Woodbridge Put Out Welcome Mat; the Coots Ate It

Even in the most planned and managed community in Orange County, plans have gone askew.

The man-made lakes of Woodbridge in Irvine have attracted--that’s right--migratory water fowl, and they refuse to conform to the community’s regulations.

The worst offender by far is the coot, officially the American coot. By the hundreds, they arrive uninvited in the fall and for months meander ashore to eat the lush Irvine landscaping. They strip sections of the shore lawns down to bare earth, then deposit the metabolic results into the lakes and onto the nearby decks, walkways and bicycle paths.

When they’re good and ready, they depart in the spring, leaving behind them a $10,000-landscape repair job and a harassed homeowner association manager ready to tear out his hair.

Robert N. Figeira is executive director of the Woodbridge Village Assn., a quasi-city government for the 30,000-person community. If the coots were homeowners, he would know how to handle them. Like any other nonconforming resident, they’d be cited in no time and hauled before the association’s board of directors to explain why they should not be fined or taken to court.

But Figeira’s best efforts against the coots have been in vain. The coots are winning the war.

What’s so hard about getting rid of some coots? At first glance, not much.

The slate-gray, chicken-sized Fulica americana , a member of the rail family, is not on the endangered species list, or anywhere near it. Even the National Audubon Society, arch-advocate of bird conservation, concedes that coots can be pests. The society is concerned only that their culling be done legally.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has tried to encourage hunting of the coot by boosting the daily maximum number of coots a hunter can kill to 25, a huge number compared to other waterfowl.

“I would issue a permit tomorrow (for Woodbridge) to shoot them,” said the man who has the power to do it, David L. McMullen, the service’s assistant western regional director.

Big deal, says Figeira. That’s where we started nearly 10 years ago, “and it seems like every time we turn around we end up in a Catch-22,” he said. “It’s getting to be a joke.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service will authorize shooting the coots, but Irvine has an ordinance against discharging firearms within the city, and city officials refuse to make an exception, Figeira said.

Shooting is not practical anyway, he conceded. “Can you imagine the outcry from people waking up in the morning and here we are blasting birds in the lake? God!”

How about catching them and taking them somewhere else?

“I can issue a permit for trapping and relocation, but the state of California is against that for fear of spread of avian diseases,” McMullen said.

“We don’t want them taken out and released in one of our wildlife areas,” explained Dan Connelly, waterfowl project coordinator for the state Department of Fish and Game.

Figeira has tried it, on a small scale, and is dissatisfied.

“We can remove the ducks that are not mallards--mallards are extremely protected. But the white Easter duck (domesticated ducklings given as Easter gifts, then dumped), we hire people to catch them. They’re relocated,” Figeira said.

Where?

“They’re just relocated, OK?”

But when it comes to catching coots, it’s another story.

“I spend 100 man-hours and catch two coots,” he said. “That bird is so attuned to the wild that it won’t walk on anything (alien to it). We’ve tried netting them. We put nets down, and we put bait in there, but the coots won’t come in. They won’t touch a net. They know natural soil compared to a lawn with a net on it. You can’t get close to 95% of them them.” What about drugging the bait? Figeira has been frustrated there as well.

He obtained a permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service to sedate the coots with food laced with tranquilizers. He envisioned the coots keeling over, then being taken to a veterinarian for euthanasia.

But the attempts to use the drugs resulted in administrative catastrophe. The bait was spread, but the mallards wanted a share too, and four of them died of drug overdose. “They will just sit there and eat until they die,” Figeira complained.

Figeira’s permit died along with them. “Such unauthorized taking of protected migratory birds is a serious permit violation and in direct conflict with the provisions of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act,” McMullen’s letter stated. The permit to use drugs was immediately suspended and will remain so “unless the Woodbridge Village Assn. can ensure that no mallard ducks or other protected, non-target species will be taken,” McMullen declared.

Regular Visitors

Figeira is trying to devise such a method, and last February gathered federal and state administrators in his office to confer about it. He expects to try again in the fall, when the coots return to Irvine as regularly as the swallows do to Capistrano in the spring.

Wildlife officials say Woodbridge should have expected no different when the lakes were first planned.

Irvine lies beneath the Pacific Flyway, an invisible, overhead Interstate 5 for birds migrating in fall and spring. Building large bodies of water beneath it, then ringing them with the coot’s equivalent of a gourmet buffet, is like building a Coot Motel. Coots check in, and they don’t want to check out.

“People who have these permanent water areas surrounded by lawns, they’re going to have coot problems,” Connelly said. “Once the coots establish a tradition there, it’s very hard to discourage them.” McMullen said that 95% of his requests to cull coots come from Southern California, where developers love to build golf course ponds and planned-community lakes. “They create an attraction, then they want to kill off the animals when they’re attracted,” McMullen said. “They develop the attraction without any consideration of what they’re going to do when they suck in these animals.”

Ray Watson, president of the Irvine Co. when the Woodbridge development was being planned, said Woodbridge was designed using the theme of “a family recreation community.” That led to the idea of lakes for boating and fishing.

Water Created Value

“We did a lot of research on whether it was cost-effective,” Watson recalled. It turned out that “a lake uses less water than a green belt of the same size. . . . It was also felt that the water would create more value (in the sales price of lake-front houses) than a greenbelt would.”

The boost in sales prices would more than pay for the lakes’ construction costs, he said. According to Figeira, lake-front houses now sell quickly for $100,000 to $150,000 more than identical houses across the street.

Irvine Co. planners estimated maintenance costs, Watson said, but he didn’t recall anyone taking into account the impact of migratory birds. “We certainly knew we, hopefully, would attract wildlife,” Watson said.

Figeira is sensitive about the developers’ intentions. The typical developer of a man-made lake seems not to care about the problems he leaves behind, Figeira said. “As soon as the money’s in his pocket, he’s gone.”

“I don’t want to be arrogant about it,” Watson said, “but when you’re planning an apartment, say, and you’re trying to make it nice and attractive--greenbelts and landscaping and some water--if you ask the guy who’s going to (manage) it, he wants a concrete box, because it’s easier to maintain. When he’s through, nobody would want to live in the thing.

Part of What’s Wonderful

“Naturally (the Woodbridge lakes) are a little bit more expensive and difficult, but that’s part of what’s making (Woodbridge) wonderful,” Watson said.

Figeira said the same pattern is repeated whenever someone new moves onto the lake front.

“They love it. They see three or four little mallard birds out there and they sit on the patio and they throw them food. They do it about three or four mornings and then after that, the birds are up closer. They can feed them with their hands, and they say, ‘This is really great.’

“And about two weeks later, the birds come up on their deck; they’ve convinced them to come up and eat out of their hands, and guests come over and watch.

“Then about four days later the birds have moved right next to the damned house. They sit right next to their window. Now all they’ve got to do is slide the glass door open and feed these damned things.

“Then about four or five days later, they decided to sleep in because it’s Saturday or Sunday morning, and these (ducks) are getting used to being fed at 6 o’clock in the morning. So now here they are pounding on the window. Yeah, with their beaks! That’s it, they’ve got them trained, and then we get a call: ‘Hey, will you come down here and get rid of all these birds?’ It’s just unbelievable.”

When the coots return next fall, Figeira hopes to try drugging them more carefully. He said he will try replacing the shoreline fescue with Bermuda grass in hopes it won’t be as delectable, and experimenting with low fences in the water to annoy the birds.

But Figeira says he cannot take the steps suggested by state wildlife officials. The most effective step would be eliminating the shoreline lawns and replacing them with trees, rocks and inedible ground cover, according to Connelly.

Figeira dismissed the suggestion immediately. “I have lakes where people have spent $400,000 for a house, and I’m going to take away the lawn and put in all dirt and rocks? I mean, that’s the kind of mentality that I’m dealing with,” he said.

Then Woodbridge had better learn to live with coots, suggested McMullen. “Even if we allowed indiscriminate killing, you’d still be talking about this five years from now,” he said. “As long as you continue to provide a lake and a platter full of food, you’re going to have coots come.”

Watson said the outcry over the birds seems a little exaggerated to him. “What goes through the mind of anybody buying those houses depends on what the person is. People don’t think about (the implications of the lake) when they’re buying. What are they surprised about--that there’s dirt associated with the ocean or a lake or maybe their own house? They probably don’t think that when they have kids that they’ll ever have dirty diapers. I don’t think most people are that way.”

If they want a solution, Watson said, they “could put a notice up: ‘This is a private lake, you guys. Unless you pay your association dues, you can’t live here.’ ”