Call of the Wild : Tired of Budget Cuts, Nature Center Official Steps Down

As a child, Frank Hovore would capture wasps off flowers and spend hours poring over his field guide book to identify them.

He never quite outgrew the fascination.

Hovore and a friend earned money after school by charging peers a quarter to look at their traveling mini-zoo of tarantulas, scorpions and snakes. He also caught rattlesnakes in the Mojave Desert and sold their venom.

The 48-year-old Canyon Country resident retired Friday as the county’s natural areas administrator after working 23 years out of an office at the Placerita Nature Center. Much of his time has also been spent outdoors in the rain forests of Latin and South America where he’s been bitten, electrocuted and faced a variety of other hazards in the course of observing nature.

Hovore said he is stepping down because he is tired of repetitive administrative duties and fighting county budget cutbacks every year. He predicts the centers “will chug along with 10% cuts in various things year after year” until dramatic measures are needed, such as a new taxes.

Many of the county facilities have had few, if any, repairs and revisions during his career, Hovore said. He said recent government actions--such as deeming recreational facilities nonessential in favor of preserving funds for law enforcement--are complicating the problem.

“If you take away all the opportunities for people to do constructive things with their lives, what do you think people are going to do instead?” he said.

In general, Hovore said, he feels more secure in the wilderness than in the jungle of urban life.

“I’d rather walk through the rain forest barefoot at night without a flashlight than Downtown Los Angeles,” he said.

Hovore, a Burbank native, graduated from Cal State Northridge in 1971 and became one of the nature center’s original employees when it opened later that year. His responsibilities have grown through the years--he eventually supervised the county’s 18 nature centers--but still led hikes and trains volunteers.

He planned to continue volunteering after he retires, and will run a biological consulting business out of his home and teach a tropical biology class at CSUN. The class includes a two-week trip to Costa Rica.

“If I really were leaving in the sense of never returning I would be pretty stressed out and traumatized,” he said.

Hovore said the most profound memory he has of his work at the center is from 1979, when it was nearly destroyed by a wildfire. Despite his efforts to fight the fire, the wind overpowered him and blew the flames to one of the outer walls.

“I had to turn and run because of the fire,” said Hovore, who won a county Valor Award for fighting the blaze. “I had flaming rabbits streaking by me and deer running past me.”

Then the wind changed direction unexpectedly, pushing the fire back onto already burned ground, Hovore said.