Moves to Save Wildlife Center Start : Fund Raising Key to Success

Efforts to save Orange County’s only licensed center for the care of sick or injured wild birds and animals have begun.

The center is scheduled to close on April 15 because of state funding cutbacks.

Greg Hickman, director of the 1.6-acre rehabilitation center in Anaheim, said he has a tentative agreement with the center’s operator that if private money can be raised, the center will stay open. Hickman said he can operate with about $100,000 a year.

More than 30,000 wild birds and animals, ranging from hawks and mountain lions to raccoons and squirrels, have been treated at the center in the past 15 years.

‘Growing Problem’

“More than half of the 30,000 were rehabilitated and returned to the open spaces, and if this place is shut down, wildlife care in Orange County--a problem that is growing each year as homes and developments push into the backcountry--will come to a halt,” Hickman said.

At the center, high school students and adults are taught to care for ailing animals. The center is operated by the North Orange County Regional Occupational Program, in which five school districts participate.

Last year, students and volunteer workers at the center finished a 2,000-square-foot shelter for birds of prey such as hawks and owls. The shelter is considered one of the best in the state, workers said.

“What’s going to happen to it if we are closed out?” Hickman said. “What are the kids that helped build it going to think?”

Hickman said he has not yet developed a plan for raising money, but a Newport Beach couple, Sandy and Parke Bryan of Lido Isle, said they are trying to organize a fund-raising group.

“We have always been animal lovers,” Sandy Bryan said. “We have made the long drive to Anaheim to transport injured pelicans and other seabirds to the . . . center. Orange County is supposed to be so environmentally oriented, and if that place is closed down, why not just tell people to go out and shoot animals?”

Bryan said she and her husband are writing letters to legislators, the county Board of Supervisors and the occupational program’s directors calling attention to the need to maintain the center.

“But we’re not experienced at fund raising,” she added.

Thomas A. Kurtz, superintendent of the North Orange County Regional Occupational Program, announced the closure on Feb. 18. Kurtz said that because of state budget cuts, several programs, including those in electronics and nursery landscaping as well as the animal care center, face elimination.

This week he said that if an agency or a group can come up with long-range funding, he would “be delighted” to continue operation of the center at 2360 W. La Palma Ave.

Kurtz said a meeting of the program’s trustees will be held at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday to discuss the closure decision.

Hickman said he now has about 250 creatures and expects another 200 before the closing date in April because “it’s spring, the time when most animals are brought in.”

He said no definite action has been taken to find a place that would accept the animals. They include, besides many native species, some exotic monkeys and snakes.

Several individuals in Orange County are licensed by the state Fish and Game Department to care for certain wild species, mostly birds, but they operate out of their own homes and have no facilities or licenses for handling mammals, especially in large numbers.

One of these is Susan Parkes Randolph, whose specialty is hawks and owls, of which she takes in and treats up to 1,000 a year.

‘Necessary Facility’

“The ROP (Regional Occupational Program) is a very essential and necessary facility,” she said. “I want to help them, but I just don’t have the space in my home.”

Various city animal control offices, such as those in Newport Beach, Irvine and San Clemente, depend on the center as a place to transfer wild creatures.

Michelle Caldwell, animal control officer in Newport Beach, said the center would “be missed by us and all the others.”

And Hickman said, “I was thinking the other night, there are more than 2 million people in Orange County. If each one contributed just a nickel a year--one nickel--we could run the best animal rehab center in the world.”