Back-Yard Menagerie Is Urban Answer to Call of the Wild

You’d never suspect from the outside that things are a little different at Ron and Karen Stephens’ house. Although technically in unincorporated Orange County, they live plop in the middle of the modern urban scene, along four-lane Holt Avenue and between 4th and 17th streets. You pass a million houses like theirs every day.

Ah, but looks deceive. What you can’t see from the street is the Stephenses’ back yard, an acre that looks like every homeowner association’s nightmare but every kid’s paradise. All right, it’s a little overgrown. And you have to watch where you’re walking.

Aliso Viejo it ain’t.

“The Boy Scouts love to come visit us,” Karen says proudly, as I duck branches and walk through the bushes.

I stumbled into the Stephenses’ world--a world much like that of my small-town Nebraska boyhood but unlike any I’ve lived in since--when I saw their ad in the lost and found: “Found. Bird. Large.”

It so happens that a stunningly beautiful peacock--just like I remember from my childhood--recently found its way into the Stephenses’ sanctuary. After going out to visit the Stephenses, I felt like I had temporarily left the modern world and stepped into a pastoral Twilight Zone.

“Birds do seem to drop in on us from time to time,” Ron says, as we talk inside the large enclosure where they’re keeping the peacock.

In their living room, the most prominent features are a giant green-winged macaw, which they found in front of their house last December, and a white umbrella cockatoo. A few years ago, Ron says, a weakened Lutino cockatiel fell into their back-yard fish pool. Other unexpected guests over the years have included a golden pheasant, blue herons and various ducks. That’s not counting the more mundane visitors like the crow named Blackie for whom Karen would put out dog food.

Call it coincidence or careful planning by the vagrant birds, but the Stephens family is full of nature lovers. Until visiting Ron and Karen, I thought you had to live in the canyon country of Orange County to let your kids see what theirs do.

Ron Stephens is living in the house he grew up in in the 1950s. A two-lane road separated the family house from orange groves on the other side of what is now Holt Avenue. A flood control channel behind the house took out the barn one year and dumped it beyond the persimmon and orange groves even farther from the house. The son of pet store owners, Ron Stephens grew up with animals. One birthday present was a calf. He once had a de-scented skunk. The family kept chickens and rabbits. He and Karen once had a pig. And Ron has had sheep, a spider monkey and a porcupine.

“Several weeks after we were married, I had a rooster that was being a real pain in the tail,” Ron says. “So one Sunday morning, I dressed it out and brought it into the house. Karen, having always been a city girl, refused to get out of bed until I wrapped it in Saran wrap and put it in the refrigerator. I said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ but she said the only chicken she had ever eaten was wrapped up with a price on the top of the package.”

Needless to say, Karen has come around during their 15 years of marriage.

“I like animals,” she says. “I won’t eat my own animals. I lived in Tustin for 25 years, and you’d go to the grocery store to buy food. You didn’t raise it in your back yard, but now I’ve learned that you do, in fact, do that. So there’s your favorites you save as pets, and then there’s food. There’s a difference.”

On weekends, their three kids and however many friends want to come over often camp out. “The kids love animals,” Ron says. “We have tree frogs that live on the property, and the kids are always looking for frogs or lizards; we have salamanders that live out here now.”

Karen adds that the family has at least 10 flashlights, which are dispensed to the children for their camp-outs and the nocturnal searches for whatever they can find. “To find a tree with three nests in it . . . to see hummingbirds feed their little babies is something most people cannot say they’ve seen,” Karen says.

She says that lots of people, including some relatives, think she and Ron are a little wacky. While not vociferously disputing that, she adds in her defense: “It’s important for kids to learn how to live. I think children need to learn to live with the world and to take care of it. I think it’s important for them to learn you can’t just turn on a switch and live.”

After a moment, she adds: “That’s right up there with learning how to fish.”

I don’t know if they’re nuts or not. I couldn’t live with a macaw and a cockatoo in my living room and lizards in the back yard, but I’m glad there are people who can. And I know their kids are better for it.

That’s how Karen sees it, too: “When you have the opportunity to give children this kind of back yard in the crazy world we live in today, it’s just nice to know that when they come home, they have a place to go and run, have fun, have the dogs chase them through the plants and to learn about nature. You look at a lot of people’s back yards and they’re nothing but cement and a swimming pool, but my kids swim in a pool with a hundred fish in it. People think I’m nuts. They say, ‘You’re crazy,’ but I say, ‘Haven’t you ever been to the ocean? How many fish do you think they’re swimming with in there?’ ”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.