Camping OKd on Santa Rosa Island : Parks: Campground will open this fall. Hunters will shoot 4,000 wild pigs that have ravaged the island.

The federal government for the first time will allow campers this fall on Santa Rosa Island--coincidentally while hunters will be killing as many as 4,000 wild pigs.

No campers have been allowed on the island since the National Park Service bought it in 1986. But beginning on an undetermined date this fall, 30 campers at a time will be permitted to pitch tents on a grassy plateau on the island’s southeast side and to hike in restricted areas.

At the same time, the hunters will be shooting the feral pigs, which have ravaged the island, digging roots, eating acorns and plundering bird nests since European settlers abandoned the livestock there in 1850, authorities said.

The eradication effort to be carried out by biologists and National Park Service rangers is the first step in a plan to restore most of the island to its natural state and to turn it into a rustic resort for up to 500 vacationers by the year 2011.

“We’ll make sure hunters and campers won’t mix,” said Mack Shaver, park superintendent. “I don’t think we’ll have so many people that that will be a problem.”

Every camper who arrives this fall by boat or lands at the island’s only airstrip will be personally welcomed by a ranger and directed to the Water Canyon campground--away from areas where hunters are working, Shaver said.

The inauguration of the campground marks the beginning of what Shaver and his colleagues hope will become a backcountry operation on the second-largest of the six Channel Islands owned by the Park Service.

If a proposed plan is approved by federal officials next year, as expected, the island would eventually become a haven for tourists with a taste for rustic vacations. Visitors would be able to ride horses, kayak, tour a research and environmental center and stay in a no-frills bed-and-breakfast inn.

Unrestricted camping and backpacking would also be allowed--unlike on some of the other Channel Islands, officials said. “We don’t want people packed together like sardines,” Shaver said.

Park Service officials only want to develop about 100 acres of the 53,000-acre island and plan to maintain the vintage barns of the ranch on the northeast portion of the island.

None of the island’s dirt roads would be paved under the plan. The 80 workers would commute to the island by boat, so schools and other facilities would not have to be built.

“Rugged types” will enjoy the services most, Shaver said. “It’s truly a backcountry island. On Santa Barbara and Anacapa islands you can hear the ocean all the time and not forget you’re on an island. Here, you can wander back into a canyon and get the feeling you’re on a continent.”

But at least 90% of the island has been ravaged by the pigs, said Kate Faulkner, chief of resources management for the National Park Service. They have dug up the roots and eaten the acorns from acres of island oaks, contaminated streams with their feces and preyed on native ground-nesting birds, she said.

The loss of trees and other vegetation has resulted in massive erosion, said Bill Halvorson, a scientist for the Park Service. On higher clefts of the gray rock that stud the craggy island, buckwheat and bright yellow Coreopsis flowers grow. The flowers should carpet the canyon walls, but they only grow in steep areas where the animals cannot get at them, Halvorson said.

The Park Service will spend between $200,000 and $800,000 in federal funds over a three-year period beginning this fall to wipe out the pigs under a state mandate to restore native wildlife on the 53,000-acre island. But officials believe that the pigs can be killed in 1 1/2 years.

In late August, Park Service employees will be flown in from Hawaii to train local rangers, who will be taught to look for the pigs by helicopter and shoot them from the ground. The carcasses will be used as bait for other pigs or will remain to rot into the soil. To butcher and pack the animals on the island would be too costly, Shaver said.

The Park Service considered other techniques to wipe out the pigs, including using pit bulls to hunt them or setting traps, but decided that those methods were inhumane or inefficient, Faulkner said. Also, it is against state law to bring the pigs to shore alive because they carry a virus.

Environmental groups, including federal and state agencies as well as private organizations, have not objected to the Park Service’s plans to shoot the animals, Shaver said.

Harvey Carlson, a Santa Barbara spokesman for The Nature Conservancy, a private, nonprofit organization, said the Park Service has achieved a fine balance between environmental preservation concerns and animal welfare.

“There is a very, very compelling reason biologically to get rid of the pigs,” Carlson said. “I really think they’ve picked the most humane option.”

But the leader of another group, Fund for Animals, which is based in Washington, suggested that the pigs be neutered to prevent them from reproducing.

“I’m vigorously opposed to that kind of mass killing,” said group founder and president Cleveland Amory. “There are people in this world that believe that any time you’ve got an animal problem you can shoot it.”

In the mid-1980s, the Fund for Animals intervened on San Clemente Island, trapping and moving to private ranches about 3,300 goats that Navy sharpshooters were about to kill in an effort to preserve natural vegetation.

Faulkner said neutering the pigs would be difficult because pigs have several litters a year, and “the problem is confounding itself while you’re working.”

The pigs are only part of the problem, Halvorson said. “We still need to get the deer and cattle off. It’ll take 100 years to bring this back.”

Cattle have grazed on the island since 1902 when the firm of Vail & Vickers purchased it from the Moore family, which had raised at least 125,000 sheep there. Only about 500 cattle graze on the island since the four-year, statewide drought forced the Vail family to move about 1,500 cows to the mainland this year.

Under a purchase agreement with the Vails, the Park Service will allow the family to continue running its ranch until the year 2011. But because of the state mandate, Park Service rangers must begin now to undo years of damage done by the alien animals, Shaver said.