Bird Lovers Spend Lives Healing Creatures That Fall From the Sky

Linda Blaha takes the heads off of mealworms before feeding them to the sick and injured birds she cares for--the birds seem to prefer them that way.

When Bonnie Geyer goes to the hairdresser, she sometimes takes a cardboard box full of baby wild birds so she can keep them on their feeding schedule.

Susan Parkes, an authority on owls and other raptors (birds of prey), handles about 1,000 of them every year. She spends about 16 hours a day and $200 a month of her own money to do it.

Pat Burry specializes in rehabilitating hummingbirds, some of them babies about the size of the tip of her little finger. She says she loves to travel--and would be able to do so if it weren’t for the time and money she gives the tiny creatures.

The prime goal of all four women is to nurse the birds back to health and set them free.

For all the effort, physical and financial, the four get nothing but the satisfaction of knowing they are helping to preserve a part of Orange County’s natural environment--and the fulfillment of their love of wild creatures.

They are unpaid volunteers licensed by the state Department of Fish and Game to take in and treat the songbirds, the raptors and the sea birds that increasingly are threatened by development in the county, a fish and game officer said.

“There is a direct proportion between the amount of development and the problems encountered by various bird species,” said Lt. Ron Duval, until recently the supervising Department of Fish and Game warden in Orange County.

Duval said: “When the developers move in, it does disrupt the ecological setup, and the birds, especially raptors, move out. A lot of birds are injured or even shot by people, and many are mishandled by people who find them sick or hurt and don’t really know what to do with them.”

The volunteers licensed to rehabilitate the birds “are carefully screened,” he said. “We look into their motivations, what they’ve done on their own, what they’ve studied.

“We’ve had nothing but good reports on these four women, the only ones of their kind in the county. They are a tremendous asset.”

Parkes, who lives in Orange, got her license more than seven years ago after she contacted the Department of Fish and Game for information on burrowing owls for a thesis.

“I always felt strongly about wildlife,” she said. “and I talked to someone at fish and game who also was studying owls.

“The next thing I knew I was licensed, and fish and game was sending me boxes full of baby owls. It started with about 40 of them, and then they started sending hawks, and now I get about 1,000 birds a year.”

She said young birds often fall from nests, lose their parents in some manner or are taken from nests illegally by people who quickly realize they don’t know what to do with them.

Parkes also takes in many adult raptors that have been shot or injured.

“It seems that right after Christmas I get a lot of raptors that have been wounded by bullets or pellet guns. That seems like a bad indication of what parents give their kids for Christmas.”

She holds down the cost of feeding raptors by breeding her own rats and mice in her garage.

Bonnie Geyer, who also lives in Orange, has walk-in cages on her patio and smaller cages and boxes all over the dining and kitchen areas. Her guests include mockingbirds, meadowlarks, pigeons and mourning doves.

Like the homes of the other volunteers, hers is filled with chirps and squawks and requires constant cleaning. And the preparation of various formulas and special foods for baby and adult birds never ends.

Geyer said she started caring for birds about 10 years ago when her daughter, Tristin, now 16, found a couple of baby sparrows in the gutter in front of their house.

“I nursed them and managed to pull one of them through, and that was it,” she said.

Geyer got her Department of Fish and Game license three years ago.

“One day last summer I had 400 birds at one time, all to be fed every 15 minutes,” she said. “We lost so many of them. They were just more than we could handle. We need more backing, grants to help financially. It’s unreal what we lay out: $200 a month from the family budget.”

Unlike the other three women, Geyer said she has not been able to find suitable volunteers to give her short periods of relief.

“A weekend trip is almost unheard of in our family,” she said.

A few days ago, Linda Blaha had 83 birds in her Laguna Niguel home--goldfinches, mockingbirds, scrub jays, starlings, a rather rare poorwill and others.

“I’m usually up most of the night,” she said. “Sometimes, around midnight, I get a chance to talk on the phone to one of the other (bird) ladies.”

Her 18-year-old daughter, Kara, helps; her husband, Larry, is “supportive,” building cages and cooking many meals, and she now can accept tax-deductible donations through a foundation.

“Vacations? We don’t have them, except once in a while for a few days when Kara or one of my two volunteers can take over,” she said.

Pat Burry said that about eight years ago, she “found out what pesticides do to wildlife” and started an organic garden in the backyard of her Costa Mesa home and put out some hummingbird feeders.

“I began to get interested in hummingbirds and went around trying to find answers to questions,” she said. “I joined some organizations and built up my own momentum until people started calling me for information (about hummingbirds).

“I was needed.”

Parkes summed it up for the four women:

“This work is my contribution to society, but all four of us, caring for as many birds as we do, know we are just touching the tip of the iceberg.”