Back from the brink: The remarkable recovery of California’s island foxes
Island foxes are the only carnivores unique to California.
They’re also adorable.
A housecat-sized version of their mainland ancestor, the gray fox, they are curious and playful with pointed noses and rust-colored fur along their sides.
Island foxes live on the Channel Islands off Southern California and nowhere else on earth — and they very nearly disappeared.
Their decline traces back to the 19th century, when ranchers brought pigs out to the islands. Over time, the pigs turned feral, attracting hungry Golden Eagles that picked off their piglets and developed a taste as well for the foxes.
By the early 2000s, fewer than 100 island foxes remained.
That’s when Nature Conservancy ecologists devised a strategy — a war plan really — to eliminate the swine and drive off the birds.
They considered giving contraceptives to the pigs, but ultimately went with bullets. A team of professional hunters from New Zealand was hired for the job. They killed more than 5,000 of the pigs, sniping many from helicopters overhead.
It worked. Today, the island foxes number more than 5,000 across six of the eight Channel Islands, said Christina Boser, an ecologist at the Nature Conservancy.
“We identified the problem. We found a way to remove the problem, and then the system kind of corrected itself, and it corrected itself very quickly,” she said. “So it was pretty remarkable.”
Visitors to the islands can see the tiny foxes hunting critters and lounging in the sun. They have no predators, said Boser, making them essentially “top dog at four pounds.”
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