A Tern for the Better : Wildlife: The endangered birds were frightened from their Oxnard nesting spot last summer. But all appears well this year.

The small, angry bird flew straight at Dave Anderson’s head.

Anderson, a bird monitor for the state’s Department of Fish and Game, made an obvious target. He stood on the edge of the bird’s nesting space, a small stretch of Oxnard’s Ormond Beach that is summer home to a colony of endangered California least terns. And terns don’t like people invading their space.

They are so sensitive to intruders that the presence of too many humans can scare them off completely, driving them to abandon their nests and eggs. Last year, Fourth of July revelers strayed too close to the terns’ nests and the colony disappeared.

This year, however, when Anderson came to survey the possible holiday damage, he found a beach filled with chirping, defensive birds.

“There are just terns everywhere,” he said Wednesday as he scanned the teeming colony through binoculars.

The same couldn’t always be said for Ormond Beach, which currently houses three colonies. Alan Sanders, chairman of the local Sierra Club, said that in 1991, the colony Anderson monitored Wednesday held about four nests. Now, 60 dot the sand. The birds--each about 10 inches long, with a white belly, gray wings and a black cap on its head--dart over the waves and bring wriggling fish back to the nests on shore.

“There is a real colony out there now,” Sanders said.

Around the turn of the century, the birds were hunted almost to extinction, their feathers prized for women’s hats, Anderson said. State and federal laws now protect the terns, but urban sprawl has shrunk the number of beaches the birds can use.

Most of the time, the coast between Point Mugu and the Port Hueneme fishing pier makes an ideal nesting site. The sand levels off well above the high-tide mark, so nests are less likely to flood.

One colony covers a patch of debris-strewn sand just a few hundred yards from a Southern California Edison plant. No roads come closer than a quarter of a mile away, and no nearby parking lots entice beach-goers to the spot. Occasional metallic whines and groans echo from the plant, but otherwise, the site is quiet.

Seclusion, however, hasn’t kept the colony safe from humans, or their vehicles. People have taken wire cutters and blowtorches to the chain-link fence separating McWane Boulevard from the site. In some cases, they have tried crashing their cars through the wire.

About a week ago, Anderson watched as a man drove a pickup onto the beach near the colony--marked off by a short fence and warning signs--and let out two Rottweilers. The dogs ran straight toward the nests, Anderson said. They stopped only a few feet away from a tern chick.

“Those paws are pretty big,” he said. “They could have stepped on a nest real easily.”

Last year’s holiday traffic frightened the adult terns into abandoning the site. As a result, the birds, which lay just one or two eggs each year, probably missed an entire reproductive cycle.

“Those adults will still live,” Anderson said, “but all of the young that they would have produced last year were not produced.”

To prevent a repeat, Anderson, Fish and Game biologist Morgan Wehtje and her husband erected a barrier of steel pipes across the dirt road that winds from McWane Boulevard to the colony. Several volunteers also monitored the beach for activity, Sanders said.

The measures seemed to work. No one drove through the barrier, the beach stayed relatively quiet and the terns stayed.

They have even produced a few chicks, which start scurrying around the sand 36 hours after hatching. The young will begin to fly in about three weeks.

Then, in September, those not eaten by gulls, foxes or coyotes will join their elders in the annual migration to South America. They will return to Ormond Beach in the spring to lay their own eggs.

Although Sanders describes the effort to keep people from disturbing the colony as an ongoing battle, he said this group of terns at last appears to be thriving.

“It’s really gratifying to see an endangered bird have some level of success,” he said.