Haven for all creatures broken, lost

The Orange County Zoo is not your usual menagerie of lions, tigers and bears.

There are no majestic animals from the African savanna, no awe-inspiring creatures from Arctic reaches. Rather, here on this 5-acre wooded spread at the base of the Santa Ana Mountains are 60 mostly hard-luck animals who have had run-ins, bad breaks and unfortunate entanglements with humankind.

Visitors to the hard-to-find zoo in Irvine Regional Park in Orange encounter a hobbling bald eagle, a lopsided vulture, four-horned sheep, a raccoon that was the runt of his litter and a potbellied pig that outlived its owner, who died of cancer.

Specializing in animals native to the Southwest and accepting only those that cannot be released into the wild have made the Orange County Zoo a repository for creatures with unusual, harrowing stories, many rooted in California’s landscape. And what this ragtag group lacks in exoticism it makes up for in traumatic tales of near death and abandonment.

Its wildcats, birds, reptiles and rodents have been shot, hit by cars, forcibly removed from lakes, had altercations with power lines and been illegally harbored by families.

The aim of keeping them all together is to teach people about the animals they’re likely to encounter in the hills, canyons and backyards of Southern California, said zoo manager Donald Zeigler.

“We use them to give the public more respect for animals they may come in contact with,” he said. “They usually see them in a negative light, like when a coyote takes one of their cats. But they come here, hear their stories, and they see things differently.”

The zoo’s residents live in mostly chain-link enclosures arranged in a circle of paved walking paths. They are identified by small, fading signs. A tranquil landscape of oak trees, prickly pear cactus and native shrubs gives the property -- once a hunting reserve for the early land-owning Irvine family -- a sense of distance and isolation.

The zoo has some legendary alumni, among them animals that had a brush with notoriety as California has grown and collided with nature.

The so-called freeway foxes lived at the zoo until several years ago. The red fox mother and her cubs were among the last living things to stand in the way of the extension of the 55 Freeway in Costa Mesa. When they had nowhere else to go, they were routed to the zoo.

“They were considered vermin and probably would have been euthanized,” Zeigler said.

And then there was Samson, the avocado-grubbing black bear who basked in the media spotlight in the 1990s for taking dips in a Monrovia neighborhood’s pools and hot tubs. He lived out his twilight years at the zoo before he suffered kidney failure and had to be euthanized in 2001.

Now two black bears, Nacho and Yoyo, inhabit Samson’s former grounds. Zookeepers have a curiously short biography of 10-year-old Nacho, a 600-pound bear hailing from the Lake Tahoe-area town of Homewood.

“He was held by a private citizen for seven days, that’s all we know,” said educational coordinator Marcy Crede-Booth. Such lapses in information are common for animals confiscated by state Fish and Game authorities, then relocated to the zoo.

That holds true for the zoo’s senior bald eagle, one of its most debilitated denizens.

Housed in a cage removed from public view, the 35-year-old eagle (named Klink after the monocled “Hogan’s Heroes” colonel) hobbles when he walks and is disfigured along his right side, presumably because he was maimed by a shotgun, though no one knows for sure.

Then there is the resident golden eagle, found by a rancher near a telephone wire with a broken wing and a drooping posture. Caretakers named it Sylas, which was fitting until a surprise arrived.

“We found out she was a female when she laid an egg,” Zeigler said. But the name stuck.

Other animals serve as educational tools, Zeigler said. Most visitors, for example, are shocked by the mountain lion’s large size.

When those who say they have spotted mountain lions in the wild see the long, thick tail and the muscular, slinky body of Simba, one of the zoo’s two mountain lions, they realize that what they probably saw was a bobcat, Zeigler said.

The young mountain lion has a near-death story. A rancher got a permit to shoot its mother because she was killing his livestock. Only after she was shot did authorities notice that she had been lactating. They went off in search of her orphaned young, finding the weeks-old mountain lion cub.

With George and Gracie, the zoo’s coyotes, zookeepers try to communicate the opposite message: Animals that look small, harmless and pet-like can be dangerous predators.

Both coyotes, who live in a sandy-floored cage, were found by the side of the road as pups, he in Chino, she in Lake Arrowhead.

George was even taken in by a family, who didn’t realize they had adopted a coyote until they took him to a veterinarian for an exam.

“Most people think coyotes are small, so they don’t seem aggressive, but they’re crafty,” Zeigler said.

Other animals came to the zoo because they were mischief makers in the natural world.

Chopper, the zoo’s beaver, was one of several removed from Lake Skinner in Riverside County for pulling the bushes and plants -- prime bird habitat -- into the lake.

Now, she can move all the vegetation she wants in a new habitat full of leafy branches and two flowing pools of water.

The zoo doesn’t have the apes and monkeys of the Los Angeles Zoo or the extensive taxonomic catalog of the San Diego Zoo, but zookeepers take humble satisfaction in its being a haven for animals that would otherwise be in peril.

Although animals have been on the property in some form for over a century, it wasn’t until 1985 that the Orange County Zoo proper took shape, first as a petting zoo.

“The zoo has been here as this little jewel in the rough,” said Robert Everakes, president of the Orange County Zoological Society, the zoo’s fundraising group. “Not polished, but waiting.”

And even now, the zoo doesn’t have the popularity of the Santa Ana Zoo (with which it is often confused). Eight in 10 people in Orange County don’t even know it exists, according to a survey conducted this year.

The zoo also has seen attendance slip in recent years, according to a 2007 Orange County Grand Jury report. Its out-of-the-way location hasn’t helped; even the sleuth-like grand jury had trouble finding the place.

The zoo’s reputation as a haven for animals with nowhere else to go has at times prompted people to call, making the case that their pet iguana, goat, chicken or boa constrictor would be a fine addition to the zoo.

Others come in person. People have thrown chickens they no longer want over the fence. And once, a man came to the zoo proffering his parrot. Upset that zookeepers rejected it, he drove off without it.

Zoo officials admit to being constrained by county funding and said they have no plans to significantly raise the zoo’s profile or abandon its mission as a last resort for animals with no other options.

They will start to replace old signs, add more barnyard animals and reptiles and expand some areas. But the grounds will remain small and intimate, Zeigler said.

“Some of the larger zoos, their niche is they want to have people there all day,” Zeigler said. “We provide something that’s local, and it’s the perfect size for people wanting to spend an afternoon.”

One species the zoo would like to attract more of, Zeigler said, is Homo sapiens.

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tony.barboza@latimes.com