Last month I was privileged to have been given an ‘insiders’ tour of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, a rehabilitation centre in Fairfield, California which primarily specialises in the care of birds affected by oil spills. I wrote half of what I hoped was a glowing report (I certainly felt ‘glowing’ after my visit) and promised that Part Two - which was to be all about the release of seven hand-raised Double-crested Cormorants below the Golden Gate Bridge - would be coming ’soon’. Well, I suppose three weeks later isn’t ’soon’ at all, and my apologies to the staff at IBRRC who may have been wondering why I seemed to abandon the post mid-way: I’ve just been ridiculously busy and very jet-lagged lately - but hopefully what follows will make up for the delay…

The first part of this post detailed a tour that my good buddy Jack Cole and I were given of the Fairfield HQ of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, a tour led by the wonderful Nancy Mix (whom I referred to previously as Nancy ‘5 cent’ Mix, because that’s how she self-deprecatingly described her tour - don’t be fooled by the modesty, Nancy is a very engaging speaker and you leave her company feeling motivated and inspired).

By the time we reached early afternoon it has to be admitted we were feeling the pace (or at least I was - the eight-hour time change from the UK always plays havoc with your system no matter how often you make the trip to California) and it was something of a relief to have lunch while we discussed plans for the afternoon.

These plans, it transpired, revolved around the release of seven Double-crested Cormorants which the Center had been looking after since they arrived at a much earlier stage of their development: as eggs! Removed from nests which were slated to be destroyed as the unfortunate parents had chosen utility poles to build on, staff at the Center had hatched the eggs, looked after the chicks, watched them grow until they were large enough to be placed in a 100ft aviary with its own private swimming pool, and were now ready - today - to take them down to the ocean for release. And fortunately Jack and I would be on hand to take part.

First though, with lunch finished, there would be the small matter of rounding up seven cormorants, transferring them to crates, and then transporting them to the water - all to be done as rapidly and carefully as possible so as not to stress the birds or confine them for too long unnecessarily.

Now I don’t know whether anyone reading this has ever attempted to catch wild, healthy, non-imprinted, and wary cormorants before - I certainly hadn’t even considered how you’d go about it - but the method used by the IBRRC is to send Monty into the aviary with a large net on a long pole and swoosh them out of the pool before a) they drown, b) they panic, and c) they stab anyone with the sharp hook on the end of their beaks as they try to get away. Not something an amateur should do (the classic “Don’t try this at home, folks” warning springs to mind) and fortunately for all concerned Monty is a very long way from being an amateur!

As the photos below illustrate it was no easy task (I couldn’t even tell which cormorants were the ones to be released, but they were banded so close-up I imagine it was easier), but each bird was targeted, netted, wrapped in a towel (so that there would be no eye-contact between bird and would-be rescuer which the birds find very intimidating), and crated within about a minute in a process that could only be described as highly skilled. No blood was drawn on either side, no feathers were lost as far as I could tell, and moments later the birds were in the back of the Center’s SUV ready for transportation…quite remarkable if you stop to think about it.

From here it was just the small matter of driving 45 minutes to the nearest suitable release site in San Francisco Bay (at Fort Baker), our conversation interrupted by the curious squawks of seven cormorants objecting to the occasional bump in the road and their eventually reacting to the smell of salt air, which Nancy said most rehabbed birds usually picked up as they near the coast. Why drive all the way to Fort Baker? There’s a jetty there, a relatively boat-free harbour, and plenty of other birds so that the rehabbed individuals don;t suddenly find themselves isolated in an unfamiliar environment. I would imagine though that if someone would stump up for a Center right on the edge of the Bay below the Golden Gate Bridge the IBRRC would be delighted - I’m not a real-estate expert but I’m willing to bet that land prices in the area put that option pretty much out the reach of all but a very, very wealthy few (and so far, they’ve not offered)…

Once at Fort Baker the reason for the existence of the IBRRC, the reason that volunteers like Nancy and others like her around the world devote so much of their time to rehabilitation efforts, become both apparent and touchingly real: the release of healthy birds back into the wild where they belong.

Camera-phobic blogger tries - and fails - to look casual and unself-conscious

Jack and Nancy carry a crate of cormorants down to the water’s edge

The crates are opened…

…cry freedom…

…and he’s off…

…swiftly followed by another one…

…who is suddenly faced by the unknown…

…and decides that caution may indeed be the better part of valour…

…though some cormorants are apparently a little more adventurous than others…

‘The release of healthy birds back into the wild where they belong’. It’s a simple-enough sounding concept, but the chain of events leading up to a release are complex, expensive, and require people to get involved. Think about it. Oiled, injured, or unhealthy birds first need to be found. There then needs to be somewhere to take them, experts to look after them, and volunteers and funding to support those experts. Modes of transport need to be available, and there needs to be drivers willing to use them. There needs to be organisation, best practices, people willing to learn, to get dirty, to put aside value judgements on whether one bird is worth more than another. It takes people to really care. And finding people who care is not simple at all.

I’ve thought long and hard about my day at the IBRRC and why people like Nancy volunteer to work for them, and why the visit affected me so much. It’s taken a while for my random thoughts to order themselves, but I think what struck me more than anything was the equality of care given: to the IBRRC staff there’s no difference between a domestic duck that needs help and a Least Tern chick. In the minds of many people (myself included until quite recently I freely admit) the tern is simply more important than the duck, because the tern is rare and the duck isn’t: the loss of a Least Tern ‘matters’ statistically, the loss of a domestic duck not so much.

Is that the way us birders should be thinking though, and why do we think like that anyway?

Personally I wonder whether we’ve become more detached from the natural world than we realise. Many of the people reading this will be ‘birders’, individuals who would consider themselves environmentally-aware, thoughtful, and caring, but how many of us have actually been really close to a wild bird lately, looked into its eyes and related to it as it were rather than just recording it in a notebook? How many of us have taken ourselves out of the picture without making a quick mental calculation where seeing such-and-such bird ranks in our experiences or impacts on our thinking? Thought of how life matters to the individual bird, and not how its life matters to us in other words…

We are - as a society - becoming increasingly isolated from our environment. Many people even fear it and don’t want to either touch it or have it touch them. The ‘outside’ is dirty, too hot, too cold, uncomfortable - not relevant anymore. As birders I think many of us should be in a better position to remain connected with the natural world - but I don’t think we have done. We’re seeing birds at a distance, through lenses and as part of a day out, not seeing them as sentient elements of what sustains us, surrounds us, and keeps us alive. In effect we’re living the ornithological equivalent of knowing the cost of everything, but not its value. If we were really connected still, would we even be asking the question whether one bird is more deserving than another? I don’t think we would.

Something else too. I wonder how many people reading this might actually be thinking to themselves that ‘nice, middle-aged women’ like Nancy are just fairly typical ‘do-gooders’ or ‘tree-huggers’ who, yes, are trying to do the right thing but that there are far more important things in the world to worry about? It’s so easy to think like that, but it misses a far more fundamental truth: so very many of us have no real purpose in our lives anymore besides surviving - doing our jobs, getting by on our salaries, escaping the stresses by going birding at the weekend. Nancy has a purpose, Nancy believes in something, she has a passion. She’s more connected - in my opinion - to what should matter in life, to what our bodies, minds, and spirits are craving in fact, than many of us. Nancy and the people like her have re-found what many of us have lost, and have re-found happiness doing it.

All photographs copyright Charlie Moores

My thanks once again got to all the staff at IBRRC who allowed me to get so close to the operation at their Center - I hope I’ve justified the time you spent with me. Particular thanks to Laurie Pyne, who organised our visit, to Michelle Belizzii, Fairfield’s Rehabilitation Manager, and of course to Nancy Mix who is far more special and valuable than I think she realises.

For more information on the IBRRC go to

• The IBRRC website at http://www.ibrrc.org/index.html
• The IBRRC blog at http://intbirdrescue.blogspot.com/
• IBRRC on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/International-Bird-Rescue-Research-Center/110165288744
• The excellent Amber Coakley of The Birder’s Lounge visited IBRRC’s San Pedro Centre and wrote a great blog about her visit at My visit to the International Bird Rescue Research Center. Well worth checking out.

Additionally, the 10th International ‘Effects of Oil on Wildlife Conference’ - which promises to be an outstanding event - will be held in the enchanting city of Tallinn, Estonia the week of 5-9 October 2009: the scientific programme will take place from 4-8 October, with optional side events organised on Monday, 5 October and Friday, 9 October.

The event’s website is at http://www.eowconference09.org/