REGIONAL REPORT : Bearing Up With More Suburban Wildlife Encounters

Kathy Jenks gets many calls in the course of a day, and some of them are shaggy-bear stories.

Jenks is the Camarillo-based director of Ventura County’s Department of Animal Regulation. And what has been happening in most other Southern California counties has happened in Ventura: more and more wild animals wandering into suburban neighborhoods. The encounters make for frantic calls to Jenks’ department. But one call stands out.

“It was from my 75-year-old mother, who lives in Ojai,” Jenks said. “She called and asked where my gun was. I asked her why, and she said that a bear was up the street on a neighbor’s tennis court. She said she was going to help capture it.”

As it turned out, the county animal control people handled the bear problem nicely, without help of neighborhood vigilantes. In this case, Jenks said, the bear was suffering from an earlier bullet wound and had to be killed.

But in other cases--and there are many in Ventura County--the wandering bears are tranquilized, hauled off and released into the wild.

“We’ve had an increase in wild animals coming into populated areas in recent years,” Jenks said. “It’s the drought.”

It is the drought and a lot of other factors, animal experts say. The spurt of new subdivisions has encroached onto rural land and the wildlife that depends on it.

Capt. Bill Powell, a San Diego County-based employee of the state Department of Fish and Game, said wildlife is increasingly being shoved out of its natural lair by suburban development in regions that five years ago were mostly the domain of animals.

Moreover, he added, the people who move into suburbia “put out a ready-made grocery store for the wild animals: succulent lawns, garbage cans, and cats and other little animals running around.”

So what seems to be an animal influx is actually more encounters as humans and animals occupy the same space.

“As building expands into areas that were previously undeveloped, clearly houses are coming into more contact with wild animals,” said Bob Ballenger, executive assistant in the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control.

“We’re seeing coyotes, raccoons, possums, skunks, mountain lions and bears” in built-up areas. “Coyotes are becoming very adept with living in urban areas. Some coyotes are even living near the San Diego Freeway. They’re speedy and crafty and very skilled hunters. Coyotes go after targets of opportunity: garbage if it’s available, otherwise live animals, such as cats. To a coyote, a cat can look an awful lot like a raccoon.”

Given that mix of density and drought, the numbers are not surprising.

In Los Angeles County, officials report a 33% increase in wildlife calls during the last five years. Orange County officials say wild animals of all types are increasingly being seen in new subdivisions. Last spring, a coyote attacked a toddler in the posh rural Coto de Caza area of Orange County, biting the child before being scared off by its parents.

In San Diego County, Sally Hazzard, director of the county’s Department of Animal Control, said: “We’ve had increases in complaints about things that could be attributed to wild animals.”

Although recent rains eased the water situation for wildlife, earlier dry periods have cut back the amount of grazing and natural food--plant and animal. That means more animals and reptiles than ever are being attracted to streets and yards.

“The drought has made it worse on the animals, and they’re searching for food and water in areas they normally wouldn’t,” said Curt Taucher, a Department of Fish and Game spokesman.

Even rattlesnakes have migrated in recent years in search of food and water. Los Angeles County officials reported that rattlers last year became far more visible in developed areas fringing Malibu and Agoura Hills. And the number of skunks rose markedly last year in the Palos Verdes Peninsula for the same reasons, officials said.

Most wild animals remain leery of humans and are easily scared off, animal control experts said. But coyotes are becoming something of an exception, experts added. They are beginning to thrive in heavily developed areas and seem to have little fear of humans.

In recently settled parts of Orange County, coyotes are so numerous that animal control officials have circulated a “coyote alert” flier to residents.

“It’s something we routinely do,” said Sgt. Marie Hulett-Curtner of the Orange County animal control agency. “We just try to tell people who live in areas where coyotes also live that everybody can coexist. There are just some common-sense rules people need to follow.”

Among the common-sense rules, Hulett-Curtner said, are: Don’t leave small pets outside at night in semirural areas and never leave toddlers and young children outside unattended. Another rule is do not feed coyotes. “Some people will leave food out for coyotes because they feel sorry for them, but that doesn’t help the coyote learn to take care of itself,” she said.

Mountain lions occasionally have been seen in suburban yards in Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties. The sightings usually produce panic, all the more so since two 1986 attacks on children in Orange County.

In March, 1986, a mountain lion mauled 5-year-old Laura Small of El Toro as she and her family were on an outing in Orange County’s Caspers Wilderness Park. The child survived, and last year an Orange County jury awarded her $2 million, saying the county was to blame.

In October, 1986, a mountain lion in the same park attacked 6-year-old Justin Mellon of Huntington Beach, who also was injured before his father rescued him.

The two attacks took place in a sprawling, rural park--not a developed suburban one. Nonetheless, the incidents heightened public awareness of the fact that mountain lions still live in heavily populated counties.

Mountain lions sometimes venture from the wilds to forage in people’s back yards. In March, 1988, police in Yorba Linda killed a 120-pound female mountain lion as she crouched near a hedge where children had been leaving school. Late last October, four mountain lions wandered into Granada Hills at night. That prompted the county Department of Animal Regulation to issue a sternly worded warning to children and their parents about a potential new danger of trick-or-treating on Halloween.

Just last week, an Ojai couple found that a dying mountain lion had taken up residence in an empty doghouse in their back yard. A Department of Fish and Game employee was forced to kill the cougar when it could not be frightened back into the hills.

State and local animal control employees try to save most wild animals that stray into civilization. “Everything gets returned to the wild,” said Ventura County’s Jenks. She and other animal officials said they usually try to trap or tranquilize stray wildlife. The animals and reptiles are killed only as a last resort.

“They were here first,” Jenks said. And one reason people move out of cities is to enjoy rural life, including its wildlife.

The experts also said the outlook is optimistic for most wildlife surviving in urban areas--at least for the immediate future. Longer-range projections, given drought conditions and no letup in development, are less certain.

For one thing, they said, breaks in the drought--such as the so-called March miracle rains of last spring--already have revived links in the natural food chain. “The health of the animal population really bounces back when there’s a little rain,” said Taucher of the Fish and Game Department. “There are already more deer, for instance, because of the rains from last March.”

Another optimistic development, experts said, is that city and county planners are more aware of the need to link parks and preserves by way of undeveloped natural corridors. Such corridors tie together open spaces and allow wildlife to wander, as they must, to seek food, water and shelter, the experts said.

At the vast Bolsa Chica wetlands preserve near Huntington Beach in Orange County, an environmental group, the Amigos de Bolsa Chica, successfully battled to save most of the wetlands from development.

A key element in the 1989 agreement worked out with the land developer, said Adrianne Morrison, executive director of the group, was to guarantee a narrow land link between Bolsa Chica and Central Park in Huntington Beach. The result, she said, is that wildlife will have two big areas to roam between for living and foraging.

Wild Animal Encounters

Los Angeles County has experienced a big increase in the number of calls for handling wild animals in the past five years. County animal-control officials say the increase is due to the drought and to ever expanding development of once-rural land.

The following are the number of wild animal incidents per fiscal year in the county:

Year & Number

1986-87: 7,776

1987-88: 8,178

1988-89: 9,711

1989-90: 9,983

1990-91: 10,355