Clinic Plan for Birds of Prey Taking Wing

These days, veterinarian Scott Weldy is flying as high as the wild hawks and eagles he nurses back to health.

Only six months ago, Lake Forest officials told Weldy and a group of volunteers to shut down a backyard aviary that violated city codes.

But now Weldy is working closely with county officials not only to establish a special clinic for raptors but to build the center near the wilderness these birds of prey call home.

Weldy’s plans call for a 4,500-square-foot facility at Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park--1,600 acres of canyons, hills and hiking trails near Trabuco Canyon.

“It just makes so much sense,” said Tim Miller, Orange County’s parks manager. “We will have a center where birds injured in our parks can be rehabilitated and released. At the same time, environmental education is very important to us and that is what the center will also do.”

County officials are considering leasing the land to Weldy for $1 a year, and construction of the new Birds of Prey Center is being privately funded through donations. Weldy says he has raised enough money, about $500,000, to build a bare-bones veterinary clinic and continues to look for contributions.

“I’m very excited about it,” said county Supervisor Don Saltarelli, who was among the board members who unanimously agreed last month to open negotiations with the Irvine veterinarian. “It’s such a wonderful thing for this center to find a new home in the wild rather than in a residential area.”

Currently, the center operates from a 25-by-35-foot utility hutch in the backyard of a Lake Forest volunteer.

Weldy hopes to build cages at the new clinic that are large enough for raptors on the mend to practice taking off. Large cages “will improve how the birds exercise, which will help them heal faster and increase the number of birds we can take in,” Weldy said.

His plans also include an interpretive center featuring at least nine live raptors with injuries too severe to allow them to be released--a screech owl, red-tailed hawk, great horned owl and Harris hawk among them.

Visitors could then step out of the exhibit into the real wilderness of Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park.

“With the center being right there in the park, people will come out of the center looking at nature a little differently, a little more intelligently,” Weldy said.

Although city officials originally gave Weldy a July 1 deadline to move, they have allowed the center to remain in Lake Forest while he is negotiating with the county. Weldy said he hopes to work out a deal with the county in the next 60 days.

In addition to his regular practice in Irvine, Weldy says he spends 20 to 40 hours a week at the center, along with a cadre of volunteers who help care for the raptors.

Since 1990, the veterinarian’s group has treated more than injured 1,000 hawks, eagles and owls and recently helped rehabilitate an American bald eagle that was electrically shocked by a power line.

“It’s a kind of passion, like falling in love with a woman,” Weldy said. “Why does someone become a park ranger or a police officer? Not because it’s a job; because your heart is in it.”