Endangered Songbird in Project’s Way : Last of Leasts Will Get Hearing

A series of hearings will begin this week on how to preserve the habitat of an endangered songbird whose home is in the path of a proposed $1.2 billion flood control project on the Santa Ana River.

Once as common as a sparrow, only about 250 pairs of the least Bell’s vireo remain in the wild, with a substantial number of those found upriver from Prado Dam along the Orange-Riverside county line.

A plan to salvage the bird’s marshy habitat, before long-awaited flood improvements are made to the Santa Ana River, will be the aim of the hearings, which start Thursday at 10 a.m. at the Riverside County Flood Control District, 1995 Market St. in Riverside.

Officials from five counties--Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and San Diego--will participate in the monthly hearings, which are scheduled to run through early next summer, when a report is expected on ways to protect the least Bell’s vireo and on the flood control project’s impact.

The migratory range of the small songbird is Northern Mexico to the Santa Ynez River in Santa Barbara. The preferred habitat is dense woodlands along rivers and streams.

More than a dozen public works projects in Southern California have been proposed in areas now inhabited by the bird. Residential and commercial developments have driven the species from its nesting grounds.

Moreover, scientists say, the brown-headed cowbird has become a major nemesis of the least Bell’s vireo by laying its eggs in nests of the endangered songbird, disrupting the reproductive cycle of the Bell’s vireo.

Efforts to trap and relocate the cowbird--known to biologists as a “social parasite,” because it tries to get other bird species to raise its young--have been moderately successful, thus easing the threat on the Bell’s vireo, says Charles Collins, a biologist at California State University, Long Beach.

Part of the least Bell’s vireo study on the Santa Ana River, which runs from the San Bernardino Mountains to Huntington Beach and the Pacific, will be covered by a $250,000 appropriation from the Legislature. The money was approved earlier this year to help pay for three similar habitat studies in San Diego County.

While the current hearings will focus on the bird’s Santa Ana River habitat, Mike McLaughlin, a planner with the San Diego Assn. of Governments, said eventually the goal is to establish a regional plan to protect the species.

“The idea is to put together a comprehensive management plan which is going to save the bird,” says McLaughlin, one of the coordinators of the Santa Ana River study. In 1986, a census found 24 pairs of least Bell’s vireo living upriver from Prado Dam, which under the flood control plan would be raised 30 feet to prevent flooding downstream in Orange County during a flood of the magnitude that occurs once every 50-100 years.

McLaughlin says the Santa Ana River plan will be incorporated into the agency’s master plan for saving the bird in Southern California. He said more than 100 agencies throughout the region are involved in the project.