Animals part of valley's wild side

Vera Vann hoisted a five-gallon bucket of concrete onto the fence she was building around her Blue Diamond home.

"If you don't like the burros in your front yard, you build a fence," the 64-year-old special education teacher said.

She wiped a trickle of sweat from her brow and scooped another shovelful of the gray, gravelly goo into the bucket.

"The coyotes were coming in and breakfasting on my cats. But that's not the critter's fault. That's their food source," Vann said. "It's up to me to protect what I want to protect."

Vann lives just outside the urban circle in a place where "protection" more likely means wildlife-proof fences and trash cans than a security system and burglar bars.

Wild burros are among the mischievous four-footed visitors in Blue Diamond and Calico Basin. Down in Henderson, it's coyotes and ravens. In North Las Vegas, it might be a fox. And golf course and pool owners all over the urban area complain of vagrant ducks and geese, state wildlife officials said.

As the valley's population pushes ever deeper into the dry, deserted areas around Las Vegas, increasing numbers of people are finding the wild side of this casino town has little to do with late-night escapades on The Strip.

"There's probably more wildlife on some of the golf courses than in areas adjacent to the city now," said Mel Anderson, supervisor of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's wildlife services district that includes Clark County.

"We had a goose down there last year that was attacking golfers, and there are always ducks in the swimming pools," Anderson said. "The Las Vegas Valley used to be desert with a couple of springs. But as the valley has developed, it has developed some of the best waterfowl habitat that exists in the Southern states."

Golf courses provide swaths of succulent green grass dotted with ponds and islands. There's nothing a goose could like better, the wildlife official said.

And nothing tees off a golfer like a grouchy goose on the green.

"If they're nesting, they can get pretty aggressive," Anderson said.

Part of Anderson's job is to round up birds that have run afoul of area residents and move them somewhere else.

And he recalled traveling from his Ely office to the North Las Vegas Airport last year to remove a fox that was monopolizing a runway.

Until last year, the agriculture department called Anderson's division Animal Damage Control. The old name referred to the days when guys like Anderson spent most of their time protecting ranchers' cattle and sheep from coyotes and other predators.

But the focus has changed drastically in the past few years, Anderson said. Most calls now likely involve wildlife having an impact in an urban setting.

"It gets to be kind of public relations more than anything else," he said. "The cat wanders out of the yard or walks along the wall, and then suddenly Fifi becomes food for the coyote.

"Our calls are 10-fold what is was five years ago," he said. "The urban area is bigger and bigger throughout the United States."

As a result, more people are finding wildlife is a lot easier to live with when it's on a poster, said Chris Healy, a conservation education specialist with the Nevada Division of Wildlife in Reno.

For instance, Reno-area deer are much more appealing when they aren't eating the rose bushes.

"We get calls all the time. People say, 'You've got to do something about YOUR deer.' They think we have a global positioning device on every one, and that we know exactly where they all are," Healy said.

Mountainous terrain in the state's northern region also brings black bears into the unwanted neighbors category, Healy said. Residents like seeing them -- but not too close. However, bears have taken a liking to the things people cast out.

"People are the problem," Healy said. "People don't guard their garbage, and black bears are doing what they do naturally. The bears become addicted to garbage."

Wildlife officers are now experimenting with a system where they try everything they can think of to scare off the animals. They set traps then spray the bears with pepper spray and shoot them with rubber bullets that hurt but do no damage. Hopefully, the bear will be frightened away permanently when it is turned loose, Healy said.

Mountain lions pose a more lethal threat to people and livestock, so they are most often are shot when they meander into urban areas, Healy said.

Conflicts between urbanites and wildlife are seldom settled in favor of the animals, he said. That's why it's important that people follow guidelines like the ones that ask them to refrain from feeding wild animals.

He recalled last year's controversy over the shooting of a lioness and her two yearling cubs in Verdi, a small town west of Reno. He says the incident may have been avoided if people had refrained from feeding deer near an urban-area river bottom.

"And when you attract deer, you're going to attract mountain lions," Healy said. "We don't like to do that (shoot lions). But what if we didn't? There were kids walking to school every day right by these lions."

Residents of the Calico Basin region around Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area see mountain lions, but no one is complaining, resident Laura Sanders said.

"There have been cougars that are spotted quite frequently," Sanders said. "We have everything come down into our yards -- from snakes to gila monsters, to quail and foxes and coyotes.

"I've lost plenty of cats to coyotes. I even had an owl take one of my cats," Sanders said.

"The smart cats seem to stay around. It's survival of the fittest," she said. "That's just part of being here. I think it's great we have the owls out here."

The wild burros, however, are not so great, she said.

"They make a mess. They hang out and make noise," Sanders said. "Their hooves aren't like big horn sheep hooves. They're big, and they smash everything."

Her sentiments are shared by her neighbors. In response to residents' complaints about the burros, the Bureau of Land Management has proposed removing 30 of the animals from Red Rock Canyon's Calico Basin area. They want to sell off half and relocate half to an area south of State Road 160.

The plan also calls for moving 17 wild horses south of the highway to allow springs, the surrounding riparian areas and grasses to restore themselves.

And while folks in Calico Basin would welcome removal of the burros, residents in rural Blue Diamond at the other end of the conservation area are fighting the BLM's proposal with petitions.

Four wild horses have taken up residency in Blue Diamond. They wander into town, nibble on the grass at the town's baseball diamond and wander out again. A couple of them even have names -- Diamond and Mom.

"They eat our flowers, get in our gardens, and we just work around them," Jeannie Leavitt, manager of the town's Village Market, said. "They come in the village, and go down the road and everything. They don't hurt anything. They're fun to watch."

Dave Wolf, the conservation area manager, said the horses one day will be returned to the area north of the highway. But the burros will be forever banished from most of that region.

People are as much to blame as the burros, he said. The burros would stay away from populated areas more if people hadn't fed them in the first place.

"Burros that are down in the valley will poke their heads into your car window. And if you don't feed them they will bite you," Wolf said.

When folks call to complain, Wolf says he explains to them what he calls "the Rule of the West."

"You fence out. You don't fence in," he said.

And so Vann, of Blue Diamond, is spending her summer building a fence. It will keep the burros out of her shrubbery and may protect a cat or two from coyotes.

She hopes the burros, mustangs and and bobcats will continue to wander the dusty streets of her town and that the sparrow hawks will continue nesting in her backyard tree.

She also hopes to catch a few glimpses of the big horn sheep and mule deer that once roamed the hillsides behind town. Ongoing development has pushed them farther into the backcountry. She doesn't see them so often anymore.

But that's all right.

"It's just nice to know they're there," Vann said.

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