Stanford Wildlife

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

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