Money, Expenses and Fundraising

MickaCoo Pigeon & Dove Rescue needs donations to pay for avian vet care for the sick and injured birds that we take in. We prioritize helping the sick and injured birds because they are most in need of our help. (Most shelters still kill treatable injured or ill pigeons and doves rather than provide vet care, though that is slowly changing.)

Many of the rescued baby king pigeons come in sick and often we are able to treat them with relatively inexpensive drugs that we purchase over the counter but sometimes our meds aren't enough and they need expert (and more expensive) care.

And sometimes birds need surgical intervention- the most expensive of all (despite the deep discounts our vet partners generously provide).

Sparkle was rescued by a Good Samaritan in March of 2010. She had a healing wound that seemed OK. A bird's wound, left untreated, can seem to be healing when in fact it is getting much worse (see poor Joy's story for an example of how terribly wrong an untreated wound can turn out).

MickaCoo took Sparkle into foster care in August of 2010 and she seemed to be great! She was a big, beautiful pigeon who thrived in the foster aviary. Little did we know that her untreated wound was invisibly leading toward a crisis.

In January 2012, Sparkle required surgery to remove a 52 gram, rock hard "pus pearl" that her body had produced in order to wall off the untreated infection suffered almost two years earlier (and that was beginning to break through her skin). She was loving cared for by the staff of Medical Center for Birds and has recovered from her surgery beautifully. The cost to remove the laminated mass of exudate was kindly capped for us at $1000 but even so will require a lot of donations to cover. (Click this link to donate.)

On January 31st, MickaCoo volunteer Linda reported that one of her foster pigeons, Penny of the proven-to-count lab pigeons we rescued in 2011 seemed to be feeling poorly. Linda was right and Penny (and her mate Larry) was rushed from her Berkeley aviary out to Medical Center for Birds in Oakley.

Penny's illness was found to be the result of an egg-laying problem. (Note: We do not support breeding and replace real eggs with fake as pigeon birth control!) She was hospitalized for a week. She had the equivalent of three shell-less eggs impacted in and around her oviduct that required extensive imaging (including barium contrast) and surgery to extricate from around her vital organs. (The exploratory surgery is called celiopomy and the removal of the egg material and impacted oviduct is called a salpingo hysterectomy).

Penny is recovering well. Total costs for her care will exceed $2500. (Please click here to donate.)

The other cost that MickaCoo needs to fundraise for is to pay some sort of salary to me as the full time director/coordinator. (I've been spending my savings for the past 3 years thinking that if I could just develop the organization sufficiently, I wouldn't have to spend 50+ hours a week rescuing pigeons. You can read more about this at Salary Worthy?)

The budget for MickaCoo, if I can earn a salary and continue doing this, would be split about 50/50 between vet bills and me as a full time employee. Only about 15% of the birds we rescue require vet care to save their lives while 100% of them require homes if they are to live. That is my job and what MickaCoo does- find homes for birds so that they are not killed for the lack of one.

Since the demand for pigeon & dove rescue continues to grow rather than diminish, we have made the transition to Community Initiatives in an effort to become sustainable. I am now positioned in such a way as be be eligible to earn a salary though we do not yet have sufficient funding for me to draw one.

If you believe in this effort and would like to see MickaCoo continue its work, please donate and, most importantly, sign up to make an automatically recurring donation.

Your care for these birds isn't a one time thing and by setting up an automatically recurring donation (in any amount that is affordable for you), you are helping MickaCoo to spend its time finding homes for birds rather than finding dollars to pay bills.

Thank you.