Crying fowl: Once-beloved wild birds at lakes community now seen as nuisance, hazard

Sito Negron

Thursday, March 11, 2004 | 11:09 a.m.

They're noted as an amenity on several websites touting Desert Shores, a community surrounding four long and narrow lakes, but in a city where "too much of a good thing" is almost an oxymoron, the waterfowl there have become a nuisance.

"We have a mixture of ducks, coots, and geese, and the problem is they have stopped migrating," said John Phillips, secretary of the Desert Shores Homeowners' Association. "They used to come and go and people are feeding them and they're staying. And it's a great place to live (for the birds), like it is for people.

"We're getting overpopulated. It's a safety and health issue in terms of traffic when they cross the streets, and they're pooping on the sidewalks."

Lt. Karen Coyne with the city of Las Vegas Detention and Enforcement department, said "sanitation is one of the main concerns, and that becomes a health issue. The volumes of birds attracted to those water areas is incredible."

The solution is unclear. Phillips said no birds have been killed, and there isn't a plan to starting killing them. He said that the homeowners' association is to discuss the problem, and to introduce some possible solutions at a March 24 meeting.

Phillips said that his group is even working with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which wrote a letter to the association offering help in finding a nonviolent solution.

"We're going to be working with them hand in glove, and there's not going to be any poisoning or gassing or euthanasia. But we do have to address the situation," Phillips said. "One of the primary things is signs that say 'Do not feed the ducks.' "

In the letter to the homeowners' association, PETA writes that killing the birds isn't a long-term solution and that there are proven ways to remove fowl without killing them.

"As long as your community remains attractive and accessible to these birds, more will move in from surrounding areas to fill any newly vacant niche that you create," writes PETA. The solution is "to make the habitat unattractive or inaccessible to them by implementing an integrated waterfowl-management program, using habitat-modification strategies, repellents, fencing, frightening devices, and reproductive controls."

PETA is working with a group called Geesepeace, which it claims has worked with homeowners' associations and government agencies in such communities as Fairfax, Va., and Raleigh, N.C.

Obviously, the conflict between animals and people sharing living space is age-old. In its modern incarnation, communities across the country to varying degrees are dealing with deer, birds, roof rats, snakes, coyotes, cougars, mountain lions -- in short, animals into whose homes we've trespassed.

"People see a coyote, and think, there's an animal in my backyard. And the coyote is looking at it from the perspective of, there's a human in my territory," said Frank Chaves, game warden supervisor for the Nevada Division of Wildlife.

"We are creating micro-habitats for various critters, including migratory waterfowl," he said. "When we build something, we look at water, we look at sewer, we look at all these things. We need to look at the human wildlife interaction. That needs to be part of the scoping that goes into a project."

Phillips said the situation in his community -- which does not bar access to the lakes -- "is not an unusual situation. It happens at golf courses and any place you have a habitat that supports that population."

He said some people, upon hearing about the situation, overreacted, assuming that the birds would be killed. The association, he said, is "getting educated, we're doing our homework, and we're going to do the right thing."