Peacock Trappers Are Put on Notice

First there were too many of the birds. Now there aren’t enough.

The endless debate over feral peafowl on the Palos Verdes Peninsula took an unusual turn this week when the city of Palos Verdes Estates passed an emergency law banning the trapping or transporting of peacocks and peahens within city limits. The ordinance was prompted by a couple who had been trapping the birds in their yard.

“We don’t want to come in with a big club or heavy-handed approach,” said City Manager Jim Hendrickson. But he and other city officials said the couple, Robert and Dorothy Acciani, left the city little choice by rejecting requests that they stop the trapping.

Continued trapping of birds at the Acciani home threatened to violate a 15-year-old settlement between the city and local peacock advocates that requires a minimum flock of 21 birds in each of two neighborhoods, Hendrickson said.

The peafowl population had swelled to close to three times those targets in recent years, but city and homeowner trapping efforts in April brought the number down to 22 birds in Lunada Bay and 28 in Malaga Cove, Hendrickson said.

Peacock opponents say they’d like to see far less of the big, beautiful but noisy and messy birds.

The birds’ advocates, meanwhile, complained to City Hall that the Accianis were still trapping peafowl. Some residents also began recording license plate numbers of vehicles they saw shuttling birds out of town, Hendrickson said.

Said Gerry McAlevey, a founder of Friends of the Peacocks, with which the city reached the pact back in 1986: “It’s as if people would come in one day and get rid of all the trees, or get rid of all the views.”

The group’s attorney sent a letter to the city saying that bird proponents would start bringing peafowl in to replenish dwindling flocks if the city did not halt the exodus, McAlevey said.

That didn’t please city officials either. So the City Council passed an “urgency ordinance” Tuesday night--the first emergency law the city has adopted in at least 12 years--that leaves peafowl control with the Police Department. Violation of the ordinance carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

“Our hope would be that, by the City Council unanimously adopting this ordinance, it would be a signal to the community that this [trapping] is impermissible behavior,” Hendrickson said.