A successful program to reintroduce foxes to the wild

By ZEKE BARLOW
Scripps Howard News Service
Friday, October 12, 2007

After a life inside a fence, the fox had found freedom. The only thing was, it didn't want to go.

"Come on, it's OK," Dave Garcelon, president of the Institute for Wildlife Studies, whispered to the fox.

The setting sun cast a long shadow behind the cat-size animal as it looked around its new home on the western edge of Santa Cruz Island. All the captive-bred island fox had to do was scamper from the open kennel and run into the grass-covered hills where hundreds of other tiny island foxes were living.

One minute passed. Two. The fox sniffed the ground and the air and took it all in but still didn't budge.

Finally, with a bit of prodding, it ran into the hills away from the crowd of scientists, politicians and journalists gathered to watch the momentous event.

Nine other endangered island foxes would join it before the end of the day, marking the end of captive breeding on Santa Cruz and the start of what biologists hope is the recovery of the species.

The pioneering program to re-establish the foxes found only on the Channel Islands began six years ago. Biologists have now decided the population of about 300 foxes should be enough to stop the breeding program and let the foxes rebound naturally.

"This is a great success story," said Garcelon, whose organization bred more than 85 pups under a contract from the Channel Islands National Park and The Nature Conservancy, which owns 76 percent of the island.

And their population should continue to grow.

"It's the African lion of the Channel Islands," Garcelon said of the foxes, because they lack predators and are at the top of the food chain.

The fox populations on Santa Cruz, San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands nearly crashed in the past decade as non-native golden eagles feasted on the 5-pound foxes, which were unaccustomed to predators swooping down from the sky.

Bald eagles, which mainly eat marine life, had traditionally occupied the island, but years of DDT poisoning decimated the population.

With no bald eagles to compete for territory, and lured by the presence of non-native pigs and their edible piglets on Santa Cruz Island, golden eagle populations grew as the foxes dwindled. Only about 15 foxes were left on Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands and fewer than 100 on Santa Cruz.

In 1999, biologists started trapping and relocating the golden eagles. Three years later, they started reintroducing bald eagles and breeding foxes. Bald eagles are now nesting on the islands.

In 2005, a New Zealand company was hired to kill every one of the 5,036 pigs on Santa Cruz Island. The controversial process led an animal rights group to file a lawsuit to stop it, but it was unsuccessful, and the last pig was killed in 2006.

Once the stage was set, breeding still wasn't as easy as setting up a date between two young foxes.

"It was dicey," said park biologist Tim Coonan, who has been working with the foxes for years.

There was a steep learning curve in getting the foxes to mate because nobody had bred them before. They learned that females preferred to have a number of males to choose from and that they only started ovulating when a male was present. Females would sometimes get roughed up during intense mating sessions; still, they mated for life.

DNA was gleaned from blood samples to make sure no inbreeding occurred.

On Santa Cruz, 18 "founding" foxes produced 85 offspring. On San Miguel Island, eight adults were used to beef up the population. Two of the founding female foxes on San Miguel are so old -- about 12 years -- they are too frail to return to the wild, so biologists will keep them the remainder of their lives.

They've earned the moniker "The Golden Girls."

Visitors to Santa Cruz's Prisoner's Cove campsite have a good chance of seeing the gregarious creatures that scamper about the area. They've eaten boxes of cookies, run across sleeping campers and urinated on tents there.

"They are like campground dogs," Coonan said, who half-joked about issuing squirt guns with onion water to keep the foxes at bay.

About 30 percent of the foxes on the islands have radio collars, which will be used to track the population in studies that are expected to continue for years. The foxes are considered an indicator species for the islands that help biologists monitor the health of the ecosystem.

The U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife is expected to come out with a plan in the coming months on what would be required to take the fox off the endangered species list. It could be removed within five years if populations reach historic levels of about 1,500 on Santa Cruz.

The island fox's recovery is exceptionally good news in the environmental movement.

"This is going to be one of those animals that goes on the endangered species list and off it in record time," Garcelon said. "Between the bald eagles breeding and the golden eagles being removed and the foxes coming back, it's basically all good news, and it's not very often you get that in the environmental context."