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Santa Barbara County Wildlife Care Facility Damaged By Brush Fire Launches Drive For New Building

Santa Barbara County’s Holiday brush fire destroyed ten homes, and damaged and destroyed more than a dozen barns and other structures. It also forced the evacuation of a wildlife care center.

Now, officials with the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network say a key facility for birds is so damaged its unusable. The non-profit launched a campaign to build a new center on the site.

The good news is that thanks to the help of firefighters and a few volunteers, most of the facility survived, and only a few of the 350 animals there at the time of the fire died. But, the bad news is a key component of the center, a trailer that’s a home for sick, injured, and abandoned baby songbirds, suffered smoke and ash damage.

Elaine Ibarra, the Center’s Animal Care Coordinator, says birds are more sensitive to contaminated air than humans, and being in the smoke damaged building could kill them. For now, the Santa Barbara Humane Society is continuing to allow the use of its Education Center as a temporary home for the displaced birds. More than 100 birds are housed in cages in the rooms. Ironically, the temporary facility is more than double the size of what the Care Network had been using.

The North Fairview Avenue property has been the center’s home since 2012. The non-profit had hoped someday to build a permanent building to replace the improvised facilities, and the fire has now stepped up those plans.

Julia Parker, the Wildlife Care Network’s Director of Animal Care, says they’ve kicked off fundraising for a $2.5 million dollar building which will not only replace the damaged room, but add other long needed facilities.

The Wildlife Care Network’s Kaitlin Lloyd says even without the fire, they really needed a better facility for the birds. They were in a single wide mobile home, like you’d see on a construction site. With office space on both ends of the trailer, the songbirds were in an area about the size of a small apartment’s bedroom. Lloyd says for now, they will continue to improvise. They have to. Despite the fire, and the damage, the sick, injured, and abandoned animals continue to come to the Center, with more than 100 brought in during the last week and a half.

Staff members and volunteers say they hope that out of all the problems caused by the fire, they can actually rally community support to make something good come out of it. Cleanup efforts are underway at other facilities on the site. It’s expected some animals will be moved into undamaged areas in the next few days.

Lance Orozco has been News Director of KCLU since 2001, providing award-winning coverage of some of the biggest news events in the region, including the Thomas and Woolsey brush fires, the deadly Montecito debris flow, the Borderline Bar and Grill attack, and Ronald Reagan's funeral. 
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