Humans have altered the environment more so than any other species that has lived on the planet. And we see animals in our environment that are having to adapt to the world that we have essentially fabricated for them. And that includes them dying as a result of interacting with humans in that urban environment.

The salvage animal program is a program where we ask people to bring in animals that they might find in their backyards, on the roads that they’re traveling, and to bring those specimens into us for research purposes.

Right now in our walk in freezer I want to say we have approximately 6,000 animals.

Ohhhhhh holy moly! This animal is a Bullock’s Oriole and it’s in it’s breeding plumage. Absolutely gorgeous, and going to become a really nifty scientific specimen.

In lay terms many people think of it as an autopsy but we’re not trying to determine the cause of death, we are simply trying to preserve that specimen for scientific research.

This is a Western King Bird, he has a broken wing. Either he was hit by a car or hit a window.

We take heart samples, we take kidney we take liver and we also take muscle. We try to save gut contents.

Okay so there’s the inside of the stomach. And you can see it looks like some shell of a beetle.

We try to get as much flesh as you can off of the skeleton, but then they go into our dermestid colonies. And our dermestid colony is a colony of flesh eating beetles. They do the dirty work for us. If they are hungry you can put a small bird skeleton in there and in two to three days it will be completely clean.

The most common animal that we receive are things that you would see in your backyard. Squirrel!

We get a lot of squirrels. We get many American Robins, We get a lot of Northern Flickers. We’ve recently received a Parakeet. So, that obviously escaped from someone’s house.

That’s a baby chipmunk. Wow.

Our collection exists in the digital world as an online database that’s searchable by anyone anywhere on the planet and it contains as much information as we have on our specimens as we could possibly have on there.
We are essentially mapping historical change in organisms responding to us living in an area. We can examine exactly how healthy these populations are, what’s happening to them in response to things that we are doing. It doesn’t only matter for tracking evolutionary change in these particular animals, it also impacts us. Because we live with these animals in these urban environments.