A Bird's-Eye View

By Amanda Clark • Photos by Steve Floethe

Anita de Villegas has experienced many roles in life, including that of a bush nurse, pilot, and bird rehabilitator. “I stick to flying things,” she observes.

When I pull up to Anita de Villegas’ house in the aviation community Love’s Landing, she’s in her garage showing a neighbor her plane’s engine. Once she sees me in my mommish minivan, she motions me over to park by her green golf cart. Through her friendly mannerisms and greeting, I immediately feel like a welcomed family member, even though we had never crossed paths until that sunny Saturday.

Anita sports a flowered polo and tan capris, her golden airplane pendant glistening in the sun. Without skipping a beat, she points to her golf cart covered in bird stickers. I barely identified a Tweety one and some parrots before Anita says in her Belgian accent, “Let’s take a ride.”

“Okay,” I hesitantly respond, weighed down by my heavy computer bag that she tells me to “throw on in.” And before I knew it, we’re zipping around Love’s Landing, where it’s normal to house your plane in the garage. As Anita drives, she shares that she previously lived in a residential aviation community in Ocala, but moved to Love’s Landing in Weirsdale because she’s allowed to keep birds on the property. As I quickly find out, Anita not only rocks a pilot’s license, she rehabilitates birds, too.

You see, planes are just part of the story.

Anita de Villegas

“I have three lives,” Anita says. “One with people, one with planes, and one with birds.” She pauses in reflection and then says, “I stick to flying things.”

Originally from Belgium, Anita spent the first part of her life as a bush nurse in Africa and South America. She studied tropical medicine and flew doctors around to provide care for people who didn’t have access to medical facilities.

In Africa, she got tired of seeing once-flourishing hospitals disintegrate into rubble, so she decided to stop nursing and moved to the states. Here, she opened a glider business and refurbished and sold airplanes. She eventually retired and now flies for leisure.

During our meeting, she points to her white amphibian plane and playfully says, “I love to go gator watching with that one.” She also shows me her tow plane that she still uses for the glider club. “We use 200 feet of rope,” she explains while sketching a diagram of the exhilarating process. “At 2,000 feet, the hook comes off and I let that glider go.”

And although it’s more than easy to get lost in Anita’s life of nursing and planes, I find that birds are where the meat of her story lies. As Anita reminds me, “I’m a bird nurse now.”

She shares that she's always loved birds, and after retiring, she started to volunteer at a wildlife center in Sarasota then another in Ocklawaha. She later decided to start her own bird rehabilitation center.

“I thought,” she emphasizes, “‘It’s a need, so why not do it yourself?’” Now, Anita estimates that she receives around 150 calls a year to pick up injured birds. On my visit, she shows me her backyard that serves as part of her bird rehabilitation center. After introducing me to two perched owls, she emerges with two half-eaten mice. She casually sets them on a tree stump and says, “This is good stuff and won’t go to waste.” During my time with Anita, I discover that she’s always thinking about the bigger picture and remaining conscious of the role we, as humans, play in our environment.

In the distance, she points to the ten acres of lake property she bought so she could release her feathered friends there on the water. “Birds do not belong in cages,” she tells me a few times during our time together. “The goal is to get them to go free.”

Anita calls her center Feather Land and explains the extensive rehabilitation process. Most of the time people call the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but they only deal with big game like deer, not birds, so then Anita usually gets the call. “If it’s not too far out,” she says, “I pick them up.”

This seems simple enough, but she explains that sometimes the birds are gone by the time she arrives. She told me that she’s put over 10,000 miles on her car on rescue missions alone. “Many don’t realize that even injured birds can be quick,” Anita says. “I can’t catch them all.” But she tries. If she captures the bird, she brings it to the veterinarian where they take an x-ray. Then they decide whether to perform surgery or put it down. Anita rehabs the birds that make it at her Love’s Landing property.

Then there’s the complicated process of letting the birds go. Anita used to drive half an hour away to do so, but she now releases them on her lake property. She says that many birds make their way back to her yard each season anyway.

But Anita’s bird rehabilitation is not all happy endings. She candidly shares that they have to put around 80 percent of them down. You see, a significant part of Anita’s mission involves allowing birds with no chance at survival to die humanely. “That must be tough,” I offer. “We make it quick,” Anita responds. “It’s painless and they aren’t alone.”

When I ask Anita what she wants readers to get out of this story, she answers, “For people to have an awareness that we unknowingly affect birds’ lives.”

She tells me that we can interrupt the chain without even realizing it. “For example,” she explains, “when people spray their property, the birds eat contaminated bugs and get sick.” She describes another familiar scene of a flying golf ball breaking a sandhill crane’s leg. Since these birds need their legs to catch food, this injury results in putting them down an estimated 90 percent of the time. She also sees many birds of prey with broken wings caused by cars. More often than not, they are put down, too, because they need their wings for survival.

“And,” Anita adds, “I see a lot of fishing line.”

Many fishermen don’t think that the line can get tangled in the bird or that the hook can also injure them. This is a common problem for water birds like Anhingas, Cormorants, and the Sandhill Crane. Anita also explained that trash bags get stuck easily in an Anhinga’s beak because it’s designed to keep fish in. Unfortunately, it will keep a bag in, too.

“We need to learn to share our territory,” Anita says. “I would not put poison out because there’s a lizard, and that lizard is important. That lizard is a bird’s food.”

She then says that she encourages others to keep their cats inside. “Cats kill so many lizards and birds,” she says, “even the little mouse they kill is someone’s food.”

Anita turned some heads when she discussed this topic at a recent wildlife symposium where she stated that cats are not native, unlike the lizards that the birds eat. “That lizard is part of the chain,” she reminds me. “When we have no more lizards, the other animals starve.” She pauses and then repeats that line from earlier about being “part of a bigger picture.”

Before leaving, Anita offers to take me out on her airplane, and just like I had been whisked into the golf cart, I soon find myself strapped into a small plane. That was my first time on an aircraft that didn’t have its own gate, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m a tad nervous, especially when I see the glowing letters spelling, “Low Fuel.”

“We have enough, right?” I ask half jokingly. Anita laughs and reassuringly responds, “Of course.”

We fly over The Villages, Ocala, and parts of Sumter County where Anita points out various landmarks. Awestruck, I keep repeating how beautiful it all is. I finally manage to ask what she loves most about flying.

“There’s more than one thing,” she answers, “but I like to fly like the birds.”

Seeing an aerial view of Ocala provides such a different perspective than cruising along SR 200, and it’s high in the sky when it hits me that Anita’s all about looking at life from different points of view. After landing and disembarking the plane to head home, Anita smiles and offers a pun that packs a heavier punch than I first realized. “Now,” she nods, “you really did get to see a bird’s-eye view.”