Lessons Learned

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I'm still digesting everything I was taught at the eight-hour wildlife emergency response class.

Here are a few of the stories I heard.

Years and years ago, some person in Berkeley California caught a "seagull" that they decided to keep it as a pet (this is both illegal and ill-advised). They cut off all of its feathers to keep it from flying away. When this animal (which turned out not to be a gull, but a Laysan Albatross, a truly magnificent seabird with a gigantic wingspan) proved to be a poor house-pet, they let it "free". (Click on the underlined word "albatross" and you'll come to a very interesting story in National Geographic about these long-lived birds.) This bird was found wandering the streets of Berkeley, and eventually made it to the International Bird Rescue Research Center.

Albatrosses flight feathers grow back slowly and in stages, and soaring birds like albatross (who spend almost all of their life aloft) do not do well in captivity. So the IBRRC obtained a dead albatross from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (collecting any part of a migratory bird is illegal in America, without a special permit). They performed a laborious process of splicing the intact feathers from the dead bird onto the feather shafts of the live bird. The process took hours and hours, with the bird under sedation. The rehabilitators glued tiny dowels (toothpicks or bamboo skewers or wires) inside the hollow cores of the birds feathers, and used this structure to attach the "donor feathers." The bird was fitted with an identifying band on its leg, and released into the albatross colony on Midway Island in middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Nine years later, a scientist working with albatrosses called the IBRRC and reported that Laysan Albatrosses had started breeding on a group of small islands off the coast of Baja California. Upon examining the leg-bands, it was discovered that this very same bird was incubating eggs with a mate.




Another story that stands out is about a bobcat who was hit by a car. A well-meaning bystander picked up its unconscious body, intending to bring it to a wildlife rehabilitation facility.

The only thing they didn't take into account is the fact that an unconscious predator may not stay unconscious for the entire length of a car ride. Sure enough, this wild cat woke up and the driver had to keep flapping their hands at it, to keep it at bay.

The bobcat made a successful recovery from its injures, and was released back to its home in the wild. The driver, presumably had a great story to tell their friends.