Happy New Year

Hello, Everyone! Happy New Year! Hope your holidays were great and everyone is looking forward to a new year of good times, love, challenge, and fun.

NEWS AT THE CENTER: Things have been pretty quiet, but there are always challenges this time of year. Example: we recently released an immature Red-tailed Hawk who was admitted in December. The bird was rescued at the Bishop Landfill completely saturated with oil! It took us 4 oiled bird washes to get all the oil off. Fortunately, the bird was amazingly cooperative during this lengthy process of saturating the entire bird with a Dawn solution, then rinsing and rinsing to get off oil and the Dawn. Each bath took about an hour, and 3 people. Then the bird was placed in a cage with heating pads and heat lamps, and a blow dryer to get warm and dry. We released the hawk last week!

A few weeks earlier, Jeremy picked up a teen-age raccoon from Big Pine. Her right hand was caught in a nasty, medieval looking trap which in turn had a length of heavy chain attached. The chain had become wrapped around a post in a yard that she and her family visited nightly. The woman of the house heard the young one crying all night and found her at daylight. [the raccoon was fortunate. The chain could have caught when she was up in a tree and left her hanging, or somewhere she would not be found where she would have died of starvation or chewed off her foot, or some other horrible outcome.) The trap was a metal cylinder, possibly for something like gophers. Very nasty.
The raccoon was extremely stressed and frightened, but fortunatel, because of her hand size, the wire "killing" piece did not have much distance and momentum when it was tripped. Her hand was caught, but the only injury was bruising and some abrasion.
After about a week of rest and good food, we took her back to where she was found and she was reunited with her family.