Wildlife Service Urged to Protect Pacific Pocket Mouse : Environment: Speakers at hearing ask that the animal be placed on permanent endangered species list. Such status would affect planned Dana Point Headlands resort.

A handful of people braved a driving rain Thursday night to urge government protection for the Pacific pocket mouse, a 4-inch-long rodent that could delay the construction of a proposed $500-million resort on the Dana Point Headlands.

*

“I’m here to try to save a little bit of the Headlands that my family grew up with,” said Bob Larwood, a 26-year Dana Point resident. “The Headlands is a wondrous place.”

Said Tony Gallagher, a member of a group called Save the Headlands: “This is the only part of Dana Point that is still natural.”

The comments were made at a public hearing on a proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to place the mouse on the permanent endangered species list.

The service listed the mouse as endangered on an emergency basis last month after 39 of the mice, believed to be the last surviving members of the species worldwide, were discovered in about four acres of coastal sagebrush on the Dana Point Headlands, a peninsula just north of Dana Point Harbor.

The mouse habitat lies directly in the path of a proposed resort that would include a 400-room hotel complex and 394 homes to be built by Newport Beach-based M.H. Sherman Co. and Chandis Securities Co. on 121 acres overlooking Dana Point Harbor.

The mouse “is part of California’s natural heritage,” Fred Roberts, a Fish and Wildlife Service botanist, said at the time. “They are an important part of the ecology.”

The emergency listing gave officials 240 days--or until Sept. 28--to decide whether to place the pocket mouse permanently on the endangered species list. If that happens, Roberts said, the developers will not be allowed to proceed without first convincing the service that construction would not further endanger the mouse.

“They would have to come up with a habitat conservation plan built into this project that would show it would allow enough room to satisfy the scientists that the species could survive there,” said Connie Babb, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Chandis Securities, a firm that oversees the financial holdings of the Chandler family, is a principal stockholder of Times Mirror Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times.

The pocket mice, which had not been seen since 1971, were rediscovered during a survey conducted by a biologist last July at the request of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Once common as far as two miles inland along the Southern California coast from Los Angeles County’s Marina del Rey and El Segundo south to the Mexican border, the mouse--believed to be the smallest member of the rodent family--has fallen victim to development and hungry cats.

“The urbanization of the coast all but wiped them out,” Roberts said. “They’ve probably been at the Dana Point Headlands the whole time, but nobody’s looked for them.”

Thursday’s hearing was attended by about 25 people, seven of whom spoke in favor of the endangered designation for the mouse. No one spoke against it.

“Maybe the weather kept (advocates of development) away,” Babb said. “I am extremely surprised; they have been extremely vocal.”

Dana Point’s Tiny Mouse The Pacific pocket mouse is only four to six inches long from its nose to the tip of its tail.