - are these our guy's parents? (BAX/Laura Corsiglia)
The young Phoebe sits waiting for parents. (BAX/Laura Corsiglia)
Soon the youngster made a short flight to the roof of the building. Almost immediately an adult approached. Success! Soon the fledgling's parents were bringing food. We stayed to make sure that all was well and then left this wild family to their own world, right out in the open, in the middle of our world, yet so mysterious!
Thank you for supporting our work! Your donation goes directly to our efforts to provide care for injured and orphaned wild animals, and to promoting co-existence with all of our wild neighbors. Please share our work, and if you can, donate today!
All photos (BAX/Laura Corsiglia)
Raccoon (Procyon lotor) babies have a lot to learn. As adults, Raccoons hunt and forage for a wide range of food, from songbird eggs to berries to the salmon a bear leaves behind. Raccoons hunt small rodents, crunch on snails, and nibble the mushrooms on the forest floor. Raccoons are brave, resilient, adaptable and notoriously intelligent.
Orphaned Raccoons in their housing, prepare for the wide and wild world. To help them recognize the real world when they see it, we've provided them an artificial river of concrete. We call it the Los Angeles river. No substitute for an ecosystem, but at least they know to look for fish in moving water.
Raccoons have lived in North America for millions of years. This familiar wild neighbor has nearly as many names as there are indigenous languages. We use the Algonquian name, derived from arahkunem - which is said to mean "scratches with hands."(1) Locally, in Wiyot, the animal "with the painted face" is known as jbelhighujaji (pronunciation).(2)
For a glimpse into their place in the ecology of Northern California, a Shasta story has Coyote and Raccoon living together each with five children. When a jealous rivalry ends with Coyote killing and feeding Raccoon to his children, one of Coyote's sons tells Raccoon's orphans what happened - they decide to kill all Coyote's pups but the one who told them. Afterward they flee with the spared pup into the sky. Coyote tries to follow but cannot keep up. The six young animals become the Pleiades, high above in winter when no raccoons are about, and down from the sky in Spring and Summer when raccoons emerge with young.(3)
Taken to a remote tributary of a nearby river, rehabiliator Lucie Adamson and volunteers prepare to release the season's first six raccoons back into their wild freedom.
Taking their first tentative steps into a world without walls. As kits, as soon as they began eating solid food, they were offered fish, mushrooms, plant material, small rodents, small birds, vegetables, fruit, eggs and insects, hidden under rocks and logs, hanging from branches. They know where to look for food.
It isn't frivolous to consider the seriousness of raising orphaned babies of a species this complex, this storied, this ordinary, this mysterious. Here we are, as removed from "universal nature" as any species has ever been, yet it's up to us to provide an education for these wild young things.
When we commit to the care of a wild orphan, we accept the responsibility for their wild education. To teach a wild baby to be wild requires an inhabiting imagination. We must see the world this young animal will see, and then provide the challenges that will teach the skills necessary to thrive in that world.
When we commit to the care of a wild animal, we are committing to the wild, to nature - we are accepting Nature's terms - we are accepting, and in fact seeking, the blaze of reality. This is, as they say, a tall order.
Young, healthy and in a lush and resource-filled environment, these orphans will soon find out they are home.
Meeting nature's terms does place the rehabilitator in an awkward position. Our towns, our cities, ranches, forestry, fisheries, in short, nearly all of modern society struggles to co-exist with the wild. Promoting co-existence with wild animals - this alone puts a person outside of most of society's concerns.
Just released, this Raccoon finds something to eat right away.
To be an ally of the wild often puts a wildlife caregiver in opposition to the general dreams and desires of our human neighbors. Schools, shopping centers, highways, solar farms, windmills, none of these, no matter their merits, is a boon to the wild. Even though any of these promises to preserve the world, a wildlife rehabilitator doubts the proposition.
Experience, or maybe intuition, knows that people don’t preserve ‘the Wild.” The wild is the expanding universe and the cosmic sweep of galaxies,