Berkeley tries to rein in off-leash dogs at Cesar Chavez Park amid burrowing owl nesting season

Bess Hepner, a Cesar Chavez Park regular, gives water to her 1-year-old dog named Lou inside the off-leash area. Lou, who visits the park almost daily, is known among other visitors for his love for slurping up water from the hose. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

Berkeley is tightening its enforcement of dog leash laws at Cesar Chavez Park.

Earlier this month, city staff began verbally warning dog owners in the park that they could face tickets if they do not keep their dogs on a leash where required. Fliers handed out by staff cautioned that off-leash dogs could be impounded.

The ramped-up enforcement comes amid burrowing owl season, when the rare species of bird often nests in the northeast corner of the park. Around three owls have been spotted at the park since late September, according to Martin Nicolaus, a prominent park activist, birder and founder of the Chavez Park Conservancy.

Nicolaus and readers of his blog about the park have complained that the city isn’t properly protecting its burrowing owls. Nicolaus wants the city to let him install a temporary plastic fence to bolster the city’s existing “art fence”; the city says a bigger fence could actually be more dangerous for owls if it gave predators a convenient hunting perch.

Berkeley spokesperson Seung Lee wouldn’t say if the off-leash warnings are directly related to complaints about owl safety. He said they are “standard procedure for when City staff receives an uptick in feedback and complaints from our communities.” And he noted that the Berkeley animal shelter, which has faced staffing shortages since at least 2022, recently returned to full staffing, enabling it to send out more staff to enforce leash rules.

Berkeley has only issued warnings and handed out fliers so far, Lee wrote in an email. It hasn’t actually ticketed dog owners from any city parks in 2024, and has no records of ever issuing a citation or impounding a dog at Cesar Chavez Park over an off-leash violation. He said the main goal is educating park users about leash laws.

But the city’s warnings have upset some dog owners, a number of whom told Berkeleyside they have opted to take their pets elsewhere.

Berkeley resident Fanshen Thompson, whose 4-year-old labradoodle Georgia had been going on off-leash walks in Cesar Chavez daily since she was a puppy, said that after receiving a warning from a city employee in early October, she now goes to the Albany Bulb.

“The tone of everything has shifted in the last few weeks and it seems like there’s a lot more attention and monitoring,” said Thompson, who said her dog is a good listener and is happier when she can roam free. “It’s just not the vibe that I’m interested in.”

Jeff Malmuth, a Cesar Chavez Park regular for over 18 years who runs an email group with over 600 dog owners and walkers from the park’s off-leash area, said some dog owners now avoid the park, fearing their dogs could be impounded for straying past the off-leash area’s bounds. More than a dozen regulars have left, Malmuth said.

Contrary to an early version of the fliers city staff distributed, Lee said, Berkeley is not currently planning to impound off-leash dogs found in areas of the park where leashes are required (though the city’s municipal code gives it the ability to do so). The city has since updated the language it uses in its fliers to reassure dog owners and walkers that only citations will be issued, Lee wrote.

Jeff Malmuth, a Cesar Chavez Park regular, takes his elderly corgi Guido for a stroll around the off-leash area. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

Berkeley has required dogs to be leashed in parks since at least the 1960s. As it reads today, Berkeley’s municipal code requires all dogs in parks to be on a 6-foot leash unless in a designated “off-leash area” for dogs — even if the dogs are under voice command. Berkeley has stricter dog leash laws in parks than on sidewalks, where dogs are allowed unleashed as long as they remain under voice control and within 6 feet of its walker.

But until this fall, leash rules in city parks were seldom enforced, several dog owners at the park’s off-leash area told Berkeleyside. Many were accustomed to walking with their dogs from their parked cars to the 17-acre off-leash area, which is mostly unfenced.

Malmuth, who supports the city’s efforts to crack down on repeat offenders — like runners who let their dogs roam off-leash along the park’s paved perimeter path despite clear signage prohibiting it — said he just wants clarification on how the rules are enforced in practice. Are tickets always preceded by warnings? How far beyond the off-leash boundary must a dog stray before its owner is ticketed? Sometimes, he explained, dogs get “zoomies” while chasing one another and owners need time to call them back.

Malmuth, a retired fence contractor, also wants the city to close large gaps in the 900-foot chain-link fence that separates the off-leash area from the park’s “protected natural area” at the northern end. The fence was designed to be “critter-friendly,” but large holes at the bottom now allow dogs to slip through easily, while owners struggle to retrieve their pets due to the lack of gates.

In an email to Malmuth, the manager of Berkeley’s animal shelter said it’s “highly unlikely” that an animal control officer would write a ticket if someone brought a puppy to the off-leash area and it darted under a protective fence despite efforts to call it back. The city’s approach, the staffer wrote, is “not to enforce based on technicalities but rather help the person achieve compliance with the law.”

Tickets for walking dogs off leash are around $300, the animal shelter manager wrote in an email, noting that the specific cost varies depending on the number of dogs and if the owner is a repeat offender.

A disagreement over burrowing owl safety

Beyond the wire fence that delimits the off-leash area for dogs, a park visitor runs the park’s perimeter with an unleashed dog. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

Burrowing owls, which are under consideration for endangered status, have regularly spent winters at Cesar Chavez Park.

Nicolaus, a retired lawyer who has since 2014 observed the ground-dwelling owls, has for years argued that the city needs to do more to protect them from loose dogs — which may chase them away from their protected nesting area in the park’s northeast corner — and pushed the city to install more secure fencing. (He has at times photographed dog owners walking through the park with unlawfully off-leash dogs and posted the photos on his website.)

The city’s current fence, installed in 2010 and designed in consultation with the Golden Gate Audubon Society (now Golden Gate Bird Alliance) and wildlife biologists, is inadequate, Nicolaus has contended. He argues that the 32-inch-tall, thin metal-and-wire fence can be easily breached by people and unleashed dogs.

Nicolaus, who has on several occasions recorded videos of dogs harassing wildlife in the owl area, believes a dog was responsible for injuring at least one owl in February 2022, which disappeared the following day and he suspects died. He also suspects a dog killed one owl in 2016, though he doesn’t have proof.

Nicolaus, who visits the park daily during fall and winter in the hopes of spotting the “charismatic” bird, said he didn’t spot the bird at all during the 2023–24 winter season. Encouraged by state wildlife policymakers’ recent efforts to protect the declining species, Nicolaus in September revived his old petition to “save the owls” by giving them a more robust fence.

But the city and Golden Gate Bird Alliance contends any sturdier or higher fence could actually put the burrowing owls at more risk. A September city memo lays out the reasoning for rejecting Nicolaus’ proposal.

At Cesar Chavez Park, a thin metal-and-wire fence separates the pathway from an area where burrowing owls frequent in winter. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

“Additional and more substantial fencing can provide opportunities for predators to perch above and pray upon Burrowing Owls nesting in the ground,” reads the memo.

Nicolaus thinks burrowing owls are too sharp-sighted to be targeted by raptors in this way.

Glenn Phillips, the executive director of the Golden Gate Bird Alliance, disagreed, saying there is clear data showing that raptors use the perch-hunting approach to hunt burrowing owls. Just Tuesday, the nonprofit learned that a Cooper’s hawk had eaten a burrowing owl in Oakland by perching and waiting for it to emerge from its burrow. Only a wing remained, Phillips said.

While Phillips agrees that the current art fence isn’t an effective physical barrier, he believes it serves its purpose by signaling to people that they should not cross into the protected area or let their pets do so. He said he agrees with the city’s recent efforts to warn and educate dog owners about leash rules.

“One-hundred-percent compliance is really never possible and it’s not really necessary,” said Phillips, “Not all the owls that winter in Cesar Chavez Park winter in the protected area. … There’s no real way to fence off every possible place that an owl could be.”

Burrowing owl at Cesar Chavez Park, November 2021. Credit: Martin Nicolaus

Burrowing owls are well-adapted to handle ground predators like foxes, coyotes, wolves and dogs, Phillips said. Though there are far more pet dogs now than there once were in the wild, the nonprofit’s volunteer owl watchers have found that the number of dog owners whose dogs actually pose a threat is “tiny.”

Nicolaus has responded to the city’s decision not to build a new fence by escalating his campaign, writing a blog post accusing the city of telling the owls to “drop dead” and hiring an environmental lawyer to pen a stern letter to city management — though he does not intend to sue the city.

“We want to have the city understand that we’re not just coming from a sort of warm, touchy-feely kind of feeling about the birds,” Nicolaus said. “There’s legal issues involved here, that the birds are legally protected, that the city has potential liability if it doesn’t protect the owls.”

Nicolaus said he was glad the city was making an effort to educate dog owners about leash rules, but doubts it will deter dog owners who knowingly skirt rules believing they won’t be caught.

“No amount of enforcement, no reasonable amount within the budget of the city of Berkeley, is going to put a stop to that minority of scofflaw dog owners, so education isn’t going to work,” Nicolaus said. “The only thing that’s going to work is an effective physical boundary to protect the owls.”

North Berkeley urban planner Vikrant Sood and his dog Simba, a 3-year-old English Cream Golden Retriever, were stopped by a city employee several weeks ago while walking from his car to the park’s center, where the off-leash area is. The employee told him the city was issuing warnings to ensure dogs didn’t disturb wildlife in the park, Sood recalled, and that it would soon start handing out citations.

Sood was initially confused — the only wildlife he’d noticed in the park were pigeons and ground squirrels, both of which also exist in the off-leash dog area — but complied. He later learned through Malmuth’s email group that the city’s enforcement was meant to protect rare birds that migrate here in the winter.

“If there are good reasons, I don’t want Simba to be destructive,” Sood said. He’s since started keeping Simba on a leash as they walk to and from the off-leash zone.

Vikrant Sood and his 3-year-old Golden Retriever, Simba, at the off-leash area at Cesar Chavez Park. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

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Berkeley tries to rein in off-leash dogs at Cesar Chavez Park amid burrowing owl nesting season

A disagreement over burrowing owl safety

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