Westlake Residents Again Confronting Destructive Birds

The mud hens are back in Westlake.

Every year between November and March, lake-front residents of the otherwise serene area of Thousand Oaks see migratory birds flock into their neighborhoods.

The fowl, including ducks, herons and cormorants, destroy neatly planted beds of grass. But the worst offenders are mud hens, also known as coots, which ravage public picnic areas and lawns and use the lake as a bathroom.

“You have to clean your feet when you come into your house,” said homeowner Crosby Fentress, 65, who has lived with the problem for 15 years. Fentress said he sends his two dogs to chase off the birds when they invade.

“The grass gets eaten,” he said. “It becomes a barnyard.”

The mud hen is about the size of a duck, but closely resembles a jet black chicken with fiery red eyes. They can strip a lawn to the earth and leave greenish guano behind.

For the Westlake Lake Management Assn., which tries to keep the 150-acre lake and surrounding greenbelts clean, mud hens are more than just an aesthetic problem. Bacteria could pose a risk to the fish in the lake.

Lake-front residents spend $450,000 to $1.5 million for their residences and pay up to $1,000 apiece to maintain the lake, said Fentress, a director of the association.

The man-made lake has attracted mud hens since it was constructed in 1967 as part of the master-planned Westlake Village community, which straddles the Los Angeles and Ventura county line. About half of the 800 homeowners who live along its three-mile shoreline live in each county.

There are other bodies of water nearby, including Lake Sherwood, Lake Eleanor and the Las Virgenes reservoir, but the mud hens seem to prefer the artificial bodies of water, possibly because grass is sown next to the water.

The mud hens have also invaded the Westlake Village Golf Course, where they like to eat grass on the fairways, city officials said.

People also encourage the birds by throwing bread and seeds, despite signs warning them not to feed the birds, Fentress said.

“A lot of people say, ‘Isn’t that cute?’ And they feed them,” he said.

Artificial lakes that provide grass and seeds can become a “coot heaven” for birds migrating in the fall, said John Fischer, a wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game. With development, natural habitats have disappeared, he added.

“It’s not any great surprise to me that we have these problems from time to time,” Fischer said. “We’ve inadvertently created a good habitat for these critters. Basically, we’re setting up a nice home for them, and they don’t know any better.”

Normally, mud hens would become targets for hunters when the shooting season begins in October. But because of restrictions on shooting firearms in Westlake, “I imagine there’s never a coot season there,” Fischer said.

Indeed, in the early 1970s, some people tried to shoot the mud hens, Westlake Village Mayor Ken Rufener said.

“Every morning for about three days, you’d hear this gunfire out there. That was the way they were going to get rid of them,” he said. “It didn’t last long.”

No one has tried since.

Others have tried firecrackers to scare the mud hens off. But the birds returned. Officials concede they have lost the war against the mud hen.

“I don’t think anybody really wants to kill them,” Rufener said. “We just wish they would go somewhere else.”

Hal Poett, president of the Westlake Lake Management Assn., said he believes that some of the birds have gone elsewhere. The ranks of mud hens this year dwindled from thousands to a mere 500, he said, and nobody knows why.

One picnicker who sat on the shoreline to feed ducks said she didn’t think that the mud hens deserved to be persecuted.

“I think the coots are entitled to be here,” said Rene Schwartz, 42, of Simi Valley. “You know, when you think about it, they were probably here before we were.”