The center, having recently celebrated its 10th year in operation, is running short on cash that helps fund its efforts to rescue and rehabilitate injured wildlife.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
The California Wildlife Center, the nonprofit facility that rescues and rehabilitates injured local wildlife before rereleasing the animals, is once again scraping the bottom of the barrel for funding.
The CWC holds regular fundraisers, inviting the public to tour its facilities and witness the care provided to wildlife ranging from baby possums the size of a thumb to 300-pound deer. At its yearly fundraiser in August at a Malibu estate, which marked its 10th year, CWC managed to raise $110,000.
“That took us through the end of the year,” CWC Director Victoria Harris said. “But we’re open 350 days a year to rescue animals and with hospital techs, our vet, medical supplies, equipment, feed and formulas, our operating budget is about $350,000 a year. Our Marine Mammal Rescue group costs us $70,000 [per year] alone.”
The CWC facility on Piuma Road off Malibu Canyon Road was formerly used as ranger housing and is offered rent-free to the group by the state Parks Department. In return, the CWC offers internships to pre-vet students. Volunteers put in 13,000 hours a year, feeding the likes of baby hummingbirds every half hour. Harris said they receive donations of food from a local Trader Joe’s, but that was stretched through caring for 2,100 animals last year. Sixty-eight percent of those rescues were birds.
“We are careful to only take the animals that need care,” Harris said. “We have to tell people who call in and tell us they found a bird on the ground that they are fledglings and must learn to fly. The parents still feed them. And, yes, some of them are going to be eaten by other wildlife. It’s nature.”
The Marine Mammal Rescue unit picked up an injured sea lion in front of the Malibu Beach Inn last week and took it for surgery at the San Pedro Marine Mammal Care Center. And while staff is careful not to anthropomorphize their charges (“We never name our animals,” Harris insisted), they get the occasional heart-tugger.
“We took a fawn that had been confiscated by the Sheriff’s [Department] that was being raised in someone’s back yard along with the family dogs. He’d eat out of your hands,” Harris recounted. “So, it was imprinted with humans, not deer, and would never be able to survive in the wild. We kept him till he was strong, then released him to a refuge near San Diego. We called him Homer and there wasn’t a dry eye when he left.”
The CWC’s reach is not confined to the Santa Monica Mountain area above Malibu. Recently, it was given a young, red-tailed hawk with a broken leg, found in a dirty Hollywood alley. Volunteers set the hawk’s leg and nursed it for two months till it proved it could fly, and it was then returned to Hollywood for release at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near the old Warner Bros. studios.
“Hawks have a territorial radius of about three miles,” CWC hospital technician Kristin Joseph explained. “We knew we had to release him someplace familiar, so we thought this would be perfect.”
Indeed, at the corner of Nelson Eddy Drive and Lydia Lomonosow Lane, the young hawk was released from a blue crate and it flew immediately up into a pine next to the cemetery’s Fairbanks reflecting pool for a few stunned moments, stretching its wings tentatively.
Hollywood Forever Executive Vice President Jay Boileau was pleased at the day’s event. “We had a flock of Canadian geese come in and stay, but this is the first time we’ve released a red-tailed hawk,” he said. “It’s very exciting.”
Harris said the CWC currently has about 200 members and the availability to “Adopt a Species.” They do not offer specific animal adoptions because the goal is to get them out of the facility as quickly as possible.
“It’s like with Homer,” Harris said. “Fawns are real cute when they’re young. But when they grow to 300 pounds and are in rut, you remember you have a wild animal.”
The CWC promotes its work through a YouTube campaign and has won awards from the city of Calabasas for environmental stewardship. Recent grants provided by the Ahmanson Foundation and the cities of Malibu and Calabasas allowed the organization to put in a new surgical unit, but the funds do not even begin to cover operating costs.
“No one’s in this for the money,” Harris said. “If we cut the hours of our hospital techs, they can’t live. And with babies coming in February, we are going to need a lot of staff, paid and volunteer. We have just about enough cash to make it through then.”
More information about the California Wildlife Center can be obtained online at www.californiawildlifecenter.org