‘Bird Boy’ Lives Life Helping Wild Animals

The “Bird Boy of Burbank” has grown up and become known worldwide for his efforts to care for orphaned and wounded animals.

After a lifetime of caring for wildlife, Dave Siddon, the 64-year-old founder and director of Wildlife Images Animal Rehabilitation Center near Merlin, is thinking about retirement.

Siddon was only nine years old when he began his career of helping wild animals, with the rescue of a baby mourning dove in Burbank, Calif.

“It used to ride around on my shoulder…and I became known as the Bird Boy of Burbank,” Siddon said.

After that, people began bringing him orphaned and wounded birds to nurse back to health. However, birds were not a new thing to Siddon, whose father raised birds and sold them to movie companies.

Siddon is an avid supporter of releasing wounded wild animals once they are healthy, and said he was 19 years old when he returned his first eagle to the wild.

He got the eagle from Warner Bros. motion picture company while he was trading a parrot for a couple of baby duck hawks. The eagle had hyperextended its left leg because it was strapped to a calf by the film crew so they could shoot a scene of the eagle “attacking” the calf.

Siddon used techniques he learned as a child while in treatment for a bad leg as a result of a bout of polio. The treatment worked, and Siddon was able to nurse the eagle back to health and teach it to hunt.

In his career as a film maker, Siddon has worked on “Wild Kingdom,” “Last of the Wild” with Loren Greene and National Geographic specials featuring a variety of animals and people, including Diane Fossey.

Eventually, Siddon moved to Oregon to make a film and bought the first 17 acres of what is now Wildlife Images. Wildlife Images receives more than 2,000 injured or orphaned animals a year from around the world. Of those that survive their initial injuries, more than 90 percent are returned to the wild.