Fifty-five years in the past, a Registered Nurse named Alice Berkner stood on an oil-soaked San Francisco Bay shoreline with different involved people and determined somebody needed to act. There have been no protocols and no playbook for such a response on the time, simply urgency, compassion, and a bunch of individuals keen to satisfy the second. That’s how Worldwide Chicken Rescue was born, throughout a disaster. But it surely didn’t cease there: our work has all the time been determining how you can assist after which instantly instructing others what we discovered. It’s a chain response of affect, spreading outward like ripples on water, for the good thing about wild birds in every single place.
Since 1971, Chicken Rescue has responded to greater than 265 oil spills and different wildlife emergencies, caring for over 170,000 birds throughout six continents. We helped set up the science of look after oiled wildlife, and over the many years, that work contributed to significant progress. Due to conservation efforts, main oil spills happen much less steadily as we speak. However the crises haven’t ended. They’ve merely modified form.
With a purpose to face ongoing threats, Chicken Rescue has advanced into a world conservation group. To higher describe this transformation, we undertake the tagline that has grown quietly alongside our work: For Birds in a Altering World. We selected this tagline as a result of it encompasses the work that we started in 1971 and continues to evolve as we speak.
The Crises Modified
There have been early hints of this transformation in 2009, when uncommon Brown Pelican strandings started showing alongside the West Coast. That yr, 126 pelicans had been admitted and nobody knew why. In 2010, 540 pelicans had been admitted. By 2012, that quantity reached 900, an alarming escalation.
However the second the tide really began to show was 2015. That January, greater than 500 seabirds washed up alongside the jap shore of San Francisco Bay coated in a wierd, rubbery substance (dubbed “thriller goo” on the time). It appeared like epoxy however nobody knew what it was. Then, in July that very same yr, one other surprising disaster occurred when 460 ravenous Frequent Murres arrived on the wildlife heart.
These occasions signaled the tip of an period. As a substitute of being referred to as in to reply as half of a bigger coordinated effort with assured funding, Chicken Rescue made the daring option to lean into our restricted reserves as a way to sort out these emergencies as a result of that’s what our mission calls for. We took this leap of religion as a result of we believed the general public would present as much as help this work. The form of the emergencies was altering, and we had been altering together with it.
Within the years that adopted, struggling pelicans and murres stored coming. Chicken Rescue responded to repeated stranding occasions in 2018, 2022, 2024, and 2025, and the sample appears to be rising once more in 2026. The birds arrive exhausted and ravenous, and our solely precedence is to look after the birds we may also help. With time, we generally are capable of study what has brought about issues as with this scientific publication concerning the 2015 hunger occasion.
Assembly New Challenges
To higher help the general public and birds in want, we launched a Chicken HelpLine, providing steering and connecting folks with the best assets, whether or not meaning bringing a fowl into our care or serving to them discover one of the best resolution close by. This help extends to wild birds discovered on the seashore, in parks, in backyards, and in surprising locations.
In 2021, a nesting disaster threatened to wipe out a complete technology of Elegant Terns, a federally “near-threatened” coastal species already susceptible to habitat disturbance and meals shortage. After their nesting website was disturbed in Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Seashore, CA, they tried to boost new hatchlings on a barge within the busy Port of Lengthy Seashore.
Chicken Rescue’s Southern California wildlife heart reached capability after the primary 600 chicks had been taken in. Every fowl wanted to be hand-fed each different hour, and it was clear {that a} new plan was wanted. Via fast innovation within the area and a coordinated, multi-partner rescue effort, greater than 3,000 chicks had been saved, returning rescued chicks again to the barge the place their mother and father resumed feeding them. This labored as a result of many years of knowledge-sharing, trust-building, and area innovation had been already in place when the decision got here in.
We selected the Elegant Tern because the fowl of our fifty fifth Anniversary for precisely this purpose: it’s a dwelling case examine in what conservation appears like when preparation meets disaster in a altering world. The Elegant Tern is not going to be the final species to want this sort of fast response. We all know we should be prepared for what is going to probably embrace challenges we’ve by no means seen earlier than.
The World Birds Face Right this moment
Since arriving in North America in 2021, Extremely Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), recognized extra generally as fowl flu, has killed thousands and thousands of untamed birds globally, forcing a structural overhaul of our scientific care: devoted quarantine amenities and new consumption protocols to display screen each fowl on the door. As of this writing, there’s nonetheless no treatment. Chicken Rescue has responded by constructing the infrastructure and main the scientific analysis and world coaching that retains Chicken Rescue forward of the present, navigating uncharted waters for birds in a altering world.
HPAI shouldn’t be the one rising menace. Dangerous algal blooms and different environmental toxins are poisoning the meals chain with growing frequency, inflicting extreme neurological injury in aquatic birds. Many get well totally with knowledgeable care; some are usually not delivered to us in time.
In accordance with a landmark examine revealed within the journal Science, practically three billion birds have disappeared from North America up to now fifty years, which represents 30% of the entire inhabitants. The emergency is in every single place.
Hope in Motion
In a world formed by uncertainty, we imagine it’s hope–not worry–that sustains conservation, and that motion is the antidote to anxiousness. At Worldwide Chicken Rescue, each fowl we deal with, each little one engaged in a feather wash, each responder educated, each name for assist, each resolution created in a disaster, each analysis article revealed, each shared submit, each hour of volunteer work, each greenback donated, each new voice for wildlife, each motion huge or small creates a ripple impact for birds in a altering world.
