No solution in sight

A glass wall decried by environmental groups for killing birds is not likely to come down altogether, said a senior vice president of the housing development that put it up. But the company intends to do a lot of experimenting to find a way short of that to fix the problem with the nearly mile-long structure meant to divide backyards from protected open space while still offering a view of nature, he said.

“We certainly would be open to considering reasonable alternatives,” said Ed Mountford, senior vice president of Hearthside Homes, who put the wall on the border of its Brightwater development on the Bolsa Chica mesa in August. “Taking the wall down doesn’t sound like a reasonable alternative. It might be a combination of things that do the trick.”

Local and regional environmental groups like the Bolsa Chica Land Trust were enraged last week after former Mayor Connie Boardman discovered four dead birds next to a 4,400-foot transparent wall along the development’s border with the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. Since Friday, Hearthside has put up a chain-link fence with yellow ribbons and a mesh windscreen along the wall as a temporary fix. Activists are taking a wait-and-see approach, but didn’t express much faith in the changes.

Boardman said she has found seven dead birds so far in the last couple of weeks, but no one knows how many may have died since the wall went up. She says she found a dead hummingbird at the wall since the changes were made, and the wall still looks dangerous to her.

“There are reflections of trees now,” she said. “Rather than seeing an invisible wall, the birds are going to see trees.”

It’s hard to say whether putting up a fence will change much, said Scott Thomas, conservation director for the Orange County Sea and Sage Audubon Society.

“To some extent it remains to be seen, because we’re dealing with something that hasn’t been done before,” he said. “A chain-link fence isn’t much more visible than a glass fence when placed right next to each other. I applaud them for trying something, but I hope it works.”

Low-flying birds, and the predatory raptors that hunt them down, have no instincts from nature to watch out for such an object, Thomas said. It’s so dangerous, in fact, that he suspects the wall will have to be replaced with “something visible.”

“I don’t know with the glass that there really is a mitigating fix for it,” he said.

But Mountford said the company was working hard to find a better solution, and the current efforts wouldn’t be the end. In the meantime, he said, an employee was walking the wall three times a day, logging any birds found. So far, he said, none had shown up since the fence went up.

But talks with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service produced a few new ideas, and numerous companies and organizations have flooded him with suggestions since news of the problem broke, Mountford said.

“You wouldn’t believe all the e-mails I get and phone calls I get from vendors with products they say can help me,” he said.