At a decades-old aviary, it’s bye-bye, birdies

For decades, pigeons have cooed and warblers warbled in a rambling, county-owned aviary near Santa Paula.

But these are hard times for government-subsidized housing, particularly for birds.

Lacking the money for badly needed improvements, Ventura County officials are not swayed by the call of the cockatoos, conures, parrots, parakeets, peacocks — or those who love them. They have placed 29 of their feathered friends in adoptive homes and two sick birds at rescue centers. Over the next few months, they’ll seek homes for the 100 or so that remain.

“Believe me, nobody wants to shut it down,” said Ron Van Dyck, Ventura County’s top parks official. “We’re just painted into a corner.”

In Ventura County, Van Dyck said, parks are expected to pay their own way — and the oak-shaded aviary in Steckel Park doesn’t. More urgent, he said, the tired-looking structure needs repair and a buckled sidewalk endangers visitors. And the whole complex — there are cages within cages — sits on a creek bank that has been pounded by floods and made unstable.

The work would cost at least $150,000, he said. And though bird songs are a wonderful thing, the trill is decidedly gone for the fiscally squeezed county government.

“People say we should just raise the entrance fee to, say, $5,” he said. “Well, who’ll pay $5 to walk around a bird cage? It’s hard enough getting them to pay $2 now.” Some bird-lovers have urged the county to rally volunteers, but Van Dyck was skeptical, saying similarly well-intentioned efforts on county projects have failed.

About 40 feet wide and 170 feet long, the aviary is as big as a small mini-mansion and consists of drilling pipe set in concrete, acres of mesh and, in portions, a tin roof.

At its peak, it housed several hundred birds, many of them pets dropped off by residents who couldn’t keep them any longer. There also were aviary-born fledglings and the famous strutting parrot who would crack up visiting schoolchildren when he whistled and kept repeating, “I’m a good boy!”

The aviary never pretended to be a gee-whiz tourist attraction — there’s nothing “interactive” about it —but it drew its share of field trips and family outings, sometimes generation after generation.

Exactly when it was built is a matter of speculation. County officials say it’s as old as the park, a former ranch that was acquired in 1926 with the help of Santa Paula Mayor Methusalem Louis Steckel. Other accounts say it went up in the 1950s. Nobody disputes that it’s run into hard times before.

At one point, sailors from the Seabee base at Port Hueneme stepped in to shore it up. In the 1980s, it fell once more into disrepair — a county employee likened it to “a grand old lady that sort of fell by the wayside” — but, with the help of a $25,000 renovation by the California Conservation Corps, the county cleaned it up.

For the last 18 years, Cathy Eckert and her husband, John, have cleaned the birds’ cages, given them water, poured their feed and tried to fend off dive-bombing hawks. The Eckerts raised their three daughters in a 1930s-vintage stone cottage next to the aviary, trading their work as park hosts for rent.

The family named all 100-plus birds. They bought as much as 650 pounds of birdseed a month. Someone once surreptitiously dropped off a chicken in their driveway, and Cathy Eckert, recovering from pneumonia, kept it inside with her for a week. It has lived in the aviary ever since.

A couple of years ago, Van Dyck directed them to remove any eggs the birds produced.

“Right then we knew,” said Cathy Eckert, whose day job is working in a flight school office at Santa Paula’s airport.

“I feel truly blessed that we’ve had this opportunity,” she said. “Whenever I think about it, I cry.”

One morning last week, a few bird people dropped by the aviary, just looking around.

“There’s kind of a sadness here,” said Craig Burton, a metallurgical engineer who lives in Oxnard. Some of the parrots perched alone, separated from other birds. “It’s not healthy for them,” he said. “They need more than what’s here.”

Roughly every month, Ventura County Animal Services will transfer 30 or so of the remaining birds to a shelter in Camarillo. People interested in adopting them can find information on the department’s website at https://www.vcas.us.

steve.chawkins@latimes.com