Drought Hurts Efforts to Keep Catalina Natural

In the dry summer heat on Santa Catalina Island, wild buffalo roll in the dust and munch on clumps of grass. Spotted baby boars scurry along the edge of a trickling canyon stream, digging up roots from the soil. Goats meander on a hillside and feed on green seedling trees.

To tourists rambling through the hills of the 65-square-mile nature preserve owned and managed by the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy, these scenes might appear idyllic. But for the conservancy’s naturalists and ecologists, they spell disaster.

The grazing animals, introduced by man to Catalina’s harsh semi-desert climate, are literally eating the island away.

To protect Catalina’s scarce plants--some of which are found nowhere else--the conservancy has tried for years to reduce the number of non-native animals on the island, at times using controversial measures such as mass killings.

“If let alone, they would totally overrun the place,” said Doug Propst, president of the conservancy.

Now, efforts to control the animals are more critical than ever, conservancy officials say, because of Southern California’s four-year drought.

What little vegetation grows during the winter is quickly eaten, threatening the survival of some plant species and causing erosion.

The drought has also complicated some of the conservancy’s other tasks: guarding against fire and regulating water sources needed for residential and commercial development.

“This is a worse drought than any recorded on the island in the past 30 years,” said Keith LeFever, who manages the island’s water supplies for Southern California Edison Co.

During a drought, the animals’ hearty appetites take an even bigger bite out of the island’s unique plant life. Saplings, for instance, are especially vulnerable to grazing but are crucial for the nature preserve’s survival, said Misty Gay, a naturalist for the conservancy.

If existing saplings are not protected and new trees do not grow, Gay warned, then “when our oak trees reach the end of their lives--100 or 150 years from now--we could lose all of them.”

In the island’s interior, it is obvious where boars have ravaged whole hillsides by uprooting plants and grass, leaving dark brown streaks and tufts of rootless, dying vegetation.

“It’s like someone coming in and ripping up your front lawn,” Propst said.

Looking out over a hillside where goats have eaten away stretches that look as bare as the moon, Propst noted: “Everything evolved here under no grazing pressure. It’s a very tender flora.”

In other parts of the island, conservancy officials say, the land is recovering as a result of various animal-control measures.

This summer, the conservancy has shipped a weekly average of 20 buffalo off the island to a ranch in Oklahoma.

First brought to the island by filmmakers for the 1924 silent movie “The Vanishing American,” the buffalo number about 400, the fourth-largest herd of North American bison. The conservancy hopes to reduce the herd to 100.

Goats, each capable of gobbling 2,000 pounds of vegetation a year, are perhaps the most destructive animals on Catalina, Gay said. Spanish missionaries are believed to have introduced these beasts to the island during the 1800s to help feed the Indian population.

Hired sharpshooters killed thousands of goats earlier this year on the island’s small west end, where renewed plant growth is now visible. Similar killings can be expected throughout the island in the future, Gay added.

The conservancy also allows game hunters to shoot boars, deer and goats on the island during the fall and winter. Ideally, the conservancy would like to ban hunting, but it defends the program as another method of animal control, Propst said.

“We’re not here to run a game preserve,” he said. Ironically, he added, game hunting was the reason deer and wild pigs were originally brought to the island.

Because of the hunting and goat killing, the conservancy has come under attack from animal rights groups such as the Fund for Animals, which argues that there are more humane ways to control the animal population.

“We recognize that goats are destructive to the habitat, but there are non-lethal alternatives,” said Jerye Mooney, Los Angeles coordinator for the Fund for Animals. Mooney suggested that the animals be sterilized or shipped off the island.

In addition, the Fund for Animals is particularly opposed to hunting with bow and arrow, the only type of hunting allowed on the island. “Bow hunting is the cruelest form of hunting,” Mooney said, because many animals that are shot manage to escape and suffer from arrow wounds.

The conservancy defends its actions by saying that both animal and plant life on the island would eventually be destroyed without the controlled killings. Vegetation would be ravaged and the island’s animals would have nothing at all to eat, staff members say.

The conservancy has tried in the past to trap goats and ship them from Catalina, but this led to widespread stress-related illness and many goats died, Propst said. Conservancy staff also say that sterilizing the goats, many of which live in out-of-the-way canyons, is impractical.

“If we don’t kill the goats, they’d kill themselves and the island with them,” Gay said.

The grazing animals also compete with the island’s native mammals for scarce food supplies, putting pressure on rare species such as the Channel Island fox, listed by the state as endangered, said Penelope O’Malley, spokeswoman for the conservancy.

Conservancy officials point out that the family of chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., which owned the island and donated most of it to the conservancy in 1975, specifically wanted to preserve the island’s native plants and animals.

“We’re here to protect the island and restore it to its natural state,” Propst said.

The imported animals aren’t the only threat to the island’s fragile balance of plants and wildlife. Although the native plants are well adapted to drought, the continuing dryness presents a fire threat in some heavily wooded areas, such as the hills north of Avalon.

In the past few years, fires have broken out near Pebbly Beach, Fourth of July Cove and Two Harbors. One fire nearly wiped out a grove of Catalina ironwoods--tall, slender trees native only to the island. For unknown reasons, seeds from these trees have not been germinating naturally. Naturalists are planting and growing the trees elsewhere on the island.

Catalina usually gets between 12 and 14 inches of rainfall a year, Edison’s LeFever said, but in the last 12 months it received less than six inches.

The drought has dried up natural water holes used by animals, LeFever said. This summer, water troughs are being placed in areas where buffalo and other thirsty animals graze. Blocks of molasses are being put out in the hills to give animals more protein.

The island’s other animals--the 2,500 human residents of Avalon--also vie for Catalina’s water in times of drought.

To meet Avalon’s water needs, Edison has drilled wells in the conservancy area, raising some concern that above-ground water, crucial for plants and animals, might be reduced.

As a result of a 1962 agreement that predates the conservancy’s founding, the utility company holds all the water rights on the island.

Conservancy and Edison officials said they work together to ensure that pumping does not harm the environment. “We show great diligence in not over-pumping any of the canyons,” LeFever said. “We have throttled back some of our wells so as not to dry out the canyon.”

However, naturalist Gay cautioned, “whenever you pump water out of the area, it’s harmful,” particularly where the wells are near streams.

For instance, in Bulrush Canyon, on the south side of the island’s eastern section, a well sits above tiny, trickling streams that emerge from the ground, flow for several yards and disappear, only to resurface lower in the canyon. Propst, who has lived on the island since he came over as a rancher for the Wrigleys in the 1950s, said the streams appear normal for this time of year.

“We have a gentlemen’s agreement with Edison,” Propst said. “If any of these spots dry up, they’ll have to stick some water back.”

For now, Avalon’s impact on the interior is limited, conservancy officials say. And, they add, future development plans for both Avalon and the small Two Harbors community must be handled so that life in the conservancy is not compromised.

Propst recognizes the challenges that face the conservancy but says he is confident that the island’s unique environment can be preserved.

“This is California how it used to be,” he said, “and how it will always be here.”