ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : A Cute Little Bird Sets the Halls of Academe Aflutter : A UCI group wants to protect the campus habitat of the California gnatcatcher from being used as the site of a residence and entertainment area for the chancellor.

Being endangered these days is a pretty good gig. If you happen to be, say, a snail darter, it’s almost like being protected by the Secret Service. No worries about ending up in a fishnet, or on the wrong end of someone’s 12-gauge, or having your natural habitat turned into a yogurt bar. Once people find out that you’re a bit on the rare side, you get coddled like a pasha. Ask any giant panda.

So the California gnatcatcher has to be feeling pretty smug these days. It hasn’t officially been put on the endangered species list yet but it’s already scarce enough to prompt a group of folks at UC Irvine to give their chancellor the heave rather than ask the gnatcatcher to shove over a few feet.

The bird happens to be the current tenant of an area overlooking the UCI campus--a plateau of coastal sagebrush, buckwheat and scrub--that the university wants to use as a site for a $3-million official residence and entertainment facility for the university’s chancellor. University officials, biologists and environmental specialists have said that the gnatcatcher will be protected, or will be relocated to another suitable spot on campus.

Several students who call themselves the Social Awareness Collective don’t like this, however. They point out that the gnatcatcher’s natural coastal habitat is vanishing along the California coast and that plowing up the UCI plateau for the chancellor’s new digs would only reduce it further. During UCI’s recent graduation exercises, they planned to hand small paper origami birds, printed with the words “Don’t kill me,” to Chancellor Jack W. Peltason as Peltason handed them their diplomas.

(Peltason, as it turned out, never got the birds. Suffering from a bad back during the ceremonies, he sat while a group of deans stood and handed out the diplomas. UCI officials don’t recall seeing any folded birds, either, although a few flyers apparently were distributed.)

All this probably is not causing Peltason to pace the floor at night, however (he said he wouldn’t live in the new house anyway; it would be for his successor). So what if they have to build the place somewhere else? After all, it isn’t like the man is currently living in a refrigerator carton behind the administration building. The blue suits and the white smocks should be able to get together on this eventually.

The furor would have been a lot more interesting, however, if the object of the students’ protective instincts was not the gnatcatcher--who is is a plump little dickens and cute enough to star in a Disney cartoon--but, say, a leaf-nosed bat.

The leaf-nosed bat, up close, is a truly repulsive-looking piece of work and, like most bats, tends to frighten people. In full-face, they are fearsome looking, with undertones of malevolent aggression. People think every one of them used to be Bela Lugosi.

They are, of course, not like that at all. They eat dozens of harmful insects each day, leave humans pretty much alone and produce a fertilizer that makes the commercial stuff seem like low-grade concrete. But they remain, nevertheless, breathtakingly, shatteringly, stupefyingly ugly. And, consequently, hard to love.

So it’s sort of a shame that they don’t nest in the hills above UCI, because they would make a wonderful litmus test for committed environmentalists. After all, if you’re willing to tell the guy who runs your school--at your graduation, no less--that you don’t want him moving into your neighborhood because his house will disturb a creature that looks like Yogi Berra with a murderous hangover, the Sierra Club ought to strike you a medal.

I hope nobody turns up a pit of rattlesnakes in the hills around UCI. Before you know it, someone will want to wipe out the snakes and build a gym or something on the spot, and then more concerned students will have to fight down their natural urge to cheer and instead mount an “Our Friend the Poisonous Snake” campaign.

God knows what they’d hand to the chancellor at their graduation to promote that one.