Category Archives: local heroes

Had the opportunity to write a newspaper story about an adorable species, the Island Fox of the Channel Islands, that biologists say has gone from near-extinction at the end of the 20th century to a full biological recovery in the ten years since it was put on the endangered species list.

Loved writing the story, which can be found here (and I'll post it below, in case of paywall). Still, lots of interesting details can't be shoehorned into a newspaper story.

Here are a few of those interesting details. 

Fascinated to meet a fellow named Dave Garcelon of the Institute for Wilderness Studies. He said he launched the institute, which at the time was basically his own self, but now has about two dozen staffers, when he was an undergrad at Humbolt State in the late l970's. He explained: 

I wanted to do a Bald Eagle re-introduction program on Catalina, but I didn't have a lot of people behind me who believed it would be successful. New York had started a Bald Eagle recovery program in l976, but the birds hadn't bred yet, so no one knew if that was going to work, and I was just a kid. No one listened. I was trying to latch on to the university or some program but no one believed it would actually work, so I said, the heck with it, I'll start my own program, and I'll get my own grants. [edit]

I started working on releases of rehabiliated birds and looking into the history of Bald eagles and I found out [the Channel Islands] used to be a stronghold for the eagles. I just thought: That would be a really cool thing to do. 

Also had a chance to interview Tim Coonan of the National Park Service, who led the meeting of the working group devoted to the Channel Fox. He had some great details about the fox to relate, including the fact that the foxes have shown signs of adaptation/domestication as they have recovered and become habituated to seeing people 

At the Santa Cruz campground there's a family of foxes that is quite adept at using the resources available, and they have probably passed that information on to their young. We do not see that on other islands or even on other parts of Santa Cruz. They're very smart, adaptable animals, and they were probably kept as semi-pets by the Chumash Indians,. We know the Chumash took them to the southern islands from the northern islands. They never ate Island Foxes, there's no evidence of Island Fox bones in their middens, and yet they were important to the Chumash, they show up in their ceremonial burial sites. So I think they've always been easily tamed. They're an island species, they have no natural predators, so they have no fear of humans at all. And so where they have a lot of human contact, you will get individual animals that will change their behavior. [edit]

There can be as many as 15-20 per square kilometer. Their home ranges are very small, anywhere from half a kilometer up to two kilometers. Males and females defend territories together throughout the year. They mate for life, but there's a lot of fooling around at territory boundaries. 

Coonan also took a wonderful photo of an Island Fox, which parks spokesperson Yvonne Menard encouraged me to share with one and all.