The Year of the Dragon

For Phil Bronstein, it was the year of the dragon.

But for car-parts salvager Glen McElroy, 2001 had a turkey of an ending.

Southern California lovers of animal stories had an arkful of weirdness to revel in this year, and none was more off-the-wall than the story of the newspaper editor and the toe-breathing dragon.

It began when Bronstein’s wife, actress Sharon Stone, arranged a private pre-Father’s Day meeting in June between the San Francisco Chronicle editor and Komo, the Los Angeles Zoo’s 55-pound, 7-foot-long Indonesian Komodo dragon.

A zookeeper told Bronstein to remove his white shoes to ensure that Komo didn’t mistake his foot for a white rat, but the animal became confused anyway and pounced, crunching Bronstein’s big toe and severing tendons. A surgeon put Bronstein back together.

Komo later moved into a new habitat--zoo officials didn’t say whether that constituted positive reinforcement--and somehow wound up with a broken limb. An X-ray of Komo’s fracture is available for viewing on the Internet at https://www.lazoo.org/komodo/latest.html; Bronstein’s X-ray is not.

Reptiles also grabbed headlines in Orange County, where Laguna Hills city officials sought to break up Nicholas Amodio’s collection of exotic animals, then relented when he promised to keep Bonnie and Clyde, his 400-pound alligators, from roaming his neighbors’ yards.

At Brea’s Carbon Canyon Christian School, the killing and butchering of a steer named T-Bone launched many debates:

Whether such carnage was really necessary for a lesson about the food chain. Whether suburbanites are too insulated from food sources. Whether people should make like cows and not eat meat in the first place.

The rendering of T-Bone into T-bones also sparked a city investigation into whether the campus was zoned as an abattoir. The school lies within the city, but because the site of the butchering happened to be just outside city limits, Brea zoning officials decided they had no beef.

Bird stories also took flight during the year, from the Duck Lady of Anaheim to the Bird Lady of El Monte.

Anna Scheybeler has raised and sold hundreds of exotic birds since the 1980s. After a friend built a 720-square-foot aviary in Scheybeler’s backyard, neighbors squawked this year to El Monte officials about the noise. The city ruled that the aviary--and the flock--ran afoul of city codes and ordered her to remove them.

Instead, Scheybeler decided to fly the coop. She plans to move herself and her 60 birds to a friend’s property in the mountains.

Ducks got the goose of officials in two Orange County cities.

In Villa Park, Judy and Ron Simons were charged with creating a public nuisance by laying out feed for migrating ducks. Apparently, the couple were good at it: As many as 900 mallards would descend on the neighborhood at once to eat up to 235 pounds of feed. What goes in must come out, and neighbors claimed it did so all over their cars, houses and lawns.

Even after the Simonses stopped feeding them, the ducks kept coming, which landed the case in court. But after a four-day trial, a jury acquitted the couple, saying the city just didn’t press the duck case well enough.

In Newport Beach, city officials are ending the year by planning to ban duck-feeding, after concluding that the resulting mess is adding to pollution problems in Newport Bay.

Then there was McElroy--president of the Pick Your Parts auto salvage yards in Anaheim, Sun Valley and Wilmington--who thought he had hatched a great advertising campaign around Thanksgiving.

Customers could chase live turkeys he released in his salvage yards and, for 25 cents a bird, take home whatever they caught. But animal control officials axed that plan, leaving him with 320 birds.

Some were donated to a chamber of commerce, while a farm-animal rescue group in Sacramento took 100 into its Adopt-a-Turkey program.

In Palos Verdes Estates, the problem was a too-rapid depletion of peafowl.

Residents frustrated by flocks of more than 50 birds began trapping them last spring, in a campaign that caught the attention of Friends of the Peacocks, which has a long-standing agreement with the city to maintain minimum flocks of 22 birds at Lunada Bay and 28 birds at Malaga Cove.

If too many birds were trapped, the group warned, it would begin replenishing the flocks. The city relented: Under a new emergency law, a bird in the hand is now worth a year in the coop, and a $1,000 fine.