SQUIRRELS USE I-5 SHOULDER FOR FORAGING : WHITE LINE SELDOM CROSSED.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

Drivers on the Golden State Freeway have been sharing the road this summer with furry, four-legged critters that seem to know their place and how to stay out of harm's way.

Most days, in the late afternoon and early evening, ground squirrels skitter along the paved shoulder of southbound Interstate 5, with only the white stripe painted on the roadway separating them from 70 mph cars.

The light brown rodents sniff and scavenge the width of the narrow shoulder, between Valencia Boulevard and McBean Parkway, seemingly oblivious to - or unafraid of - the constant whiz of traffic only about three feet away.

The squirrels apparently make their home on the adjacent property, an expanse of rolling hills owned by the Newhall Land and Farming Co.

Richard Wightman, Los Angeles County's deputy agricultural commissioner, speculated that the squirrels have adapted to their surroundings and aren't bothered by the auto exhaust, the traffic noise, the cars speeding past or the ground vibrations.

Only an occasional squirrel is found squished on the asphalt.

``I don't think the cars really intimidate them. With the constant motion, day after day, they're probably used to it,'' said Wightman, of the Agricultural Department's Pest Management Division.

The county Department of Animal Care and Control doesn't keep tabs on squirrel behavior, nor does its staff trap them or estimate the size of their population. But Lt. George Enriquez of the Castaic animal shelter said he's noticed large numbers of squirrels throughout the Santa Clarita Valley.

``They're all over,'' Enriquez said. ``Just like anything else, they all breed in the spring,'' he said. ``Everything (in the animal kingdom) is born and raised in the summer months.''

Cute as the squirrels may be, Wightman and Enriquez cautioned, the animals nevertheless belong to the rodent family. For sanitation reasons, people should avoid direct contact with squirrels, whose fleas can carry bubonic and sylvanic plague, they said.

``Another potential problem with people handling squirrels is tularemia, a bacterial infection that people can get, typically from handling animals that are infected,'' said Patrick Ryan, a physician with the county Health Department's veterinary unit.

Tularemia was named for the central California agricultural region of Tulare County, where in 1911 ground squirrels were found to be carrying the disease. Tularemia also commonly affects rabbits and felines; in fact, two cats in Castaic have died from the disease since 1994, Ryan said.

Nearly six years ago, College of the Canyons was ordered by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services to thin out the ground squirrel population on campus because the high numbers posed a health risk, said college spokeswoman Sue Bozman.

``They said that they would shut the college down if we didn't reduce the squirrel population,'' Bozman recalled. Signs were posted on campus asking people not to feed the squirrels, trash cans were kept covered and were emptied more often, and drought-resistant landscaping that squirrels find less appealing was planted on campus, she said.

When the Health Department deadline arrived in early 1991, the population still remained too high. The ranks were thinned by spreading poison, nicknamed ``blue oats,'' around campus.

Wightman said the grain bait, dyed blue and laced with the anti-coagulant diphacinone, causes the squirrel to hemorrhage and die after a few ingestions.

``We had large groups of students who organized protests to save the squirrels,'' Bozman recalled, adding that the little varmints still scurry around campus, but in far fewer numbers.