 Well hello everyone we'll go ahead and get tonight's listening circle going. Welcome to another District 6 listening circle for those of you who this is your first listening circle that you've been to and those watching online. The purpose and goal of our listening circles is to discuss issues that our neighborhoods are experiencing in a format where we connect the city departments that can do something about the things that you're experiencing in your neighborhood and ultimately for my office as the District 6 representative and also for the staff who are here to be able to hear directly from you about the challenges you're experiencing and each listening circle is topic specific so that we're talking very specific to the concerns that our office has been hearing a lot about from you all as our residents and neighbors and also issues that our staff is hearing about. Tonight's listening circle is specifically all things related to wildlife and what the city is doing and what you can do to partner with the city in managing our wildlife. Specifically tonight we'll be talking a lot about egrets and coyotes. Some of you all may know my background. I wrote a whole dissertation on grass and grasslands and so I think it's really important as a growing city that we continue to conserve our natural heritage that is the Fort Worth prairie that is rich with all kinds of wildlife all kinds of plant species and just beautiful scenery. That's one of the reasons why as a council office we focus specifically on the open space program. Thank you all who participated in the 2022 bond program. We put a proposition for it as a council for the voters to decide on as it relates to conserving open space across the city and the voters approved a $15 million proposition for the city to acquire open space conservation areas not only as an amenity for the city of Fort Worth residents and guests to enjoy outdoor activities and additional park spaces and trails but also as a strategy for conserving wildlife all across the city in more suitable habitats right then in the middle of our neighborhood. Sometimes that's not the best habitat for our wildlife and for the safety of our residents. For those of you who haven't heard the news it's a little bit dated but as a part of open space conservation we have secured one of the largest parks in the Fort Worth system here in District 6 being the Chisholm Trail open space conservation area which is it started out as 270 acres and last year last summer we were able to add 30 additional acres so that's now it's right at or a little under 200 or sorry it's right under 300 acres of open space conservation and it will be an amazing amenity for us and our guests and visitors to the city. So with that being said I also want to thank a few people our co-compliance department and also Texas Parks and Wildlife is here and thank you all you know we have had a lot of conversations as a district about wildlife specifically with egrets and the challenges that we're experiencing in our neighborhoods particularly one house you all may all remember had over 290 egrets nesting both chicklings and also adult birds and because of working together with you all and with staff I was proud to see that we now have a migratory bird operation policy that works to deter egrets before they nest because they're fairly protected and once they're nested we cannot disturb those nests not only to deter them to more suitable habitat but to ensure that we work with not only our local and state partners but also our federal partners like the Army Corps of Engineers to ensure that we have suitable habitat that's in open space areas for them to nest and so thank you all for your input on that I mean thank you staff for the amazing work that y'all did with that. Without any further ado I'd like to introduce two folks that will be presenting a little bit about what what the work that's being done around managing our wildlife once they present we will open up the floor for any questions that you have you see that we have our whole co-compliance team that serves our district here and so if for some chance that we can't answer your questions we will certainly be taking note of that my office staff is here I'm Davia Johnson raise your hand is our district director and Joshua Rivers is our constituent services director who is your liaison for all things that are important to you that you need to help navigating through the city with and so you have a man and a friend in Josh and so be sure to contact him and get his contact info at the end of the event and so without any further ado I'd like to bring up Chris Loret first we also have Rachel Richter did I get that right with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department they'll give a briefing to you all and then we'll open up the floor once they're finished for questions also if you're watching online we know that you may not be able to interact live with this right now as this is a recording and so if whatever questions that you have please feel free to send those to our district six council office at district six at Fort Worth Texas dot gov without any further ado Chris come on up give the residents a briefing I mean the next we'll have Rachel come up hi my name is Chris Loret I'm the co-compliance superintendent for animal control and I'm just going to give you all an update as far as egrets for uh candle ridge area and of course we're already into the migrating period for this year for 2023 they started coming in already I don't think we've had too much going on down here in the south area by candle ridge most of the sightings that we have as far as egrets coming in is further north up by our sunny bank area and district I want to I can't remember exactly what district but it's to the east of 35 by basswood as far as the everybody down here in the candle ridge area they've had a lot of people last year that grew up together everybody knew what to do as far as scaring the birds out they cleaned their trees they made their trees trimmed out they had arbiters come in and clean the end the insides of the trees which helped a lot and this year I think we're more worried about ball lake which is going to be to the west and that area we've already noted uh contacted the owners of the property over there and we're working with them and some arbiters hopefully that will be cleaning out their nests and so forth as far as the north area we've made contact with everybody over there all the owners some of them just went ahead and cleaned out their trees and chopped the trees down and we're continuing our progress with all the neighborhoods uh as far as continuing the progress if y'all have any calls if y'all see any egrets y'all can use my forward app y'all can notify us about the egrets coming in uh my team will get those calls and we'll go out and assist uh or you can call 817-392-1234 which is our city call center they will they will also take the calls and the stray team and our special projects team as well as our senior officer for the south district will continue to assist and help any citizen that needs help with the egrets uh that's pretty much what I have right now for egrets uh I know y'all had asked some calls about coyotes as well uh as far as we know right now with the coyotes uh I know where they're dining I'm not planning on removing any coyotes because of the simple fact they have not done anything that we are we don't want to remove some that are familiar for the area because if they start you start removing them you're gonna have other coyotes come in and they're not familiar with the area they start causing problems okay uh but that's pretty much where I stand with the coyotes okay uh Rachel you want to say anything as far as coyotes because I think the probably like number one inquiry that we get into our office is coyote right and that either ranges from um you know I saw a coyote and like I want to be its friend to like I saw a coyote and we're all gonna die um and so we try to find the middle ground with that you know and the thing about coyotes is I think here in north Texas it is would be much more unusual to have a neighborhood that does not have coyotes in the area than to have one that does I think the majority of our neighborhoods do have coyotes in the area now the important thing about your coyotes in the neighborhood is how much do you know that they're there how much do you notice that they're there because what we're concerned about with coyotes is what is their behavior um and so if the coyotes in your neighborhood you don't really notice that they're there or you might only see them once or twice a year at night that's more or less what coyotes should be doing on the back side of this coyote handout you'll notice there's like kind of a seven-point scale um and that scale was developed by people who research coyotes in urban areas um coyotes in urban areas are so common that they've actually there's actually been a lot of research done on them and we know a lot about them and we know that they have predictable patterns of behavior as they become increasingly habituated to people we also know that they're very responsive to human actions and basically we determine where they are on that scale um and so there's more to this that is not on this handout which is basically like what are our reactions like what's an appropriate response to all of these and basically you know um if there's if you're at a point where you're starting to feel like okay i'm seeing coyotes a lot more than i used to or they're hanging out on people's yards a whole lot or um they're following people who are walking their dogs things like that those are some things that might be kind of a little bit of a concern that um not of danger but that they're getting too comfortable they're starting to lose their fear of people of those types of things start happening but the good news is there's some really easy things that the community can do to make sure that the coyotes kind of get back to where they were behavior-wise first and foremost with coyotes it's all about food you want to make really sure that um you're not feeding them intentionally i always feel really silly saying that because that's like wildlife 101 right like don't feed the wildlife but the stories that i have collected over the years of people um you know going to different cities and stuff there is one golf course where they were concerned about why um coyotes were coming up to people while they were playing golf and so they started watching and there were golfers that were keeping dog treats in their golf bags and giving them to the coyotes right okay so that's why even though i know you'll know better i always just say it because i've heard so many ridiculous stories that you wouldn't believe um but i think what happens more often that attracts coyotes to neighborhoods is the unintentional feeding and so this is where you basically just want to take some common sense precautions to make sure that you're not um accidentally feeding the coyotes so that's make sure your trash is secure um make sure if you're feeding your pets outside that's fine but take the bowls inside when they're done um if you have uh fruit trees you want to pick up the fallen fruit from the trees um you also want to um maintain uh like firewood piles and stuff like that and if you have bird feeders in your backyard sweep up the seeds underneath it so coyotes are opportunistic omnibores so they'll eat a lot of plants they also eat animals right um but the majority of their diet is rodents so some of these things like trash and pet food they can the coyotes will eat that themselves some of these other things um things that coyotes like to eat like rodents which is the majority of their diet um you know like fallen birds eat is gonna attract rodents and then that's gonna attract coyotes um so those are the things that you really want to be mindful of um you also want to another thing that you can do if you're concerned about the behavior of the coyotes in the neighborhood is if you have a coyote that like you know it sees you you see it and you don't feel like it's responding appropriately like you know it's not running away from you or if it's hanging out somewhere where a coyote just shouldn't be like your yard um that's when you want to haze and hazing is basically yelling making loud noises and throwing things um and with hazing um basically anything that's scary or intimidating will work you can bang potlids together you can just yell and wave your hands um one thing that doesn't work so great in urban areas is car horns because they hear those all the time right um but anything that's kind of like a loud scary noise um if you're hazing a coyote you want to make sure that you keep it up until the animal leaves the area um if you go outside and you yell and make a loud noise and you just kind of look at the coyote and the coyote looks at you and then you're like oh that didn't work and you go inside the coyote is kind of like oh that sure was a silly thing that that human did right but if you've annoyed it enough that you make it made it leave the area then you know that you've kind of reminded it that humans are dangerous and that's where like if it doesn't respond right away to like um the audio deterrents um that's where I would pick up a stick or a rock and throw it like with the intent to hit and they'll they'll be gone because you reminded them humans can hurt me um and usually the good news is coyotes are pretty responsive to that and you'll see a behavior change in their behavior within a couple of weeks if not if not faster than that um as chris said relocation trying to get rid of them not a good idea um there will always be more coyotes in the area that can move in so it's better to address the underlying issue that might be causing some of those undesirable behaviors also coyotes have what we call density dependent reproduction and they're also pack animals and if you destabilize that pack and their numbers get low then they have more babies um so you have more adults reproducing but they also can have more pups per litter so you can actually end up with more coyotes that may not have as good as manners as the kidneys that you have now um and also another negative side effect of removing the coyotes is you tend to see an increase in the things that they eat so rodents um if you do feel like you're at a point where you know you're kind of like looking at the seven point scale and you're really concerned about the coyotes one thing that neighborhoods can do is start a monitoring program so this is basically where you just have people report to a central location whenever they see a um coyote behaving inappropriately um and you're going to record information like where and when what was the coyote doing where there are other animals around did the coyote respond to the human that type of stuff and that helps to kind of get a picture of like exactly where you all are at on the scale and also um can help you um potentially identify hot spots where um you know the most activity is being seen um and so that that's pretty much my quick and dirty spiel on coyotes there and I guess are we doing questions now or so the other thing is is if y'all have anything that y'all want to look at we have information on the city website for egrets as well as coyotes there's also information about deterrents there's information on what to do if there's coyotes to contact us we will come out as far as the coyotes in those areas we will look at them we we will see what they're doing and we'll do an investigation basically whether or not they're doing something that would be a matter to pull them out okay uh typically you might see me out there actually looking at the coyotes or one of the supervisors just to make sure uh I know we had an issue a while back somebody thought the coyote was dinning in somebody's backyard we went out there we checked it they may have passed through but they weren't dinning uh they actually are dinning somewhere else that um we're keeping an eye on uh and they do have some cubs which is one of the reasons why we're not going to move them we're going to leave them where they at and we're we're going to keep an eye on them uh and of course all the egrets stuff if y'all have any questions this plug reminds me of my old sega genesis and yes I'm old enough to remember a sega where you have to like bend the cord underneath the machine to get it to work some of y'all laughing because I think y'all had the same kind of sega so anyways at this point we'll um open the floor for discussion I'll stand off to the side unless it's council related I'd be more than happy to answer any you know policy related questions this gentleman had a question and then we'll come over to you okay so off the top of my head so what so he was asking how many other neighborhoods around the area you want to know about the city as well the whole city so how many other neighborhoods around candor ridge that have coyotes in them so candor ridge is a big park okay they have several areas in candor ridge where we have little pockets uh the one that y'all may have seen as far as the two and the cubs or close to probably french lake I have a couple more down south by this old uh the elderly living area I have some further down south by uh chism trail I have three by the lake by uh by the zoo I have two by the botanical gardens in trinity park uh I have a couple on the east side that's pretty spread out I guess my question is and nobody reported that they were being fed uh but we will look into that and so we just I don't think that's all this good they they actually been dinning in an area for about three years now because I knew about them over there we've actually pulled had to pull one of them three years ago out and there was a female that was left over the one that we pulled out had unfortunately had to stem her so we had to pull him out and he was sick so the other of course the female there she's going to find a suitor that suitor came in but they've been there for about three years uh we will definitely look into that so are you are you are you talking about the birds that come in by welch lake so let me I will get with uh parks and rec and I will see if we can get some signs out there that that's one of the biggest problems that we have sometimes is is people feeding them feeding the wildlife and it does cause a problem so yeah you can definitely the seagulls and the e-grads you can tell the big difference with them e-grads got the long beaks yes ma'am coyotes until a few years ago when they put in the chiseled trail they were forced out of their habitat yes and and that's and we have them I see them in the morning when I walk my dog around Canada's park and they are there you know they're on their side I don't see up to four because I know they keep the rope population down and uh and stray cats and people who have other animals should keep them in you know that they shouldn't be running wild anyway and I'm a big dog and they never have bothered us and I always say hi why well like I said earlier we're not we're going to keep keep an eye on them okay we're going to keep an eye on them we're not removing them as Rachel said moving them away there's only one way because you can't relocate them okay and I'm not going to remove them we're going to leave them where they at we're going to keep an eye on them we will make sure they're not doing something if y'all see see them doing something that they y'all feel they shouldn't be doing let us know you can go on my my forward app you can call our call center at 817-392-1234 let us know we'll go out there we'll check them and hopefully we can live together with them with no problems yes yeah exactly I we don't we will not remove any wildlife unless it's going to be a nuisance to the citizens or it's going to be a sick animal because I mean a lot of wildlife does spread disease so we want to keep those two in check because there's a combination between the domestic animals and wildlife so we just we definitely want to want to keep an eye on that and we have been in contact with a lot of the ferro colony people we educate them about leaving food out we tell them to feed the animals at certain times and once they're done eating to pick up the stuff we're still doing that we're going to continue to educate and we're going to continue to talk with them and work with them to make sure everything we also work with them for tnr because the city does support tnr for cats so we'll continue to do all those things with the ferro colonies as well as every citizen and we educate everybody in reference to their domestic dogs we also pick up a lot of stray dogs so we can keep those you know secure for citizens as well any other questions yes ma'am i'm sorry so if it's a nuisance animal we could go out there if it's doing something wrong that we need to erratic take them out uh yes we could go out there and shoot them we do have tranquilizer guns uh i don't suggest any citizens shooting any weapon in the neighborhoods or in the city because pd will come out and could possibly now if if a coyote is attacking somebody and they're defending themselves from the coyote i mean that could happen but i don't suggest anybody going around with their guns shooting any wildlife contact us let us go out there a lot of these officers have been with the city for 10 plus years and they've been working with me on a lot of this all of them are tranquilizer qualified and they can do what we got to do so let's put somebody claiming an animal control out there with an air rifle that was not the case huh hold on with the coyote i'm the person that saw it i saw an animal control truck driving down a little way turned on the belt cut off two coyotes jumped out of the car had an air rifle in his hand i don't know what they were doing can you clarify okay so there was a call that we had that somebody was concerned about the coyotes and wanted to point out where they were that officer did go out there he was in with a dart gun he did not his he had called me and said hey this is what i'm doing this is i'm like okay just keep an eye on them see what they're doing but we wasn't removing them and we wasn't darting them now we do get out sometimes with the dart gun and we might look through a scope to see make sure that we're seeing the coyotes does not make does not mean he was going to shoot him okay sometimes we can see better with the binocular on the gun but uh yes he he did contact me we told him i told him that we were not taking the coyotes out i knew about them i told him exactly where they were exactly where he knew that they were and the discussion was had right there that they were not going to be removed okay anything else so she wanted to know where the den was and whether or not they were in the back of candle ridge park apartments the den is not in the back of candle ridge park apartments okay some people probably already know where the den is uh i would ask that nobody go by the den because there are cubs and if you do go by the den then the coyotes will be they could be defensive for their cubs okay it is springtime springtime is when all the flowers bloom so i'm i'm gonna put it like that the flowers bloom so also the cubs come out okay thank you chris um and rachel um we're so proud of the partnership that we have with not only our city departments with code compliance especially on this issue but i'm also for the texas parks and wildlife department taking time out to come be with us we yeah we could clap for that um well thank y'all for attending we are actually done 20 minutes early so i think we've solved all the problems for today but that does not mean y'all can't keep reporting the problems and so um i am really really excited about the my4th app not only can you report um egrets using the um egret button on my4th app but you can also report any number of issues that you're seeing in the city um the importance of using the my4th app is it creates a ticket and the staff respond to that ticket and they work with you until that ticket's completed and you keep you have a record on your app of all the tickets that have been completed that you submitted so please please please um submit it use the my4th app if you have a smartphone if not um you can always um call the call center um that's 817-392-1234 and you can also contact our council office um and we're happy to connect you and help you navigate the city to find the right person and the right department to answer your questions um for those of you who are watching online you can also do all of those same things um and for all of us um please take these pro tips um and spread the word with your neighbors um don't feed the coyotes right now we have deterrent tools that also work for egrets and just know that egrets are federally protected and so if you're unsure um about any of um the species of wildlife in your neighborhood and what to do with them always always reach out to the city we work for you and so put us to work um by reporting what you see um for those of you watching online um um please share this recording as well um and again if you have any questions reach out to our office or any of those number of ways they engage thank y'all um and have a blessed night take care