Birds in Westminster Are Frustrated, and This Woodsman Blames the City

In any dispute between city bureaucracy and a 76-year-old bird lover with cats named Henrietta and Mr. Finnegan, is there a question which side to be on?

So, I’m with Thaddeus Laird in his gripe against Westminster, not knowing for sure if he’s right but admiring his passion.

Laird was looking out his window last week when he saw a tree-trimming crew coming by on Pyle Circle, where he and his wife have raised a family over the last 38 years. The crew set its sights on a 30-foot Australian pepper tree next door and began doing its thing. Laird was aghast, knowing the tree to be the home of three sets of doves, a mockingbird couple and a pair of hummingbirds. “There were five families there,” he says.

I’d normally be skeptical of someone’s certainty about such a thing, but Laird assures me that he’s a woodsman from way back, having grown up in Savannah, Ga., and then becoming a craftsman in wood. He convinces me by showing me dozens of wooden bowls, containers and other items he’s made over the years. In addition, he pulls out a third-place ribbon he won at the 1994 Orange County Fair for a lovely bowl. OK, the man knows his wood and his trees.

I ask him to describe what he saw with the cutting crew.

“I was devastated,” he says. “I was really quite perturbed. They came in like the Army. Two big trucks with cherry-pickers. They just devastated the trees, really. They bumped the little birds out of their nests. The cats didn’t mind. They got a few of the babies.”

Laird is a little short on evidence. He can’t produce a fallen nest for me, because, he says, the truck that trails the cherry-picker scoops up the fallen limbs and grinds them into mulch. That’s where the nests went--along with an unknown number of baby birds, he says.

That makes his case a circumstantial one. “You got anything else?” I ask.

“A baby bird got knocked right out of the tree,” he says. “I went to pick it up, but Henrietta beat me to it. So, [the bird] didn’t go to waste. It went back to nature.”

Any other proof of what happened?

“Doves have been flying around ever since,” he says, “looking for a new mate. They’re frustrated. You can tell a frustrated bird.”

A good reporter would have asked a follow-up question, but I didn’t.

Brad Fowler, the public works director for Westminster, couldn’t have been more cordial in discussing Laird’s complaint. Problem is, Fowler hadn’t heard anything about it until I called and, as a result, couldn’t do much about it.

He says, however, that the city’s tree-trimming policy is to avoid cutting down branches where birds are nesting. In his four years on the job, Fowler says, he’s never heard a complaint about birds being rousted by the crews.

The workers on Laird’s street probably were from a private company under contract to the city, as opposed to being city employees, Fowler says. A person who took my call at the company said no one was available to respond to Laird’s remarks.

That’s where the matter rests. Laird still was unhappy at week’s end, questioning why crews would be cutting trees this time of year when, according to him, “they’re in early bloom.” That period, he says, runs roughly from late April to mid-June.

Laird concedes that he didn’t complain to City Hall. Fowler says he would have been happy to discuss the matter had Laird telephoned.

“We’re doing more tree-trimming now than in recent years,” Fowler says. “We’re catching up. There was a time when we didn’t have funds and weren’t doing any tree-trimming.”

Laird is a former Marine recruiter and postal carrier. He faces eye surgery later this month and has a bit of a hearing problem. As we stand outside his house, he spots a mockingbird on a phone line across the street.

“When I used to have teeth, I could whistle what he wanted to hear,” he says.

We shake hands, and I ask Laird if he can put the birds’ nest incident behind him.

“I rebound quickly,” he says. “But this aggravated the crap out of me.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.