Today we’d like to introduce you to DeAnn Waggoner.
DeAnn, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
The Haven was actually started quite by accident. As a child, I never grew up thinking “I wanna do bird rescue”. My goal for as long as I can remember (at least Jr. High School age) was to be either an interpreter or a teacher for deaf children. I pursued that by going to school to become a deaf education teacher- getting my Bachelors and Master’s Degree in Deaf Education and then going on to become a Certified Interpreter. Owning a bird was never a conscious thought. I never even owned a bird until I was an adult and married. A budgie was given to me, and shortly afterward I found it another (better) home. This was the end of my bird experience… or so I thought.
Fast forward about 15 years. I’m now a homeschool mom of 3 beautiful children ages 12, 13.5 and 16.5. Because we homeschooled, we tried our best to incorporate all sort of unusual experiences into our lives. So, I wasn’t caught too off guard when my son informed me that he wanted a bird. Without much thought. I just told him to study up about them, do some research and we would consider it. This was a casual statement that I would have to make good on. He really was serious about it and talked about it day and night for the next forever, until we finally told him to decide what type of bird he wanted, how much it would cost and that he would have to save his money and buy it. Even this wasn’t a deterrent. And so it began.
A few weeks later, we brought Pharoah home. A young, healthy, happy and LOUD male cockatiel. Of course, we had insisted that he give the bird only as much attention as he was able to continue. Yea, right. A couple of months went by. Every time my son would walk into (or go out of) the room Pharoah would squeal and holler for his attention. Eventually, he decided that Pharoah needed a friend and purchased another young male cockatiel named King along with all the supplies including another cage. Yes, he saved his own money for all of this.
Eventually, we realized that they were getting along very well so we decided to allow them to live together inside one cage. This seemed to make things much more copacetic for my son. The birds were happy together, my son was still able to get them out and hold them, but they weren’t nearly as loud because they had each other. Then… IT HAPPENED!
One Sunday afternoon as I’m sitting in my comfy chair doing my lesson plans for the following week my son comes in, very exaggeratedly, puts his hands on his hips and declares “mamma, ‘member that bird we named Pharoah? Well, she’s Phae now! They were “doing it”. We only then realized that Pharaoh was a girl.
Now understand- it was NOT my idea on this Sunday afternoon to spend time telling my twelve-year-old son about the “birds and the bees”. This wasn’t in the game plan. Nevertheless, this was something we had to deal with fast. The one thing I didn’t want was for these eggs to fall to the bottom of the cage and KILL the babies. Obviously, from this one thing, you can tell I didn’t know a lot about birds at this time. I didn’t realize until much later (finally did my own research) that if you just don’t give them a nest box they will play hanky panky and have their fun but most likely wouldn’t even lay an egg. And… even if they did they might not incubate it.
So early the next day off we go to the petstore to purchase – you guessed it- a nest box.
Long story short… 5 clutches later we finally knew the cure for this problem. We took away the nest box… and they never laid any eggs again. We even reintroduced the box 3 years later just to see what they would do: NOTHING. Yes, we were diligent to find good homes for all the babies… we were very careful to make sure the new owners knew how to care for them before we placed them. I had also become “unhappily” involved with a local bird club/rescue.
This particular organization did not have a facility at all. They would receive a call and then advertise (mostly among their own breeding membership) that this bird was available. They would then find someone who wanted it, and then one of their members (I went with her several times) would go to the home- pick up the bird and then immediately carry it to the new adopter’s home. I witnessed this with my own eyes several times. These docile, pet birds were taken from their home and placed either inside the cage or immediately next to another bird within an hour of the pickup. I was just LIVID. There was no testing, no acclamation, NOTHING. It was at this time (2003) that I realized I HAD TO DO SOMETHING. While I didn’t know a lot about birds I did know that there had to be a better way.
During this time, I had been doing tons of research on my own. I had learned so much but still had much more to learn. I had also acquired 2 macaws from someone and made the decision that, while I couldn’t afford to be a private rescue with all the fees of vet bills etc. on my own, I could set up a nonprofit. Which I did.
I found 2 other people who were bird lovers and knew that what we were seeing happen in this other rescue was not right. They willingly agreed to become a board member. They each remained on the board for about 3 or 4 years.
Since that time, we’ve been blessed to find more people that not only love birds but want to give of themselves to make sure that the birds have a second (or third or more) chance. We currently have a board of 6 members. Each member has his or her own special job to do as well as each one pitching in and helping in other aspects as needed.
We remained an all-volunteer organization until we were absolutely FORCED to hire help in 2012. At that time, we hired someone for a whopping 6 hours a week. We stayed with this number of hours for several years. A few months ago we added a second employee for 4 hours a week for a combined total of 16 hours of paid work a week. All the rest is done on a volunteer basis.
As the founder and director and the one who has literally devoted 60+ hours a week to this “labor of love” for the past 15 years, I realized (after having 2 surgeries/hospital stays) that I am NOT getting any younger. I realized that, although the board members are very beneficial to the organization, none of our current board members would be able to continue the Haven if something happened to me. I realized that as long as the Haven was on my own personal property we would NOT be able to continue. This LEGACY which I had ultimately created would end- fall flat on its face if something were to happen to me. This was indeed a wakeup call for me.
At the same time, I also realized that because of some of the health and emotional conditions of some of the birds we were getting it was imperative for us to make plans for long-term housing of some of the birds. We knew this was impossible on my personal one acre (in an established housing edition no less)
I began dreaming. For two years I would drive around looking at properties. For two years I would spend hours upon hours looking on the internet for our new land. For two years I would draw design after design after design of just how I wanted “my legacy” to be developed. For two years I WASTED thousands of hours trying to find something we could afford. There were actually a few times that the owner would land finance. Everything seemed perfect until we realized in each case there was something that wouldn’t work according to the county rules. We just kept hitting a brick wall. As all this took place the board members were very supportive of the endeavor but had no idea how to make things happen any faster.
Finally, one day I realized that we had to have financial help or this wasn’t going to happen. Sure, we had done several fundraisers in the past. We had done things with our own Facebook group as well as via go fund me. Each time we got funds but never enough. We just couldn’t find the magic content that would make it go viral. There had to be a better way. The board agreed.
I contacted a few grant writers. I finally made contact with a group of grant writers which I felt good about. With the board’s consent, we signed up to have this grant-writing team write 3 grants for us. We already knew the three we wanted to apply to… just needed their expertise in putting the words on paper.
Almost immediately, we received a “not approved” notice from one of them. They said it was because we were not a sanctuary. Ya gotta have a sanctuary to get funding for a sanctuary. Made perfect sense to me. The second one came right behind the first. The third, however, we eventually received a phone call interview. The interviewee told me she did not make the decision and that if we didn’t hear anything by XXX date we wouldn’t get it. Well… the entire month I would gingerly open the mailbox… each day I would leave with a disappointment greater than the day before. It was the very end of the month and we hadn’t heard from them so I finally just came to realize we would have to find more grants to write for. Then, on July 2nd, going into the post office for the first time in over a month thinking nothing about it at all, I open the box and almost had a heart attack. There it was! The answer to our dream… or at least the beginning stages of it. Bob Barker (DJ&T Foundation) had answered our prayer.
Within a month we had found the land we wanted. It took quite some time to get all the answers we needed before we could actually put in a bid but finally, on September 1st the 10-acre land purchase was finalized.
We have recently put down a deposit on our first building- a 2000 square ft. modular to be moved onto our new property the first week of January 2018. This building will serve as our office, store and training center. Once this building is on the property and we have all the utilities we will then be able to set up “open hours” for our organization. We will, at first have to bring a few birds back and forth until the birds’ building gets put into place. We have plans for the bird building, a courtyard where the birds can be out in the sun during the day, a picnic area for tour groups, a quarantine building, a boarding facility and eventually a tri-plex which will allow people to travel from a distance and spend time with the birds to learn which one suits them best for adoption.
Yes, this will take a long, long time but for now… we are just super excited that the legacy that was started so many years ago is finally seeing the potential to be here for years- possibly centuries to come. As long as there are breeders there will be a need for parrot rescues. Wings of Love tries hard to encourage adoption instead of purchase and tries to educate the importance of not breeding, however, no matter what… we will always be needed. No matter what… we are doing our very best to be a legacy for our feathered friends.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Many struggles. First of all, we had to realize soon that this indeed was a residence and it wasn’t possible to entertain “hours” of operation. For 15 years, we’ve worked by “appointment only. While this isn’t ideal, it is the best you can do from a home environment. We are so looking forward to having set hours.
I’ll have to say that the biggest struggle we’ve had to deal with was a disease that came into the aviary in 2007. From 2003 (inception) to 2007 we had taken all sizes of parrots from finch to Macaws and Cockatoos. We did test but not routinely. None of us really fully understood how diseases were carried. We didn’t realize that birds could be healthy- yet be carriers that were fatal to other birds.
It only took ONCE for us to learn our lesson. In 2007 we had a bird come in that was a carrier of a disease. Without knowing it we did what we’d done so many times before… put him into the bird room after a short isolation period.
Within a week or so we had our first death. A Cherry Headed conure perching, eating and playing the night before found dead in the morning. Then another… then another… and another. In all, we lost 15 birds dead in the bottom of their cages.
Long story short, during this time my mom was also having serious (eventually fatal) health problems so I was gone a lot. My poor husband was having to take care of these birds that were left alive so I could be with my mom. Understand that at this time we had very few if any volunteers. We just hadn’t developed that much. Once this disease was diagnosed we had to of course immediately STOP taking in more birds. Knowing that the birds we had left were now exposed we had only 2 options. We could euthanize every bird that was left or we could adopt to no bird homes with the understanding that we would have to mandate that they would NEVER allow these birds to be exposed (directly or indirectly) to other birds. We opted for the later. It took us almost an entire year before we could find enough (and suitable) adoptive homes.
Up until this time we had birds literally all over my house. 68 birds at one time in fact! Birds in each and every room. Believe it or not, my husband is NOT a bird person. He allowed it, but it was obvious that things needed to change. Soon after, we build him a new garage on the back of our property and converted his 2.5 car garage into our bird room. We had a restroom, medical room, kitchen/office area, storage area and main bird room all in this small space. For the next eight year’s we’ve made this space work.
After going through this above tragedy, we had to take a second look at what we were doing. It didn’t take us long to realize that we couldn’t continue like we had. We immediately stop taking the smaller birds and started doing routine testing on each and every bird that came in. We soon acquired a separate building we could use as a quarantine room. This building is small… but adequate. Most of the time we take in one bird at a time. Test that one bird, wait for the results and then once a quarantine time has ended and we are sure the bird is disease free we place him into the main aviary. I am the only one who ever goes into the quarantine building. Each time I enter I then go immediately into the shower to avoid spreading any potential disease. It is very time-consuming… but necessary. We are excited to think of the time that we will be able to have a larger quarantine building that has several spaces so we can have more than one quarantine bird at a time.
Lastly, just the convincing of surrenders (as well as adopters) that there is a need to pay a fee for these services. Many people feel that because we are a rescue they should be able to get the bird for free. If we weren’t strict on this rule we would indeed have a lot of people telling us to do things differently. We would also be broke and have to close our doors. We’ve had to come to a point and realize that we can’t please everyone.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
We put the birds’ needs above all other things! Always have… Always will. To the best of our ability. Even before we knew more about the disease testing, etc. we were always careful to feed a very healthy diet and do the very best we knew to do.
Our Haven diet is second to none. We try our very best to make sure that the people who adopt our birds will carry with them the same diet knowledge and give their birds the best food possible.
We are also very strict about all matters of care. We won’t adopt unless the new family meets all of our criteria; criteria that is safe for the birds. Things such as Teflon cookware, cigarette smoke and air fresheners are not allowed in the homes where our birds are placed. These items are poisonous to the birds- most likely poisonous to humans as well.
We are strict with our adopters because we want the birds to be happy, safe and healthy. We also have a 3-year contract that allows us to go back into the home to verify that the contract is being followed. People who place their birds in our care because they can no longer care for their beloved birds can do so knowing that we will do everything in our power to place that bird into a safe new home.
What were you like growing up?
I grew up very happy-go lucky. I loved people… loved to talk. Always enjoyed spending time with family, friends and even those I didn’t know. I was one of those people who never met a stranger.
I was a very “compliant” child and was raised to respect others and always be polite and courteous. I was fortunate enough to be taught right from wrong from a very early age and held responsible for this behavior so I wasn’t ever even tempted to get into any trouble as a child or even as a teenager or young adult. Many might say I was “boring” but in my book, I call it BLESSED.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bird-haven.org
- Phone: (972 617-3931
- Email: de@bird-haven.org
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