With each baby season, comes an increase in calls for our Wildlife Exclusion Service. Austin Robinson, our Exclusion Technician, has been busy out in the field helping our community humanely exclude wildlife from homes, businesses, sheds, and under decks. This critical part of the wildlife rescue not only helps fund our nonprofit work but helps ensure that wildlife issues are humanely handled, preventing not only the trapping and euthanasia of wildlife, but allowing wildlife to stay in their home habitat while also ensuring that wild mothers are not separated from their young.

We are currently scheduling our Barn Owl Maintenance Program's spring monitoring and have already been out in the field checking our first boxes for occupancy. We are excited to work with Cal-Poly Humboldt again this year through our BOMP Coalition to capture as much information and learn as much as we can about the nesting patterns of barn owls!

While baby season is off to another busy beginning, we are still in the early stages of the work that we will set out to do on behalf of wildlife this year. This summer Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue will be the temporary home for hundreds of wildlife patients. The care that takes place during these busy summer months largely includes bottle feeding dozens of orphans a day, providing advanced medical care to sick and injured wildlife, creating and implementing natural enrichment for our patients, preparing daily diets for upwards of 170 patients in the height of baby season, answering wildlife hotline calls and dispatching rescues for wildlife in need.

The added expense that baby season will bring is tremendous, with 70% of our animal care budget occurring in these few months. We hope we can count on you for help this spring. Our Spring Season Appeal will be sent out later this week. We hope you will consider donating to Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue.

Sincerely,

Doris Duncan

Executive Director

Baby season is fast approaching, and we are looking for caring and compassionate individuals who want to expand their knowledge and experience in wildlife rehabilitation by participating in our summer internship. The warmer months are the busiest time of the year, so interns are exposed to many opportunities to care for injured and orphaned wildlife. No previous animal care experience is required, as our team of staff members and volunteers take new interns under their “wings” to educate about the many facets of running a professional wildlife rehabilitation center.

Some common summer internship tasks include animal handling and weighing, enclosure maintenance, baby feeding, rescues, and releases. Interns are expected to take initiative, work independently, and have adept communication skills. If you are interested in applying for our summer internship program, you can find our application and more information in the link below.

We have an exciting animal spotlight this round! Our resident great horned owls, who have been nesting in the same eucalyptus tree in the same nest for 15 plus years, have two glaring, fuzzy owlets again this year. Great horned owls do not make their own nests, but occupy nests abandoned by other raptors. Unfortunately, the nest they have been using all that time is finally starting to deteriorate, leaving scant scraps of material to hold the small owls and their significantly larger parents.

A couple of weeks ago, we found one of the owlets on the ground, huddled in some bramble outside of our aquatic mammal enclosure. We made the decision to leave it overnight to see if we could find out if the parents were taking care of it. Low and behold, the next morning there were rat pieces and smears where eaten pieces had clearly been, right next to the owlet. The parents had been taking care of the fallen owlet! The next step was to get the owlet to safety; beyond the wildlife we rehab, the eucalyptus grove where Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue operates is also home to plenty of wild critters that might brave an owlet snack. We consulted our raptor expert, Dona Asti who has been working with and renesting raptors back to their wild families for over 30 years and formed a plan.

With the help of a very tall orchard ladder and a lot of safety equipment, our animal care staff pinned up a deep basket filled with natural substrates across from the nesting tree, placed the owl in it, trained a trail camera on it to monitor progress, and waited with bated breath. That night, our minds were put at ease as we started collecting footage of the parent great horned owls feeding and caring for the owlet!! We are going to continue monitoring the progress of the owlet as it grows and “branches” out of the nest to make sure there are no more trips to the forest floor and otherwise let the parents do their job. We are so thrilled with this as-of-now success and can’t wait to continue sharing progress and updates with you! Stay tuned!