Fifty-five years ago, a Registered Nurse named Alice Berkner stood on an oil-soaked San Francisco Bay shoreline with other concerned individuals and decided someone had to act. There were no protocols and no playbook for this type of response at the time, just urgency, compassion, and a group of people willing to meet the moment. That is how International Bird Rescue was born, during a crisis. But it didn’t stop there: our work has always been figuring out how to help and then immediately teaching others what we learned. It is a chain reaction of impact, spreading outward like ripples on water, for the benefit of wild birds everywhere.
Since 1971, Bird Rescue has responded to more than 265 oil spills and other wildlife emergencies, caring for over 250,000 birds across six continents. We helped establish the science of care for oiled wildlife, and over the decades, that work contributed to meaningful progress. Thanks to conservation efforts, major oil spills occur less frequently today. But the crises have not ended. They have merely changed shape.
In order to face ongoing threats, Bird Rescue has evolved into a global conservation organization. To better describe this change, we adopt the tagline that has grown quietly alongside our work: For Birds in a Changing World. We chose this tagline because it encompasses the work that we began in 1971 and continues to evolve today.
The Crises Changed
There were early hints of this change in 2009, when unusual Brown Pelican strandings began appearing along the West Coast. That year, 126 pelicans were admitted and no one knew why. In 2010, 540 pelicans were admitted. By 2012, that number reached 900, an alarming escalation.
But the moment the tide truly started to turn was 2015. That January, more than 500 seabirds washed up along the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay coated in a strange, rubbery substance (dubbed “mystery goo” at the time). It looked like epoxy but no one knew what it was. Then, in July that same year, another unexpected crisis occurred when 460 starving Common Murres arrived at the wildlife center.
Those events signaled the end of an era. Instead of being called in to respond as part of a larger coordinated effort with guaranteed funding, Bird Rescue made the bold choice to lean into our limited reserves in order to tackle these emergencies because that’s what our mission demands. We took this leap of faith because we believed the public would show up to support this work. The shape of the emergencies was changing, and we were changing along with it.
In the years that followed, struggling pelicans and murres kept coming. Bird Rescue responded to repeated stranding events in 2018, 2022, 2024, and 2025, and the pattern seems to be emerging again in 2026. The birds arrive exhausted and starving, and our only priority is to care for the birds we can help. With time, we sometimes are able to learn what has caused problems as with this scientific publication about the 2015 starvation event.
Meeting New Challenges
To better support the public and birds in need, we launched a Bird HelpLine, offering guidance and connecting people with the right resources, whether that means bringing a bird into our care or helping them find the best solution nearby. This support extends to wild birds found on the beach, in parks, in backyards, and in unexpected places.
In 2021, a nesting crisis threatened to wipe out an entire generation of Elegant Terns, a federally “near-threatened” coastal species already vulnerable to habitat disturbance and food scarcity. After their nesting site was disturbed in Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach, CA, they tried to raise new hatchlings on a barge in the busy Port of Long Beach.
Bird Rescue’s Southern California wildlife center reached capacity after the first 600 chicks were taken in. Each bird needed to be hand-fed every other hour, and it was clear that a new plan was needed. Through rapid innovation in the field and a coordinated, multi-partner rescue effort, more than 3,000 chicks were saved, returning rescued chicks back to the barge where their parents resumed feeding them. This worked because decades of knowledge-sharing, trust-building, and field innovation were already in place when the call came in.
We chose the Elegant Tern as the bird of our 55th Anniversary for exactly this reason: it is a living case study in what conservation looks like when preparation meets crisis in a changing world. The Elegant Tern will not be the last species to need this kind of rapid response. We know we must be ready for what will likely include challenges we have never seen before.
The World Birds Face Today
Since arriving in North America in 2021, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), known more commonly as bird flu, has killed millions of wild birds globally, forcing a structural overhaul of our clinical care: dedicated quarantine facilities and new intake protocols to screen every bird at the door. As of this writing, there is still no cure. Bird Rescue has responded by building the infrastructure and leading the scientific research and global training that keeps Bird Rescue ahead of the current, navigating uncharted waters for birds in a changing world.
HPAI is not the only emerging threat. Harmful algal blooms and other environmental toxins are poisoning the food chain with increasing frequency, causing severe neurological damage in aquatic birds. Many recover fully with expert care; some are not brought to us in time.
According to a landmark study published in the journal Science, nearly three billion birds have disappeared from North America in the past fifty years, which represents 30% of the total population. The emergency is everywhere.
Hope in Action
In a world shaped by uncertainty, we believe it is hope–not fear–that sustains conservation, and that action is the antidote to anxiety. At International Bird Rescue, every bird we treat, every child engaged in a feather wash, every responder trained, every call for help, every solution created in a crisis, every research article published, every shared post, every hour of volunteer work, every dollar donated, every new voice for wildlife, every action big or small creates a ripple effect for birds in a changing world.