Wild Things

At the turn of the century, a thespian ornithologist named Eugene Schieffelin released all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays into Central Park. Schieffelin thought that this would enhance the Bard’s popularity with New Yorkers; instead, it inspired near-universal hatred among them for starlings. Southern California is also home to unlikely wildlife emigres. Some are feral pets gone native; others were deliberately turned loose by daffy owners, a la Schieffelin, in the hope of making California seem more like Kansas. Here’s a roundup.

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Monkeys: During the ‘20s, Virginia Robinson, daughter-in-law of the department store magnate, maintained free-ranging monkeys in the palm grove of her 6.2-acre Beverly Hills estate. The story goes that one evening the Beverly Hills police received a frantic summons from a matron reporting a peeping Tom. When the cops arrived, the alleged perp turned out to be one of Robinson’s monkeys. Urban legend holds that descendants of Robinson’s monkeys still call Beverly Hills home. Skeptics point out that none of them have been spotted driving a Range Rover or screeching at the valets at Barneys.

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Parrots: According to Kimball Garrett of the L.A. Natural History Museum, there are nine species--all non-native--residing throughout greater Los Angeles. (They seem particularly fond of the San Gabriel Valley and its many mature shade trees.) The parrots are probably the progeny of pets released when their owners discovered they weren’t a feathered green accessory to match the sofa. The rowdy birds can also be sighted at Point Fermin Park in San Pedro and Live Oak Park in Temple City.

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Cardinals: Released in the 1920s by an El Monte minister homesick for the Midwest, about 20 pairs still reside at the Whittier Narrows Nature Center. Cardinals normally live in colder climes but “nobody seems to have told these guys,’ says Carmen Diaz of the Whittier Area Audubon Society. For Angelenos interested in exotic non-native birds, Diaz suggests the pair of African red bishops living in the Malibu Lagoon. “At first they look like red scraps of paper,’ she says, “but keep looking.’

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Chickens: Even jaded Angelenos agree there’s something paranormal about chickens pecking and scratching in the dust next to the Hollywood Freeway. Precisely how these fowl came to set up housekeeping at the Vineland Avenue onramp has never been determined to anyone’s satisfaction. One theory holds they escaped from a nearby ranch; the generally accepted explanation is that they flew the coop when the truck carrying them overturned.

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Bison and Pigs:

In 1924, 14 head of North American bison arrived on Catalina Island to appear as themselves in a Western being filmed there. Rather than pay to ship the animals back, the film crew--in a fine example of Hollywood accounting--simply left them. Today, about 300 of their descendants roam the island, where they probably bump into the 2,000 or so feral pigs that also call Catalina home. Introduced in the 1920s by ranchers concerned about rattlesnakes, the pigs ate the snakes and saw no reason to leave.

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Camels: In January 1858, Edward Fitzgerald Beale and 20 men rode into Los Angeles with 14 camels in tow, part of an experiment by the Army to have dromedaries transport supplies through the California deserts. Posted in San Pedro, Fort Tejon and Fort Mojave, the camels’ Army career ended with the outbreak of the Civil War. Beale kept some at his El Tejon ranch, where he reportedly trained two to pull a sulky he rode the 100 miles into L.A, but others simply vanished into the desert. Descendants of Beale’s camels are said to still roam Southern California’s deserts, a notion that Sally Cunkelman, an archeologist based in Barstow with the California Bureau of Land Management, finds unlikely. “I got a call five or 10 years ago about a camel sighting,’ Cunkelman says, “but I think they might have been smoking something.’