A Gnawing Problem

By Olin Ericksen
Staff Writer

May 17 -- While the City prepares a $10 million plan to shore up the Palisades Park bluffs weakened by moisture, a gnawing problem remains – what to do with the ground squirrels that contribute to minor landslides.

Hopes to relocate the natural inhabitants of the 26-acre park have eroded after City officials learned from The Lookout that the squirrel relocation program staff suggested to the City Council as an option does not exist.

As a result, untold hundreds of ground squirrels -- whose burrows pockmark the park, causing smaller landslides that are dangerous to motorists below -- may have to be sacrificed, suffering traumatic deaths by poison or starvation.

“Nobody on the council would like to consider themselves a killer of squirrels or an enemy of squirrels,” Mayor Richard Bloom said in an interview last week, “but I think we have to balance the overriding interests of the people who visit these bluffs and the motorists below. We’ll just wait and see what options staff comes back to us with.”

While City engineers have said the unwanted tenants must go, and some City Council members support that course of action, the squirrels have at least one champion on the dais who opposes any solution that would result in the “control” or killing of the park’s unwanted residents

“I’m afraid that what you call rodent management is in fact, killing squirrels, and I’m not comfortable with that,” said Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McKeown, during the staff’s geotechnical presentation to the council earlier this month.

A champion of other animal species as well, McKeown sported a blue hound dog pin that sparkled from his lapel as he spoke, a token from the grand opening earlier in the day of Santa Monica’s first exclusive small dog park.

“I don’t know… whether there are ways to move those squirrel colonies somewhere else or discourage people who are feeding them and making their populations grow from what they would naturally be,” McKeown said. “But I hate the idea of setting out poison in our parks.”

City engineer Anthony Antich seemed to have the solution in hand when he told the council that he heard “the County (has) a program to relocate… displaced squirrels.”

Yet to the detriment of nature’s foremost foragers, some digging by The Lookout has revealed that no such relocation program exists.

“It’s illegal to relocate ground squirrels because of state fish and game regulations,” said Vector Control field inspector Joe Ramirez in an interview last week.

“From a public health standpoint, they have an association with plague and other diseases and relocating them could lead to their spread,” he said.

Even if it were legal, the sheer numbers of squirrels on the bluffs would make relocation impractical, Ramirez said.

“Those bluffs are essentially a rodent sanctuary,” said Ramirez. “There are no natural predators there, (and) people are known to feed them -- which artificially increases their numbers.”

There is something about the squirrels’ appearance -- whether it’s their large, spread-apart eyes or furry texture -- that leads humans to find them “cute” and worthy of protection or even care, including unnatural feeding, according to Ramirez.

But even without humans to hand them a meal, “irrigation sources turns the vegetation surrounding those burrows into virtual salad bars, pushing their populations to tremendously large levels,” Ramirez said.

When not feeding, ground squirrels can be found sunning, dust-bathing and grooming, but always vigilant.

The City’s options, according to Vector Control, are limited to killing the squirrels using poison or quarantining the area to limit feeding.

A third option might be introducing natural predators, such as snakes, yet public use of the park makes that scenario impossible.

Although using poison may seem harsh, Ramirez said, starving the squirrels to death is even more inhumane.

“These squirrels live in nature and nature is not humane,” said Ramirez. “It’s not like they die of old age in a peaceful sleep. They are usually killed through some type of trauma or from lack of food.

“Often they are known to cannibalize their own young in the early spring when there is not enough food around,” he added.

The park ground squirrels -- which are between 16 and 18 inches in length from head to furry tail and are brown and speckled -- could indeed turn on one another should their food supply diminish, Ramirez said.

The poison alternative is likely the best. Poison would cause the squirrels to bleed to death, said Ramirez, and the symptoms the rodents are known to experience are “a gradual weakening and perhaps some thirst.”

Methods of extermination would vary depending on the City contractor -- either county agriculture or a private pest control service -- but “bait stations” would be the likely method used, Ramirez said.

These “bait stations” contain poison pellets, but are designed to allow entry only to rodents, in this case squirrels, he said.

While there is always a “slight possibility” of the poison escaping the stations, Ramirez indicated it that would not usually happen unless someone tampers with the devices.

“Sometimes you’ll get these animal rights activists who come and empty the bait stations,” said Ramirez, “and that’s when there’s a problem.”