Rescues
1980-1998

How and why we collect our information
The end of a year brings us to the chore of providing a statistical count of our wildlife intake. For some of us, sorting through piles of treatment cards and counting up our releases is satisfying.

For others, however, caring for wildlife is infinitely more satisfying than paperwork, particularly when those of us who do many baby birds discover we have six cards labeled "sparrow" "found on ground" with no subsequent comments on what happened to them.

At this point, straining the memory and imagination finally gets some kind of answer since we are obligated to keep records of how many of our wildlife died and were released.

Each animal has a treatment card (with information provided by the animal’s rescuer) that follows it through the rehabilitation process.

Some animals with identifiable features or problems can be tracked through the system with their own cards, while others, such as the several hundred baby sparrows, finches, mockingbirds, opossums, squirrels etc. are simply allocated an intake card for the appropriate species and intake date when they are transferred from cages in one location (at a volunteer’s home or our care facility) to aviaries or release cages at another.  After all, faced with thirty seemingly identical juvenile house finches, which of can tell one from another?

We do not band our birds because some are so small on arrival that bands of the right size would damage their limbs as they grow, and more importantly, we do not have a special banding permit which would allow us to band birds prior to release.

At year’s end each volunteer receives a form listing the wildlife species normally found in the county, and they are asked to fill out the total of a species that they have taken in, the number of juveniles, the number which are euthanized, the number that died, and finally the number released.

Volunteers return their lists, and the data is entered into a database program which sorts, adds and prints out the results. The lists are provided to the state and federal permit offices. We also share our nestling data with the San Diego Natural History Museum’s Bird Atlas Project which is headed by Philip Unitt.

Helped by many photographs taken by volunteers over the years, some of us can now tell whether a 5 gram pink object with fluff and a beak is an oriole, mockingbird or starling -- well-maybe after ten minutes of phone help, fifteen minutes of picture perusal and some head scratching!

How our wildlife intake has increased
The figure shows the numbers of animals taken in each year since 1980. Project Wildlife’s intake has increased from approximately 1200 to 1500 wild birds and mammals in the late 1970’s when the group was founded by Bob and Martha Hall, to the present ten thousand plus birds and mammals a year. We receive a few (less than twenty) reptiles, amphibians and exotic pets yearly, but these are usually transferred to other organizations.

In 1988 we opened a small care facility located on the San Diego Humane Society property on Custer Street to cope with the large number of baby songbirds that require feeding at 30 to 60 minute intervals for twelve hours each day.

Volunteers who could not take care of animals at homes would have an opportunity to volunteer for four hours weekly. When the birds are able to feed themselves they are transferred to flight cages in different areas for pre-release conditioning.

Chaotic record-keeping during the facility’s first year probably resulted in the observed dip in the graph and the true "landbird" numbers were probably higher.

Birds
Frequent flyers who need help

The numbers of "landbirds" (which include 80 different species of songbirds, game birds, pigeons and doves) have steadily increased with the largest peak so far in 1993.

Why 1993? Maybe we were featured more frequently in the news media, so more people brought in wildlife, or perhaps the weather and food supplies resulted in more bird nesting attempts.

In our increasingly urban environment, our most frequent patients and orphans have been mourning doves, hovering (so to speak) around the thousand mark in the last three years.  These are closely followed in number by house sparrows and feral pigeons.

House finches and starlings (about five hundred each) are the next most numerous, and of the smaller species, hummingbirds (mostly Anna’s with some Costa’s, Allen's, Rufous and Black-chinned) come in at a rate of three to four hundred birds a year.

Seventy four species of sea, shore marsh birds and waterfowl (all lumped here on the graph as seabirds) have steadily increased since the late 80’s as the numbers of gulls (mostly Western) rose from 50 in 1985 to over 300 in 1997 and 1998, and the number of Mallards (mainly ducklings from urban nests) has risen from less than 100 a year in the 80’s to over 500 a year since 1991.

Herons. Pelagic birds, shorebirds and waterfowl fall victim to traffic (car and boat), fish hooks and line, feral pets, habitat loss and overfishing.

Raptor intake has remained steady with a few dips in 1988, 1989 and 1995. The number of species treated is usually about fourteen, Barn Owls (over 100 each year since 1996) are currently at the top of the raptor intake list, exceeded in the past on by American Kestrels (189 kestrels in 1993!).

Red-tailed hawks are one of the largest most visible hawks in San Diego, but Cooper’s hawk and Red-shouldered hawk are more numerous on our yearly counts at 30-50 a year.

Recent years have seen a greater proportion of raptors brought in (usually unharmed) but trapped as part of the program for protecting endangered Least Terns. These raptors are held in captivity for a period and released after the terns migrate.

Mammals
Orphaned, injured, four-footed and furry

The mammal intake has also fluctuated, perhaps because of the periodic variation in the numbers of our mammal team volunteers or possibly due to weather patterns and food availability.

We usually receive about 15 different species of mammals. Opossums, our most numerous species, have consistently make up 50% to 80% of our mammal intake at one to two thousand juveniles and adults a year, followed by cottontail rabbits (300 a year), and ground squirrels (100 to 200 plus a year).

Other species brought to us include Gray foxes and coyotes (less than 50 each a year), brush rabbits and jackrabbits (less than 20 a year).

We also admit a few longtailed weasels, woodrats and tree squirrels (the last from a small local introduced population in Balboa Park), some pocket gophers (yes we rehabilitate gophers but we release them away, make that far away from backyards), and an occasional kangaroo rat (species unfortunately usually not recorded).

Our striped skunk intake has declined from over 100 a year in the 1980’s to the present level of less than 50 a year. Recently we have re-established our raccoon team and currently handle less than 30 a year, but this may change as housing development increases.

All species of wildlife admittances will probably (and unfortunately) continue to rise as San Diego grows.

Meryl A Faulkner

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