The Farallon Islands are a wildlife refuge off the coast of San Francisco that is critical to a broad diversity of seabirds and marine life. The scientific research and conservation efforts there are essential. Grateful to see the terrific work of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Point Blue Conservation Science in action.

In 1991, researchers from Monterey Bay Aquarium were watching a wild sea otter mother who had lost her pup and was still swimming around the area calling for him, which was already heartbreaking enough, but at almost exactly the same time the aquarium happened to have an orphaned male pup named Elwood who was also spending a significant portion of his day calling for a mother he didn’t have. So at some point the researchers found themselves in the extremely specific situation of having one sea otter desperately looking for a baby and one baby desperately looking for a sea otter mom, and apparently someone said the scientific equivalent of “okay, this might be stupid, but hear me out.” They brought Elwood out to the bay, found the female still there, put him into the water and waited to see what would happen. She swam over, inspected this random baby the humans had just delivered to her… and adopted him... The next morning they were still together, and researchers continued seeing them together for months. And because apparently “what if we give the sad baby to the sad mom?” can occasionally be a legitimate contribution to conservation science, this accidental little family helped inspire Monterey Bay Aquarium’s later surrogate-mother program for orphaned sea otters. I love wildlife rehabilitation because sometimes it involves years of research, specialized veterinary medicine and extremely complicated protocols, and sometimes somebody just looks at two animals and goes, “I have an idea.”