Public’s Bambi Fixation Upsets State Biologists

If you ask Jon Fischer, he’ll tell you point-blank that nature isn’t always pretty, and that people’s efforts to save California’s cute, cuddly animals don’t always have the heart-warming endings of Disney movies.

In fact, the best of intentions often go sadly awry, and the fox, goat or deer the public is trying to save ends up in a zoo, or even dies. Or an adorable creature is saved, but smaller animals that it preys upon hover dangerously closer to extinction.

So Fischer, a wildlife biologist in one of the most populous regions in the nation, is disheartened by the recent Bambi-esque tale of the red foxes “rescued” from their den hours before cars started whizzing by on a new stretch of the Costa Mesa Freeway.

He and many of his colleagues at the state Department of Fish and Game say the episode is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in California, where emotion often overrules science when it comes to management of wild animals.

“We don’t have the resources as society to take care of every animal that is born. That’s not the way nature works anyway,” said Fischer, who works in the department’s Southern California office. “People can go around rallying to save one or two little animals and feel good about themselves and say their job is done, but what we are really doing is winning one battle, while we are losing the entire war.”

The real wildlife crisis, they say, is the sweeping losses of California’s endangered species and habitat to development and urban pressures. And they believe that the intense efforts to remove the Costa Mesa foxes--33 officials working an equivalent of 145 work days at a cost of $25,000--would have been more wisely spent fighting that difficult battle.

“That fox species needs our help like a fish needs a bicycle. They are the most adaptive four-legged carnivore in the world,” Fischer said. “But there are animals that need our help or we are going to lose them, and they are virtually ignored.”

More and more, wildlife management in Southern California, where man and nature frequently collide, is a strange mix of public pressure, politics and science. The result can be unpredictable and disappointing to all parties involved.

Take Coconino the bear.

Last year, a veterinarian in Big Bear tried to keep an orphaned bear cub that he said hikers had dropped off at his office.

Fish and Game officials wanted to return the bear to the wild. But the cub captured the hearts of Big Bear residents, and about 5,000 people signed a petition and lobbied their legislators to make Coconino the town mascot. Eventually, the case went to court, and both sides lost when the cub was sent to a wildlife theme park in South Dakota.

Or consider the deer on Angel Island State Park in the San Francisco Bay.

In the mid-1980s, Angel Island was so overcrowded with deer that Fish and Game planned to kill about 300 of them. When an animal-rights group sued, the agency decided instead to move all 300 deer to Mendocino County.

Within a year, 80% of the deer had died because they couldn’t cope with the predators, diseases and other pressures of their new home. Within three years, they were all dead.

On San Clemente Island off San Diego, the public has repeatedly rushed to the rescue of thousands of goats whenever the Navy and wildlife officials thin the herds to restore the ecological balance. The goats devour many of the plants that the island’s rare lizards and birds need to survive. Animal lovers have managed to capture and relocate some of them out of the line of shotgun fire.

When it comes to animals that capture the public’s heart, the state’s policies are often so easily upended that Fish and Game biologists now wonder: “What is good wildlife management anyway?”

Is it protecting the cutest, cuddliest animal at the expense of one that may be scaly and ugly but much more in need of help? Is it what benefits an ecosystem as a whole, or whatever saves the life of a creature that has won the affection of the public?

“It seems every time we (biologists) want to do something to protect some endangered species, we run into problems like this,” said Michael Soule, chairman of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz and an evolutionary biologist who has studied Southern California ecosystems. “Taxpayers end up spending thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars on really silly projects.”

With so many people and so many animals sharing limited space in Southern California and development moving into the backcountry, the conflicts are increasing, from mountain lions wandering into Irvine back yards to bears ambling into parks in Antelope Valley. Resolving those conflicts and creating a harmonious blend between people and wildlife raises some tricky questions for Fish and Game about what humane treatment of animals really is.

The agency’s wildlife biologists have a basic rule for managing wild animals in this urban setting: Minimize man’s intrusion on nature, and in areas already so devastated that native creatures are nearly extinct, lend them a helping hand by eliminating the threats.

Oftentimes, that means destroying a non-native species, such as red foxes, that is preying upon or crowding out a native one. That philosophy of wildlife management can seem callous, but biologists point out that nature itself can be cruel, with only the fittest surviving.

Even native animals are not immune to that management policy. In general, the state agency’s policy is to destroy, not relocate, wild animals that intrude in urban areas because they can transmit urban diseases that harm their entire species, or throw off the ecological balance in the wild and cause overcrowding and starvation.

If Fish and Game followed its usual wildlife policies, the freeway fox family would have lost on all accounts. Not only are red foxes not native--they were imported to California a century ago by fox hunters--but they prey upon sensitive animals that are on the edge of extinction, including the least tern and the clapper rail, two ground-nesting marsh birds, as well as California’s rare native foxes.

“We failed to clearly show people that sometimes saving the red fox means killing 40 least tern chicks,” Fischer said. “I admit that (the foxes) are cute. But a lot of people who look at a least tern chick thinks it’s just as cute, if not cuter.”

Fish and Game officials say they are put in the untenable position of choosing every day which animals in Southern California live or die. But if they are playing “God,” they certainly have created a lot of “atheists” among animal lovers.

The wildlife agency’s Long Beach office has come under increasingly hostile attack by animal activists, who believe every animal should be treated equally.

“The only good thing you will hear about Fish and Game is from Fish and Game,” said Nancy Burnet of the United Activists for Animal Rights, based in Orange County. “Other people who work to protect animals have nothing good to say about them.”

“This last situation with the foxes was too much,” she said. “Every time anyone in the public takes a stand to protect an animal or some type of sensitive area, Fish and Game takes the opposite position no matter how detrimental it is to the area or the animal.”

Animal-rights activists castigate Fish and Game biologists for what they call a bias against non-native animals such as the red fox. They say if the same puritan principle of eliminating non-native species was applied to people, most California residents would be banished since they aren’t native, either.

“The fox is a scapegoat for them,” said animal-rights activist Hal Baerg of Huntington Beach, who has been fighting to protect the red foxes in Orange County’s wetlands for five years. “They actually call them aliens. But there are zillions of foxes in California and they’ve been here for over 100 years. They found their place in nature, and they have the same value as a tern or a clapper rail or a human.”

Since Southern California’s ecosystem has changed so much, it is unrealistic to try to seek the old natural balance, Baerg said.

“The truth of the matter is what biologists want is a pristine ecosystem--the same as it was 1,000 years ago--and that cannot happen,” Baerg said. “In a closed ecosystem, non-indigenous species do upset the balance of nature. But in an open one like we have here, it’s unreasonable to return it to the way it was, so what you should do is protect what you have.”

Soule of UC Santa Cruz, however, said that “that train of thought will eventually leave California with only black rats and house mice and alien species of fox. That’s what is already happening in many parts of Southern California.”

Unfortunately, wildlife biologists say, the public doesn’t empathize with California’s endangered species, which they say will vanish forever without careful attention.

Biologists have dubbed it the “Bambi syndrome,” when furry, doe-like animals with big eyes bring out people’s nurturing instincts. Many of the state’s endangered species are less-endearing birds and reptiles.

“It’s the cute, warm and fuzzy factor,” said Fish and Game spokesman Curt Taucher. “I truly think Southern California would have been happy if we could have glassed off that section of the freeway so they could see those foxes every day. . . . But if it was the least tern out on that freeway and we stopped construction, people would have been mad at us.”

Fish and Game officials worry that their credibility was shattered when the agency’s director, Peter Bontadelli, issued orders to trap the foxes after about 1,000 people, including some state legislators, called the agency and the governor’s office.

Frustration with the handling of wildlife issues is one reason the Southern California Fish and Game office can’t hold onto its biologists for long. Fischer, who is leaving his post in Los Angeles County to manage bears and other large mammals in Northern California, is the second wildlife biologist to transfer out of the Long Beach office in the past few months.

The financially strapped office has five vacancies among its staff of 15 field biologists. Both Los Angeles and Orange counties are left with no state biologists protecting wildlife, and an agency-wide hiring freeze will extend that to much of this year.

“The tragedy is that we’re told there’s no money to do things like survey bighorn sheep in the San Gabriel Mountains at the same time we’re running around taking care of these red foxes,” said Esther Burkett, who until recently was the agency’s wildlife biologist in Orange County until she transferred to Sacramento to manage endangered species in redwood forests.

Bontadelli, appointed director of Fish and Game in 1987, agreed in an interview that many of his agency’s biologists are disappointed that the public outcry persuaded him to order the capture of the freeway foxes and take them to the Los Angeles Zoo. But he said the end result--removing red foxes from the environment--was in keeping with sound management policy.

“There are probably some people who are concerned about how we got to that point in this case,” Bontadelli said. “But in my view, there is general agreement among our personnel that the red foxes are not native and should be removed.”

One of the thorniest issues that remains in Southern California is the destruction of red foxes at Bolsa Chica wetlands in Huntington Beach.

Since 1987, the state agency has trapped and destroyed 26 foxes that were preying on least terns, and since then, the endangered bird is starting to recover, with its populations higher last breeding season than ever before, Taucher said.

The practice, however, has spurred vehement protests from animal-rights groups and some legislators, who call it inhumane and are continuously trying to stop the practice.

The agency is studying the red fox problem, but has not yet decided on a solution. There aren’t many alternatives to destruction. Biologist say they cannot be safely freed elsewhere in California, most zoos will not accept them, and other states have so far refused to allow them to be released there.

Sometimes, wildlife biologists will make a special effort to save an urban animal by relocating it to a new home. But even they often learn nature’s lesson that what sounds humane may be the cruelest solution of all.

A few months ago, a black bear cub wandered into a park in the Antelope Valley, so Fischer captured it and released it in the San Gabriel Mountains. But about a month later, the same cub wandered into a trailer park in La Verne, weighing only 35 pounds, about half its weight when Fischer found it the first time. He once again took the little creature into the mountains and let it go.

Now, Fischer is agonizing about whether he did the right thing.

“People assume that the animals we release in the wild live happily ever after, like they do in Walt Disney,” he said. “But they don’t always do that. The reality is that I may be subjecting this animal to a long, slow death.”