Wildlife Care Center hosting Baby Animal Shower

On its website, the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center briefly states some of what’s asked of volunteers: “help with animal care, prepare food, clean cages … .”

That summary sounds simple enough, but the work at the Hughson facility is crucial to the animals’ health and requires care and commitment, said Donna Burt, the center’s director.

Take food preparation. The center houses more than 250 species of injured or orphaned birds and animals, from bats to bobcats, eagles to egrets. “That’s a lot of different diets, so it gets complicated,” Burt said. Add to that, some of the animals have to be helped to eat because they’re too young or ill to do it themselves.

Other things volunteers need to know and take precautions against:

▪ Some species carry diseases transmittable to humans, and vice versa.

▪ Some animals – coyotes and foxes, for instance – may bite or scratch.

▪ And some baby animals are so delicate they can be injured if not handled correctly.

The Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center has about 40 to 45 volunteers, and “that’s not nearly enough this time of year,” Burt said. Already this spring, the center has admitted dozens of baby songbirds, squirrels, coyotes, opossums, hawks and owls. And every day, more and more animals come in.

More information on becoming a volunteer – the training that people get through the care center, the commitment that’s expected – will be available at SWCC’s Baby Animal Shower on Saturday.

The annual event also affords visitors the opportunity to meet the center’s “ambassadors,” animals that couldn’t be released back into the wild and now live at SWCC. Many of these animals – including Hopper the raven, Poe the crow, Jet the American kestrel, Carson the red-tailed hawk and Titus the great-horned owl – travel to schools to help students learn about California native wildlife.

Those animals are but a small fraction of the 2,000-plus that the center cares for each year. Most of the bigger animals taken to the center were hit by cars, Burt said, and most of the smaller ones – pretty much all of the songbirds – were mauled by house cats.

Other baby birds fall from nests or are knocked out by storms, she said. The center recently took in a young jay that was caught in a sticky trap used to catch rodents.

Some goodhearted folks the other day brought in eight young mallards, maybe a week old, that were caught near a canal gate because they could not swim against the current. The rescuers said the ducklings were there several hours, with no sign of the mother, so they bought a pole net and pulled out the birds, Burt said.

Also at Saturday’s Baby Animal Shower benefit – intended to generate donations of supplies, money and volunteer time – visitors can see the SWCC’s new $132,000 eagle cage. The enclosure is 100 feet long, 22 feet wide and 18 feet high, Burt said, and constructed from telephone poles, fencing and plastic-coated wire. It’s as large as it is, she said, because eagles “need all that space to exercise their wings and fly.”

Currently, the center has no eagles, so a curtain has been hung in the middle of the cage, with large hawks on one side and large owls on the other. The owls’ and hawks’ usual home is being replaced, Burt said.

The large complex of flight cages was “so rotten we took the whole thing down for safety reasons,” Burt said, adding that she pounded a nail into a post and nearly brought the roof down. “We’re replacing it with good-quality cages on a concrete footing that’s being poured tomorrow,” she said Monday. “We’re getting eight large aviaries with a central hallway. We’re envisioning these to be for barn owls, screech owls, egrets, kestrels ... as well as a new home for our resident red-tailed hawks and great-horned owls.”

The aviary complex is being professionally built and should last 50 years, Burt said. It’s being constructed “to the tune of $40,000, which we don’t really have, so what we’re really in need of is large donations.”

The Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center was started in 1984 and always has been supported entirely by donations, Burt said. Saturday’s event runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at its facility inside the Fox Grove Fishing Access, 1220 Geer Road, Hughson. There will be games, cookies and punch, face painting, kids’ crafts and more. Admission is free, but a list of suggested gifts is on its website, StanislausWildlife.org, including receiving blankets, dishwashing liquid, heating pads, playpens, sandwich- and gallon-size zipper-lock bags, and much more.

This story was originally published May 12, 2015 at 1:33 PM with the headline "Wildlife Care Center hosting Baby Animal Shower."