Former Santa Rosa cop heeds call to help birds

The birds? Brad Marsh didn’t pay them much mind through the 31 years he focused on human behavior and interaction as a Santa Rosa police officer.

Then, in the midst of yet another fairly lazy day of retirement eight years ago, Marsh came upon an injured towhee, a common, long-tailed bird that looks like a burly sparrow. As thousands of people do each year, he placed it gently in a box and delivered it to the Bird Rescue Center off of Santa Rosa’s Chanate Road.

Marsh, who once spent a good deal of time in the sky himself as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, noticed inside the center’s county-owned World War II Quonset hut a printed solicitation for new volunteers.

Hmmm, the retiree thought, “You can only play so much golf.” He enlisted.

Today, Marsh is a key volunteer at the Bird Rescue Center, a specialist in the release back into the wild of mended and rehabilitated raptors - the powerful, keen-eyed, sharp-taloned hawks, owls, falcons, eagles, merlins and kestrels of which he’d long been only casually aware.

Get the former soldier and policeman started on the wonders of these fast, agile hunters and you’d better have some free time.

“There’s a beauty about them that is almost regal,” Marsh said at a table outside the busy little center’s hospital. He has become sufficiently familiar with avian physiology - the musculature, the function of feathers and wings, the respiratory system that allows extended flight - to be astounded by it.

And Marsh is constantly impressed by how rescued raptors, and also the songbirds and crows and vultures and members of all the species, endure their injuries, their contact with humans and the captivity that hopefully is only temporary.

“They’re extremely stoic,” he said. His appreciation for the beauty, abilities and diversity of birds fuels an avocation that places him at the center sometimes seven days a week.

The most hectic time for Marsh and the center’s other ?80 volunteers will begin ?any day now: the spring fledgling season. Ashton Kluttz, the director of avian care, said it’s not unusual for people? in Sonoma County and several surrounding counties - Napa, Mendocino, Lake, Marin, even Humboldt - to bring in 20 or more young birds a day.

Noted Marsh, “We’ve had people drive three hours or more to bring birds to us.”

This time of year, most of the arrivals are young birds that fall from nests. Kluttz and the volunteers urge that people not be too hasty to gather them up because sometimes they’re walking about as intended, under the gaze of their parents.

Though the nesting season is the center’s busiest period, all year long the phone rings or people appear at the door with tales of birds that were struck by motor vehicles, or flew into windows, or were caught by cats, or were electrocuted on power poles, or that flew into power lines or vineyard wires.

As the center’s small paid staff - 2½ positions - and volunteers prepare for the spring run, they’re also getting ready for their May 2 Festival of Feathers, an open house at the facility on County Farm Road, off Chanate Road just east of the former Community/Sutter hospital.

From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., visitors can tour the center, enjoy a snack and meet some of the ?20-plus resident birds of prey that could not be returned to nature because they’re disabled or were captured when they were young and then kept as pets.

The seniors among the resident birds are Wowl, a 28-year-old great horned owl, and Arnold, a turkey vulture a few years older.

With the Bird Rescue ?Center approaching its ?40th year, Executive Director Greg Damron and the ?volunteers are looking to attract the financial and community ?support needed to expand ?and modernize the mission.

Marsh, the raptor specialist, said there’s about half as much aviary space for birds in recovery as is needed.

Said director Damron, “We’re growing faster than we have the capacity to sustain.” Though the Santa Rosa center routinely transfers species such as waterbirds, eagles and quail to other rescue organizations that specialize in them, it strives to be able always to accept transfers of the songbirds, vultures and raptors that are its focus.

In addition to their treatment and rehab services, volunteers regularly engage in education outreach, taking resident birds to schools, fairs and festivals and talking up the importance of habitat preservation and agricultural practices that limit negative impacts on birds and other wildlife.

The Bird Rescue Center crew expects to take in more than 3,000 birds this year. Its objective is to get as many as possible examined, treated if necessary and quickly returned to the wild.

The payoff for nearly ever-present volunteer Marsh is when he releases a previously grounded red-tailed hawk, great horned owl or other magnificent bird and watches it fly up and away.

You can contact Chris Smith at 521-5211 and chris.smith?@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.