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Bird Fakeout

A pink plastic lawn ornament caught Charles Moore's eye when he set off in search of decoys to attract egrets and herons back to Bair Island. But Moore found that the pink flamingo, for all its long legs, couldn't be transformed into a heron look-alike.

"It was virtually unpaintable," says Moore, a volunteer with a S.F. Bay National Wildlife Refuge project that will deploy several dozen decoys at the Bair Island site of the Bay's oldest heron and egret rookery. Red foxes decimated this nesting site in 1991.

"Herons and egrets are social birds," says the Refuge's Jean Takekawa. "They depend on sheer numbers to protect their nests from predators. The bigger the colony, the more successful they may be. If a fox came in, they'd mob it."

Takekawa hopes the live birds will come back to socialize with the plastic decoys. Since the colony was decimated, refuge staff have been working to remove the foxes. And Moore has been looking for better raw material for his heron and egret lookalikes than the flamingo. He lucked out recently when he discovered a high quality European import of a great blue heron at a Bay Area hunt shop. And he's already transformed several would-be seagull decoys into Caspian terns - local nesters also suffering from red fox predation.

"You can't just go into a hunting store and ask for a Caspian tern," says Takekawa. "It's kind of an unusual item."

Dollars from U.S. Fish & Wildlife's S.F.Bay Program will pay for the hardware necessary to create, paint and anchor the decoys. Moore says these new plastic props for ecological restoration will probably be deployed this winter or next spring, and possibly enhanced with taped bird calls.

Contact: (510)792-0222

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