Cute Doesn’t Count as Simi Residents Battle Squirrels

First, 10 pounds of dog food disappeared from the Shulers’ garage while they were on vacation. Shortly afterward, Liz Sierra’s summer garden was destroyed overnight.

Then a group of Simi Valley homeowners whose properties back onto a 219-acre vacant parcel owned by comedian Bob Hope and known informally as “Hopetown” began the regular practice of running in and out of their houses, clapping and shouting.

“Back and forth, back and forth. It’s the only way to scare them away unless you have a dog,” said Sierra, an avid gardener who learned to tend plants in her native Germany.

But the California ground squirrel, driven off Hopetown by a dry winter to seek food in the residential neighborhood, has proved a tenacious foe. Hundreds of them have been nibbling at the carefully landscaped yards of about six homeowners on Charing Court off Kuehner Drive for more than a month.

Opinion Changes

“I used to think they were cute and darling creatures until the invasion,” said Debbie Shuler, 29, a housewife who has become the spokeswoman for the neighborhood. “Now we’re frustrated because it seems like there is no end in sight.”

Sales of poisoned squirrel bait to people who have noticed the rodent influx have increased throughout Ventura County, said Don H. Anderson, chief deputy agricultural commissioner. But the Simi Valley neighborhood has the worst problem he has heard of, Anderson said.

Every day, Shuler and her neighbors combat the growing squirrel population by setting traps baited with slow-acting, poisoned pellets. To get rid of the fleas the rodents carry, they spray their yards and homes.

The California ground squirrel, Spermophilus beecheyi, found in California, western Oregon and parts of Baja California, Washington and Nevada, builds its nest in underground burrows and can carry fleas that transmit bubonic plague, said Sarah B. George, assistant curator of mammals for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

And this is the residents’ biggest fear, they said: that one of them will get bitten by a flea carrying the plague.

Bubonic plague, characterized by inflamed lymph glands, fever and delirium, was responsible for destroying a fourth of the population of Europe in the 1300s.

“The potential is always there,” said Randy T. Smith, vector-control specialist for the Ventura County Environmental Health Department. “But we haven’t had a human case since a 2-year-old Fillmore girl died of it in 1975.”

Smith said he cannot do anything about the Simi Valley situation because the environmental health department conducts plague surveillance tests only if one of three conditions has been observed: if fleas carrying the disease have been found in a particular rodent population in the past, if humans in the area have contracted it, or if there have been extensive deaths of rodents, presumably because of the plague.

Simi Valley officials, who do not have a rodent-control program, said they, too, were unable to help homeowners get rid of the squirrels because no law is being broken.

“The city does not have the technical expertise to resolve the problem,” said Jocelyn Reed, programs administrator for Simi Valley’s community services department. “We have recommended that homeowners take the matter up with the owner of the property.”

Hope Asked for $111

Before residents had finished drafting a letter to Hope’s attorneys, asking Hope to compensate them for the $111 they have spent on squirrel bait and to permit them to set traps on his land, the squirrels struck again. This time they wiped out $26 worth of flowers planted by Ruth Zuziak. Frustrated, Zuziak called a television station, and a news story aired Monday.

Since then, Shuler has been cited by the county Agricultural Commissioner’s Office for setting traps on Hope’s property and for scattering the poisoned pellets on her lawn instead of putting it in traps.

Vows Cooperation

Hope, who had not yet received the residents’ letter, said Friday he will “be glad to do anything and everything” the health authorities want him to, said his publicist Ward Grant.

“You know, I didn’t know I had any livestock left on that property,” Hope said, referring to the cows that used to graze there.

The situation is not a joking matter to Shuler, although she said she is aware it might appear trivial to some people.

“Right after we were on TV, my husband got a call from an animal activist who thought all this was no big deal,” she said. “She hung up on him after he told her, ‘If you feel that way about it, I’m sure you won’t mind if we bring a few hundred over to your yard.’ ”