Learning to Cope : Respect Goes a Long Way With Wild Neighbors

Time after time, Charles P. Culp tried to start a flower garden at his home in the hills high above Laguna Beach. Each time, deer ate the tender shoots. Culp, in his own words, “was going batty.”

Then he recalled that during a trip to Africa he had seen farmers scatter lion dung along the edges of their fields to keep gazelles and antelopes away. Culp went to the now-defunct amusement park known as Lion Country Safari in Irvine, bought a 50-pound sack of what someone had delicately named lion “dandies,” and spread them around his yard.

“The deer never have come back,” he said. “I have raccoons now, but they don’t bother me.”

It has been several years since Culp coped with the gentle deer in his own bizarre fashion. But that was only a hint of the problems that face thousands of Orange County residents even now in some well-settled neighborhoods, problems that will be compounded for thousands more as vast new housing tracts are pushed into the foothills and open spaces.

Getting Along With a Rattler

How do you get along with the potentially more bothersome skunks, coyotes, opossums, bobcats, rattlesnakes, even mountain lions and many other creatures that historically claim the creek beds, woodlands and canyons as their own?

A first step is to learn a little bit about them and their habits, starting with the fact that each of them, large or small, carries some weight in balancing the environment.

For example, ground squirrels and their burrows are a headache for gardeners and erosion-control workers, but the burrows help aerate the soil, and the squirrels eat bothersome weed seeds.

Gulls and pigeons may leave unsightly droppings on cars, but they clean up the equally unsightly garbage that people leave on beaches, parks and parking lots.

Spreading such bits of knowledge is the prime purpose of a course offered at Orange Coast College. It is also the goal of a Community Wildlife Institute now being organized by Jeffrey B. Froke, western area manager for the National Audubon Society. “The institute is a coalition involving the county, several large developers and conservationists, with the aim of educating the public on sharing the habitat,” he said.

“We’ll be targeting the large new developments such as Rancho Santa Margarita, Portola Hills and Coto de Caza,” Froke said. By this fall, the institute hopes to set up an information workshop and possibly a small Audubon store in Rancho Santa Margarita “to sell wildlife booklets, binoculars, birdseed and the like,” he said.

The people who move into these new tracts “will have the greatest opportunity for sighting and encountering all manner of creatures, including mountain lions, and it will be necessary for them to know something about what they see,” he said.

Wildlife authorities agree that there can be danger to humans who come in contact with some of these wild animals.

Raccoons, skunks, foxes and some other animals make cute pets, says Denny G. Constantine, a public health veterinarian with the state Department of Health Services.

But all animals tend to revert to their wild natures as they grow older, Constantine said, and can be vicious biters as well as carriers of rabies.

Coyote Attacks

Two children playing in their yards were attacked by coyotes in San Clemente in 1983, and a 5-year-old girl was mauled by a mountain lion this year at Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park near San Juan Capistrano.

“That attack caused a lot of us professionals to rethink the old concept that cougars will do anything to avoid human contact, “ Froke said. “It’s a rude awakening, and we’re looking at it from the angle that the big cats have not been hunted by man for more than a decade, and we’re dealing with a new generation of them that seems to be losing some of its fear of people.”

Aside from the widely publicized attacks on humans, “most of the complaints we get now come from people whose pet cats or dogs have been killed by bobcats or coyotes, or even by great horned owls,” said Joe Oliver, chief of field services for the county Animal Control Department.

And the complaints can only increase as families begin moving into the hundreds of new homes in the hitherto wilderness sections near such backcountry places as Trabuco Canyon, he said.

“The bobcats and coyotes and the rest are not moving in on us. We’re building out to meet them.” And, he added with a laugh, “I’ve been told that the manufacturers of pet foods are making their products so tasty that the house cats and dogs that eat them are just irresistible to bobcats and coyotes.”

Pets in Danger

The cardinal rule, he said, is to keep small pets in the house at night, since most predatory animals are nocturnal hunters.

In San Clemente, notorious for its coyote incursions and more recently for bobcat activities, Animal Services Officer Jim Krause said: “It is best to remember that small pets aren’t safe at night even in a fenced yard, because fences mean nothing to a bobcat or a coyote. Take them indoors.”

Coyotes are still sighted frequently in many sections of San Clemente, even after police sharpshooters killed 17 of them following the attacks on the two children. Bobcats are known to have killed at least one cat in a residential neighborhood, although, according to the pet’s owner, nearby fields contained many rabbits, a bobcat’s natural prey.

Oliver, Krause and others warn against offering food to wild animals, because it breeds a false sense of familiarity that can lead to risky confrontations. In fact, Krause said, San Clemente has an ordinance making it a misdemeanor to set out food that might attract bobcats, coyotes or other predators.

Encounters with skunks may not be life-threatening, “but they can leave an unpleasant, long-lasting impression,” according to Greg Hickman, vice president of the 10-county Alliance for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education.

Whiff of Trouble

Skunks are well aware of the potency of the musk that they can spray up to 10 feet. “But a skunk will warn you before he shoots by stamping his feet and doing a little dance,” Hickman said. “That’s the time to leave.”

If he does get you, or your dog, use milk, tomato juice or strong detergents to help eliminate the odor. If a family of the little black-and-white creatures sets up housekeeping under your house, throw a few mothballs under there and they’ll go away, Hickman added.

Raccoons, he said, are less likely to be encountered because of their nocturnal habits, and, although they make good pets when young, they tend to be mean and unpredictable as adults. Their sale in pet stores has been barred by the state Fish and Game Commission.

Between them, raccoons and skunks perform beneficial services by eating tremendous amounts of rodents and insects.

Hickman said that just about all wild creatures are in the nesting and baby-raising season now. By about August, many young of all species will be out learning what the world is about.

“This means that all of them, especially the mothers, are very protective of their nests or dens this time of year,” he said. “Even little mockingbird mothers will dive at a person’s head or peck at a cat or a crow that gets too close. And it’s the same with the larger animals, so it’s a time for caution.”

Courses in Wildlife

Another source of information about getting along with the furred and feathered crowd--which outnumbers the county’s humans by almost two to one--is a day and evening course called Southern California Wildlife, taught at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa by Robert L. Pope, a former county deputy agriculture commissioner.

It is Pope’s theory that Orange County development came about in a somewhat different manner than that of most counties. Instead of spreading from a central point and forcing the wildlife to the fringes, “It just sort of popped up in several spots, and as each spot grew, the animals and birds were squeezed in between.”

This, he says, may account for the fact that coyotes, bobcats and many others, including mountain lions, show up in what are considered older neighborhoods.

“Most birds have adapted well to urbanization, which provides many roosting places and food sources,” he said. “But developers are out to develop, and we (conservationists) can’t save all the land, and I don’t think we’ll be able to save all our endangered species. They’ll go, with the help of man, like others in the past.”

Efforts to put off their departure are being spurred by such groups as the Sea and Sage Chapter of the National Audubon Society. With the help of a consultant, Dave Bontrager, they are working with the county’s Parks and Recreation Department to establish new regional wilderness parks and to ensure that the ecosystems of all such parks are preserved.

All creatures and plants in a given area are totally interdependent, Bontrager said, and to disturb one is to disturb all.