ENDANGERED SPECIES NEED SOME STRIFE.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I have a horrible feeling that somehow we've gotten this whole endangered-species thing wrong. Yes, we continue to carelessly destroy habitats, introduce alien species and randomly dump industrial waste, and that's all bad and we should stop it.

But I've been eating dolphin-safe tuna for 20 years now - I don't even like tuna that much - and those darn dolphins are still not safe. Meanwhile, nobody is trying to protect the Northern Pike of Lake Davis. Quite the opposite.

Some idiot released a couple of pike into the small and now very un-placid Lake Davis in the late 1980s because he thought they would be fun to catch. However the California Fish and Game Department has spent the last 10 years and something in excess of $13 million trying to hook these piscatorial carnivores, and it didn't prove to be fun for anybody.

The fear is that these voracious invaders will escape Lake Davis, swim downstream and eat all the salmon California has just spent tens of millions of dollars trying to reintroduce. To prevent that, the Northern Pike have been poisoned. They have been electrocuted. They have been shot, netted, hooked, cornered, dynamited, starved and suffocated. The state even drained the lake. These fish aren't on any endangered-species list, they're on the 10-most-wanted list. They've got more people gunning for them than Saddam Hussein.

When nothing else worked. Fish and Game tried stocking Lake Davis with oversize trout, thinking they would be too big for the young pike fry to eat and the pike would starve to death. In response, the pike began growing faster than normal. Nine to 14 times faster. They became super-pike. Franken-pike. Pike-enators. Big, nasty pike.

Six hundred pike were caught in Fish and Game nets the year after the lake was poisoned. After years of further extermination attempts, this year's catch was 17,635. Not willing to be finished off by a fish, Steve Martarano of Fish and Game tried to put the best face on things by gamely insisting, ``We've gotten better at knowing where the pike are.'' Yeah, Steve. They're in the water.

I guess the next step is to designate the habitat the Lake Davis National Fish Oil Reserve. The Bush Administration will have those pike clear-cut in a week.

But perhaps the pike of Lake Davis are trying to tell us something. Maybe we've been misunderstanding Mother Nature. Maybe the reason the spotted owls are endangered is that we've been coddling them.

Consider the lowly pigeon. There isn't a city anywhere in the world that isn't forced to budget money for pigeon population control. What's the feathered tree rats' secret of success? At Cardiff University in Wales, experiments showed that pigeons recognize and remember individual human faces, and they learn which ones to avoid.

Meanwhile, biologists hand-raising endangered California condor chicks used condor puppets so the baby vultures would have no direct human contact or positive human interaction before they were released. Despite these efforts, about a half-dozen of the first juvenile condors freed chose to hang out at the Pine Mountain Club, a condo resort village down the road from Frazier Park. It seems the birds figured out on their own that their razor-sharp beaks and talons designed to rip open animal carcasses worked even better on plastic trash bags and kitchen window screens.

This horrified the biologists, who felt the birds were in danger and, besides, it didn't fit the image of noble condors sailing in an empty sky above an untouched wilderness. Which is where the condors almost became extinct in the first place. Need I point out that not a single condor died at the Pine Mountain Club? They ate too many French fries, but none of them died!

I'm not suggesting we try protecting endangered species with dynamite or by raising their cholesterol levels, but it does seem that the animals we're protecting are all in trouble, while the ones we're trying to exterminate are experiencing population booms. What can we learn from this?

Well, there are 6 billion humans on this planet at present. Modern condors, searching for dinner while soaring above the wilderness, are going to see a lot more humans than dead deer. So why not ``humanize'' them, teach them what every pigeon idiot knows: The fries are better at Burger King; don't drink the yellow water; never trust a politician in an election year; and don't go swimming in Lake Davis unless you want your talons bitten off.