Feathered Friend : Birdman of Mt. Baldy Has Been Helping Ill or Injured Birds of Prey for 11 Years

The birdman of Mount Baldy Village was thinking back to when it all started, to a night in 1973, in a darkened hallway in the Pomona College biology building.

Stationing a student in front of a window at one end of the hallway, the birdman, biology teacher Bill Wirtz, stood at the other end with a hooded object on his arm. When the last light was turned off and the hallway was dark, he removed the hood, revealing a great horned owl.

Silently, the owl flew off Wirtz’s arm and down the hallway. To prevent the bird’s crashing into the window, the student waved his arms and shouted. The owl turned and flew back to Wirtz.

Since that night, Wirtz and his wife, Helen, have treated 1,037 birds at their Mount Baldy home, sort of an orthopedic ward for birds of prey, known as raptors.

“That first great horned owl I treated in ’73 was found by someone in a farmer’s field, injured,” Wirtz recalled recently.

“We fed it rats and mice, exercised it in the hallway for a few weeks, then released it. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about how to care for injured raptors, particularly barn owls and golden eagles.”

Wirtz showed a visitor his raptor rehabilitation center, located in front of his hillside home. In one room, private because its resident might eat a roommate, was a golden eagle, perched on a cement block on which it likes to sharpen its talons. It glared suspiciously at the visitors.

“This one will never fly again,” Wirtz said. “We’ve done all we can for him. We’d like to place him a zoo. It’s expensive for us to keep him, he eats a lot of rats.

“A San Bernardino County sheriff’s officer found him on the side of Highland Avenue in Cucamonga at 3 a.m. in the fall of 1983. He had a bullet wound in his wing. He brought him to us and we took him to a veterinarian who removed some broken bone pieces. He pinned the wing together so it wouldn’t drag on the ground, but we knew he’d never fly again.”

Wirtz opened the door to the eagle’s cage and the massive bird hopped out to an open area, surrounded by a 10-foot high fence. The eagle tried to walk uphill over a patch of ice, left over from a recent storm, to a foot-high stone perch. Its long, sharp talons couldn’t penetrate the ice, however, and it slid backward, awkwardly.

Finally, it reached the perch, hopped up, and looked up at small birds flying overhead. Then it looked at the wire screen fence and leaped high, flapping its wings. It reached a point about four feet up the fence, clung to it briefly, then fell back down.

“Looks frustrated, doesn’t he?” Wirtz said. “Actually, we like him to be out of the cage once in a while. He gets good exercise jumping around like that. We handle the birds as little as possible. We like to keep him in as wild a state as possible. I don’t want him to lose his fear of people. Let’s face it, the only reason he’s here is because some clod shot him.”

Segregation is a way of life at Wirtz Ornithology Hospital. “Small and large raptors must be separated,” Wirtz said. “A large hawk or owl would eat a burrowing owl or a kestrel.”

In a larger cage nearby, three burrowing owls and two North American kestrels watched Wirtz approach. Burrowing owls are small, daytime birds that nest in fields. Kestrels are small hawks, commonly seen perched atop telephone poles in suburban areas.

“These birds are all doing well and will all be released,” Wirtz said. “Four of them came to us in the last several months with broken wings. One of the burrowing owls is blind in one eye, but we think he can make it on the outside, too.

“When we see them flying easily inside the cage, we know they’re ready to fly on the outside. But they must show me they can catch food, too. When I drop a live mouse inside the cage and a bird catches it before the mouse can hide, I know that bird is ready to be set free.”

In two second-story wooden cages nearby, a turkey vulture and a great horned owl were recovering from assorted injuries.

Wirtz, wearing a raptor handler’s glove to protect his hand and wrist from the bird’s talons, entered the great horned owl’s cage and picked it up.

“This guy was hit by a car near here a few months ago,” he said. “He acted a little wacko for a few weeks, and we weren’t sure if he’d suffered a head injury or not. But he’s acting normal now. I think he’ll make it.”

While Wirtz held the big owl, Helen Wirtz pointed out the owl’s aerodynamics.

“Look, you can see why owls are the only silent fliers,” she said. She pointed to the lead feather on the bird’s wing, where a fine row of tiny teeth could be seen. The wing’s interior feathers were covered with a dense covering of tiny, soft, fur-like feathers.

“Those two adaptations eliminate the whooshing and flapping sounds other birds make with their wings,” she said.

Next, she lifted the owl’s neck feathers to reveal one of its ears, a relatively large opening in the skull. Wirtz passed a hand in front of each of the owl’s huge, gold-black eyes, demonstrating the rapidity with which its pupils dilate and contract. He also pointed out the transparent membrane that protects the bird’s eyes when it is flying in bad weather.

Other owl species hear as well as they see, she said.

“When you look at a barn owl that has heard a rodent moving about, you’ll see it moving its head at odd angles,” she said. “What’s it’s doing is getting an audio fix on the prey so it can fly right to it.”

Years ago, Wirtz ran out of room at his home for more cages. He was a prime mover in establishing a bird rehabilitation facility at Pomona College. Thousands of mice and rats are raised at the college, to be fed to treated birds at the college as well as those in the Wirtz menagerie.

“It costs from $4,000 to $5,000 a year to care for the birds at the college and here, at our home,” he said. “We’re always looking for contributions.”

“One of our prime benefactors is a chicken rancher who donates chicks to us to feed the birds. That’s a huge help. It costs us $2,000 to $3,000 a year just to feed the birds. We have to pay someone at the college to raise rats and mice. Helen and I live-trap cottontails to feed the eagles. We also peel dead rabbits off the roads.”

All of his and the college’s bird work is financed by the National Audubon Society and the Humane Society, Wirtz said.

Wirtz needs some money that is not in his budget to improve cages at his home. Frequently, raccoons, bobcats and coyotes try to dig into the enclosures.

Often, the Wirtzes find themselves treating a raptor that was once owned by a would-be falconer.

“A lot of people who take up falconry don’t realize you have to be licensed by the state to do that, and that falconry is almost a full-time, daily activity,” Wirtz said. “Anyone who removes a raptor from the wild for purposes of falconry who isn’t prepared to work the bird every day is going to fail.”

The Wirtzes have treated eight golden eagles since 1973. Four were released, two died, one was given to UC Davis and the eighth still is being treated. Some of their stories:

--A Fontana chicken rancher found a golden eagle with a shotgun wound. He took it to a vet, then, for a couple of months, fed it chicks he’d raised. The Wirtzes cared for it and released it in the summer of 1983.

--A man walking his dog near the Ontario airport came upon a golden eagle so weak it could barely stand. There were no visible wounds or injuries. “We did all we could--we stuffed him with antibiotics, fed him and prayed,” Wirtz said. “Eventually, we sent that one to UC Davis for treatment, because we had too many eagles at the time.”

--The eagle currently in residence was found sitting on a tractor by a Claremont man. Examination showed the bird had been shot, probably with a .22 rifle.

Wirtz says great progress has been made in the field of treating injured birds, as well as other wildlife.

“One important development has been the formation of a new organization, the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Assn., which unites people who do what we do,” he said. “I now have a list of 30 people in Southern California who treat wildlife.

“Second, there’s a major raptor treatment center at the University of Minnesota where some new things have been learned on splinting birds’ legs and wings.

“With small birds like kestrels, it’s relatively easy to put their wings in a splint. I simply put a band of wide cellophane tape around its wings. When you peel it off slowly, it doesn’t damage the feathers at all.”

Wirtz estimates that 60% of all the raptors he has treated have been released. Many of those too severely injured to be saved are put to sleep, he said. He has no way of knowing how many of his released birds survive after confinement.

“The eagles have the toughest time adapting back into the wild, because they’re too big to exercise their wings properly in small cages,” he said. “It’s impossible to build a cage big enough for an eagle to practice flying.”

Many of the burrowing owls treated by the Wirtzes are released at the 63-acre Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station, located across the street from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont.

“Burrowing owl habitat is rapidly disappearing in Southern California,” Wirtz said. “They need flatlands, and most of what they once had is now covered by houses. Our field station is a wildlife research area, and it’s ideal burrowing owl habitat.”

Not long ago, on a bright, sunny afternoon high in the San Gabriel Mountains, all the time, effort and money seemed more than worth it to the Wirtzes. They were ready to release two golden eagles they had rehabilitated.

“It’s impossible to describe the feeling of watching an eagle you’ve cared for fly away,” Wirtz said. “It’s elation, I suppose, coupled with a little prayer that it can make it. You think of all the sweat of building the cages, the blood you shed when their talons dug into your arm and all the hard work. But to see them fly off, that’s a great reward, believe me.”

On this day, the Wirtzes drove to a point high in the mountains, put the cages near a cliff, then opened the doors. The two eagles hopped out. Then, without hesitation or even a backward glance, they soared away.

The Wirtzes cheered.