The heatwave striking the west coast of the United States is also putting a severe strain on local wildlife. Animals, disoriented and lacking the resources to cope with extreme temperatures, are doing whatever they can to survive in an environment that is no longer suited to them.

Over the past few weeks, hundreds of young falcon chicks, still unable to fly, have thrown themselves out of their nests in a desperate attempt to move away from the sun and find some relief. The increase in the number of raptors in need of care has put pressure on volunteers at local rescue centres, who have had to ask residents for help.

"Hawkpocalypse"

The summer of 2021 is bringing record temperatures to the entire west coast of the United States: from 54.4 degrees Celsius in California's Death Valley to nearly 47 degrees in Portland, Oregon, and 42 degrees in Seattle, Washington state.

Between June and July, volunteers at Shasta wildlife rescue & rehabilitation, an animal rescue centre operating in northern California, took in 60 falcon chicks that had fallen from their nests. "They're still very young — they weren't ready to leave," Jeane Capozzo, coordinator of the centre, who goes by the name Raven, told LifeGate.

The rise in temperatures, combined with a lack of food and dehydration, forced them to jump from a height of around 20 metres. Capozzo explained that the phenomenon is not new: "In 2016 we took in around 25 falcons in difficulty due to the heat, but this year we broke the record in a single week." For this reason, even though the peak temperatures are yet to arrive, Capozzo is already describing the situation as "hawkpocalypse", a combination of the words "hawk" and "apocalypse".

The unprecedented number of animals in distress has put pressure on the staff and volunteers at Shasta wildlife rescue, who on several occasions have been forced to ask local communities to provide fresh water resources to offer some relief to the chicks as soon as they were found. In this way, many individuals — particularly the older ones — were able to recover on their own. The others, the weakest, were instead brought to the centre to receive specialist care. Capozzo reported that as of 25 July, around half of the 60 individuals found had been released back into the wild, while five chicks had not survived.

A problem for the entire Pacific coast

California is not the only state grappling with this sensitive issue. Over recent weeks, animal rescue organisation Blue mountain wildlife, which operates along the Pacific coast between Oregon and Washington state, took in 188 individuals — young falcon chicks that had abandoned their nests without being able to fly in order to escape the unbearable heat. "They jumped — it's all they could do," Lynn Tompkins, long-serving director of Blue mountain wildlife, explained to LifeGate. Tompkins added that, fortunately, most of the individuals found were in not too worrying a condition.

From a practical standpoint, the increase in the number of chicks to care for has inflated the rescue centre's budget, causing serious financial strain: "Last year we spent 62,000 dollars on feeding the animals; this year the figure will probably be around 100,000 dollars," Tompkins noted.

According to Capozzo, the situation currently offers no prospect of improvement: "With the intensification of drought periods, rising temperatures and the urbanisation of the landscape — she concluded — we fear we will have to deal with problems of this kind more and more frequently." The risk, therefore, is that the problem will worsen further in the medium and long term.