The Recovery Road

A few of us realized we were staring into the abyss here, that we were looking at a species on the verge of extinction. But we faced some steep challenges. First, island foxes were not an endangered species, or even proposed as one. They were on nobody’s radar screen, and that needed to be changed. Second, there was no funding at that point for any type of recovery program.

In 1999, Dave, Gary and I decided it would be ideal to convene all island fox researchers along with experts in canid conservation and raptors, to assess the situation and make recommendations, the thought being we needed a coalition to garner support from the agencies and the public. At that time there were very few researchers working on island foxes, which were pretty much a niche species, a small-market team, in sports parlance. The National Park Service, which realized the gravity of the situation, at least at the local (park level), hosted the meeting, and the recommendations were the ones any reasonable person would make: removed the predating golden eagles, build up island fox populations through captive breeding, restore bald eagles to the islands, and remove the nonnative ungulates (the feral pigs) from the ecosystem.

Any one of these actions would have been a daunting, almost insurmountable task, one which could consume a full professional career. So we started small, and scaled up. It was certainly a numbers game, and the odds were stacked against us. The island fox group recommended we bring all remaining San Miguel island foxes into captivity, since there were only maybe 30 left (we estimated) and golden eagles were still having their way with them. We decided to do captive breeding on the island (“in situ”), instead of on the mainland, because foxes raised on the mainland might have brought diseases back to the island when re-introduced. Keith Rutz of my staff, who had worked with endangered Mexican wolves, took the lead on constructing captive breeding pens on San Miguel. Pen materials (chain-link fencing panels) were loaded onto an NPS landing craft (surplus WWII) at Port Hueneme and taken to San Miguel, where a helicopter picked them up off the boat deck and drop them at the pen site, to be put together by volunteers. Then we set about to capture the remaining foxes on the island. My staff combed the island, and within a trapping season had brought in 14 foxes. One lone female evaded capture for over a year, but that was it. Only were 15 foxes left on San Miguel!

At this point, it seemed unlikely that we could bring the San Miguel subspecies back. They had declined over 95%, and of the 14 foxes we had in captivity, only four were male. We quickly developed “husbandry” methods to caretake for island foxes, a species which had never been held in captivity before. Working with the nearby Santa Barbara Zoo and with experts from the national zoo, we developed a diet, veterinary care schedule and procedures, breeding plan (genetically, we knew who was related to whom via blood sample genetic testing by UCLA) and pen design. Most captive breeding programs last for decades (see California condors) and we thought we were in it for the long haul. That first fall, in 1999, we paired the four males with females to whom they were not related, and we were off and running. Two of those pairs bred successfully that first spring, and foxes, surprisingly, continued to breed well in captivity. In 2000, upon the advice of the fox group, we brought the remaining foxes in on neighboring, larger Santa Rosa Island, and again, only a handful of foxes remained. Fifteen, in fact. The following year (2001) we started a captive breeding program on Santa Cruz Island (owned partly by The Nature Conservancy) where we estimated there were maybe 100 foxes left. Though the early years of captive breeding were fraught with worry (and that may be what turned my hair gray, though there’s a distinct possibility that parenthood also contributed), foxes actually bred well in captivity on all three islands. By 2003-2004 we had reached our target captive breeding populations which would allow releases back into the wild. Just one problem, though; there were still some eagles out there.