NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

My daughter-in-law Nicole Murray picked me up the other morning on her way from San Diego to Beverly Hills.

Baby Megan is signed up with a modeling agency and has been getting lots of auditions, and even some paid work, most of it in L.A.

Last week’s audition was for Old Navy. I often go along to watch the twins while Nicole and Megan are at the photo shoots.

It’s a great excuse to see more of my grandbabies while Vic is teaching.

As I got into the car, Lauren asked, “Where Papa Vic?” I told her that Vic was at work, and we’d be having lunch later with him in the park. Allison and Lauren smiled at that idea. The twins love feeding the “silly duckies” with their Papa Vic.

This time Nicole watched the twins while I took Megan in for her audition.

We’ve found that Megan tends to cry more when her mother puts her down, but doesn’t mind as much when I put her onto the “casting couch.”

At nine months, all Megan wanted to do was crawl off the couch. It was a struggle to get her to look at the camera and smile. But with her great big blue eyes, chubby cheeks, and ear-to-ear grin, it’s easy to see why she keeps getting picked as a model.

The best part of any photo shoot is coming back to Huntington Beach and going to Alice’s Breakfast in the Park. After lunch, Vic buys a bag of duck food at Alice’s and doles it out to the twins, one handful at a time.

They laugh and laugh at the ducks, pigeons and coots that come up to be fed. Lauren even holds her arm out for the pigeons to land on her.

While feeding birdseed to the ducks on the grass at Alice’s is acceptable, tossing bread or other bird food into the water at any of our parks is not acceptable.

Bread sinks to the bottom of the water, where it decays and consumes oxygen. That can lead to outbreaks of avian botulism, a highly contagious disease of waterfowl.

While Vic and the twins were busy tossing birdseed, I noticed a sick-looking female mallard under one of the benches. It had an injured leg and couldn’t fly more than a foot off the ground. It needed help.

One of Alice’s employees came out with a box, intending to catch the duck and take it somewhere for care. I asked her if she wanted help, and she said yes.

Thinking that capture of the duck might be traumatic for the twins, Vic distracted them. Alice’s employee blocked the duck from flying in her direction, and I grabbed it. Between the two of us, we pinned it to the ground and quickly put it into the box.

Vic and I gave the young woman directions to the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center on Newland Street at Pacific Coast Highway.

As we headed back to our car, I noticed a fox squirrel feeding on the lawn. Fox squirrels appeared in the park a number of years ago, probably having migrated down from Los Angeles.

Some have even made it to our house near Slater and Gothard. I enjoy watching the squirrels, as they’re a rarity in Huntington Beach.

Vic tells me that fox squirrels were brought to Los Angeles in 1904 from the Mississippi, possibly Tennessee, where they’re native.

Apparently, some Civil War and Spanish American War veterans at the Sawtelle Veterans Home on Wilshire and Sepulveda missed seeing fox squirrels, so someone brought them here to provide the vets with some amusement and a sense of home. By 1947, the squirrels had spread to Simi Valley, where they became a pest on walnut groves. It took them longer to migrate to the south. They popped up in Costa Mesa in 1998 and Newport Beach in 2002. Their arrival in Huntington Beach is fairly recent, but they seem to be doing well.

In the mountains, fox squirrels can compete with, and displace, native gray squirrels, but Huntington Beach has no native tree squirrels, only ground squirrels.

In general, we don’t like to see non-native species introduced into ecosystems where they don’t belong.

But in our urban landscape, I enjoy having squirrels in the yard once in a while. I even confess to putting out dried corn and peanuts when I see a squirrel in the yard.

They’ve been coming to our yard in the fall for a couple of years now, generally in autumn when males disperse to find new territories.

The twins enjoyed seeing the squirrel in the park. They called out “squirrel” or some approximation of that word.

At two months shy of their 3rd birthday, they have a vocabulary of about 400 words, many of which are names of birds, insects and other animals.

They know nearly 80 animals, or about double the number of words that they have for toys, foods or actions. In contrast, they show very little interest in plants, and know the names of only a couple.

We can’t help but wonder if the twin’s interest in animals is typical for their age, or if they’re going to grow up to be biologists. We can only hope.

The day after our visit to the park, I called the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center to see how the mallard was doing. She was missing most of her tail feathers, had a big bruise on one wing, and an injured foot. Looks like either a dog or coyote grabbed her. She’s eating and flying around already, and will be released as soon as her injuries heal. All’s well that ends well.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].