Stanford Today Edition: March/April, 1998 Section: Features: Creature Comforts? WWW: Creature Comforts?
Coping with the other campus inhabitants: bats, owls, ducks and even salamanders
By Justin Pope
Karl Hickethier was only trying to show a little hospitality toward some ducks in the fountain by the Medical Center. That was all. No big deal, he thought.
Hickethier, the Medical Center's director of housekeeping for 22 years, set up some shelters and allowed visitors to start feeding the mallards. "It was fun; it was great for everybody," he said. Then quack of mouth spread quickly through the duck world and other families started showing up for their share of Hickethier's goodwill. The ducks became a giant headache - they polluted the fountain and caused problems with their aggressive mating and territorial behavior.
Desperate for advice, Hickethier called the California Fish and Game Department. Officials there told him he never should have encouraged the ducks in the first place. So last May the hospital had members of Palo Alto's Wildlife Rescue remove newborn ducklings from the pond.
But as is usually the case with the management of animals at Stanford, controversy was close behind. Some employees were peeved. "It's the only joy in their day for some of the really sick kids in this hospital," Patti Spezia, a medical systems employee at the hospital told a newspaper. Against the wishes of Fish and Game, Hickethier left a ramp that will keep any future ducklings from drowning in the fountain. He also posted signs that read, "Wildlife Experts Say Don't Feed the Ducks." But his nightmare didn't end there. People on all sides called to complain. "There were days when all I handled was duck calls," he sighed.
The tale of the ducks was just one of many man-versus-beast squabbles in recent years at the Farm, which has enough animals around to make the nickname more than a quaint anachronism. While Hickethier fretted over the ducks, facilities manager Herb Fong was busy managing squirrels, bats, cats and local animal rights activists.
At some point, most of those squabbles land on the desk of biologist Alan Launer, who advises the university on animal matters from resident endangered species to pesky critters that sometimes seem poised to overrun the place.
"There are pockets of wild and crazy things all over campus that come up," Launer said. As a reminder, he keeps a color satellite photo of the Bay Area on his office wall. South and west of the main campus, the map shows the lush, green preserves of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a stunningly fertile habitat surprisingly unscarred by humans. North and east, the nearly entirely urbanized areas that envelop the Bay are industrial gray. In between, straddling the border between man and nature, sits Stanford. "It's a biological transition zone," Launer said. "Stanford has [these issues] because they've done a good job. Its general growth plan was restricted compared to the surrounding area."
Fong's archenemy has been the ground squirrel, which has been trashing the Arboretum around Palm Drive, the main entrance to campus. Local activists protested Stanford's poisoning of the animals to protect oak and eucalyptus trees. The director of facilities management, Chris Christofferson, declared a 60-day moratorium on the poisoning in September 1996 after animal rights activists claimed the anti-coagulant poison being used induced an exceptionally painful death and triggered unintended secondary kills of other species.
Stanford resumed the poisoning last September in order to save the trees along Palm Drive, but opted for a poison that, Fong says, has no secondary effects. "We need to be as flexible as possible and still be a good steward of our resources," Fong said. "I'm just glad we have a reasonable alternative."
A popular solution to many of the wildlife quandaries is Stanford's increasing use of natural predators when the ecology requires a little tilting. The strategy can make for strange bedfellows; Fong, for instance, has become a serious chiropterphile (bat fan) in recent years. The winged mammals can eat their body weight in insects, he said. Last spring the Facilities Operations division built houses and perches for 300 bats. As long as the bats stay out of Meyer Library and other buildings, Stanford hopes to encourage the population.
Another local predator is the feral cat, which curtails the populations of small animals on campus. Cats have wandered the area for years; most are left by students or abandoned by locals. Eight years ago the population was becoming a serious problem and the university was ready to round up the cats and ship them to local humane societies, where many would be put to sleep. But the threat galvanized local cat lovers to found the Stanford Cat Network, a volunteer organization that spays, neuters, vaccinates and tags cats. The cats are then allowed to roam campus, where they are fed by volunteers. Carole Hyde, a volunteer, said the organization is composed mostly of Stanford staff and students.
The system isn't perfect - the artificially supported cat population upsets the balance of other species, and the food left for the cats is sometimes grabbed by less desirable animals like raccoons and skunks - but it has worked fairly well. Hyde said the Cat Network has reduced the feral cat population by 60 percent since the program was started. "I'm very pleased with the cat operation - now if we could just start adopt-a-raccoon or adopt-a-skunk," Fong joked.
In the long run, though, it may be the scarcest animals that leave the biggest mark on the university. The presence of several threatened species on university lands may tie Stanford's hands in future development decisions. The California red-legged frog, for example, which lives at Matadero Creek and is already on the endangered list, is likely to affect future land-use decisions. "They're doing poorly across the state," Launer said. "The Santa Cruz Mountains are actually a stronghold. They could come back with some work."
Year after year, one of the most discussed issues preceding the Big Game is the tiger salamander, which breeds in the same lakebed that for years hosted the Big Game Bonfire. Since 1993 the bonfire has been on hold to protect the salamanders, currently under consideration for federal protection.
Lake Lagunita is the only known breeding site for the species on the peninsula, and in many respects it's amphibian utopia. "With people sailing and swimming, the predatory birds stay away," Launer said. "It's like heaven for the salamanders." Most salamander ponds are far smaller than Lagunita, so the population positively explodes here. At the same time, when the salamanders venture out from the pond, they pay a heavy price. Hundreds never make it across the busy streets that enclose the lake.
"There are a lot of problems with this population," Launer said. "You've got the whole population breeding in one artificially maintained seasonal reservoir. It's weird - it depends on Stanford to survive."
The current plan is to develop other, more isolated breeding ponds that will give the species a chance to flourish in more than one place. University bulldozers have started digging a few to help the process. "We're kind of settling in, slowly but surely, putting in some more ponds up in the foothills to decrease the mortality along the roads," Launer said. "We want so many salamanders that we don't have to debate things like a bonfire. In an urban/suburban setting, that's about the only way to make everybody happy. But we're not there yet." The university is also eager to see the salamanders survive as an academic resource. Launer's students examine the salamander population in the summer, some undertaking the rather gruesome task of clipping the toes of animals flattened on the roads in order to determine their age and the years the population flourished. "The work is meaningful. It's fun to find out things like a salamander can't climb curbs," he said.
"My philosophy," Fong said, "is that as long as the animals aren't interfering with property and the mission of the university research and teaching - we'll try to live with them as best we can." ST