Wildlife under siege

The news last week carried a story of pine trees at the Tennis Estates in Huntington Harbour being pruned. The trees had nesting egrets in them. After reports of dead chicks, broken eggs and destroyed nests in the pile of branch prunings, the California Department of Fish and Game warden placed a 30-day stop notice on the pruning.

There can be no prosecution if there is no evidence of a crime. Broken egg shells are left behind naturally when a chick hatches. The parent birds generally carry the shells away and drop them. Sometimes chicks die. We’ve seen protected and unmolested egret colonies with dead chicks draped over the branches in the colony. This happens naturally.

Unless someone can document that the eggs were broken or that chicks were killed by the tree trimmers or by the process of trimming, the warden can’t charge the trimmers.

It would behoove us all to carry a camera with us to catch wrongdoers in the act. Think about the Rodney King beating. If no one had recorded the beating, the cops probably would have been able to get by with claiming that he resisted arrest. There are numerous other instances where on-the-spot recordings have provided key evidence of crimes.

We’ll bet anyone walking along the mesa trail at Bolsa Chica or along the flood control channel could film a crime on any day of the week, and dozens on weekends. Lawless activity there is rampant. It ranges from dogs off leash to off-road dirt bikes and motorbikes, illegal drug use and even filming pornographic movies.

We’ve seen dogs off leash swimming in the Bolsa Chica on numerous occasions, chasing the ducks. Owners will argue that their dogs need the exercise. But when the ducks are chased, they’re burning up energy that they need for migration and nesting. That’s why dogs aren’t allowed at Bolsa Chica, even on leash. Stressed wildlife isn’t happy wildlife.

These days our local natural world is under considerable stress from the millions of people that live here.

We’ve seen entire families traipse off the trail at Bolsa Chica and across the pickleweed to get to the water, right through areas where Belding’s savannah sparrows are nesting. What law are they breaking? Oh, how about the one about not disturbing endangered species while they’re nesting? People walking off the trails are liable to step on eggs of ground-nesting birds, or they may disturb nesting birds and make them fly off the nest.

They are also trampling the vegetation. One person walking off the trail makes the next person wonder why that grass is trampled down, and they walk the same way to investigate. It’s a natural human tendency. Then another person walks the same path and soon there is a new trail that doesn’t belong there.

But back to the egrets. They got a 30-day reprieve. When they finish nesting this season, the tree trimmers will be back. Many people don’t like birds that size nesting in their back yards and cut down the nesting trees that support the egret or heron colony. If everyone does that, they will have no place to nest.

The same goes for cliff swallows and barn swallows. Some people don’t want them nesting under their eaves and will wash down the mud nests. Again, disturbing these nesting birds or their eggs or their nests during breeding season is illegal. Some swallows lay their eggs in the nest before they finish constructing it, so just saying that the nest wasn’t finished yet isn’t an adequate justification for hosing them off a building.

It saddens us to see wildlife under such siege from humans. We wonder when it will stop. And we know it won’t stop. We continue to multiply and expand our population, covering the earth from pole to pole. More and more arable land is forced into producing food for humans, or covered to provide housing, shopping, manufacturing or transportation services for humans.

We’ve reached a population size of more than 6 billion and are still growing like there is no tomorrow. We burn fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate, going through the planet’s resources like they were all renewable. They’re not. For some things, there will come an end.

That reminds us. Be sure to go see “An Inconvenient Truth,” otherwise known as the Al Gore movie. It’s a sobering and inspiring hour and a half. The scene that shows Gore riding up in a lift to get to the top of the graph that shows the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is shocking. The graphic of the polar bear swimming across miles of ocean, looking in vain for an ice floe to climb onto, will bring tears to your eyes. Polar bears are now swimming up to 60 miles in search of ice floes. They can’t swim indefinitely. If they don’t find a sturdy ice floe in time, they drown. And that’s exactly what is happening in the Arctic. The days of polar bears in the wild are numbered and that number is small.

We hope that the same won’t be true of egrets in Huntington Beach. Can’t we all just get along?