Navy Takes Steps to Erase Footprints : Nature: An ambitious program is under way to return much of San Nicolas Island to its pristine state and preserve its fragile ecology.

A tiny island fox, once a cherished pet of aboriginal Indians on San Nicolas Island, has emerged as a symbol of the Navy’s effort to restore the desert island to its pristine state.

It is one of many threatened creatures that the Navy wants to bring into balance with the 225 Navy personnel at the island’s missile tracking station. About 65 miles southwest of Point Mugu, the island is also home to the threatened island night lizard and provides rare breeding grounds for the Western gull, the Brandt cormorant and protected sea lions and seals.

With no natural predators to fear, the tame foxes spent years crowding around a slop trough behind the Navy’s galley, waiting for table scraps. Ecologists stopped the daily feeding in the mid-1970s when they realized the handouts had swelled the fox population far beyond what the 3-by-9-mile island could support.

Forced to return to a diet of insects, vegetation and bird eggs, hundreds of the red, furry foxes died of starvation. Only recently have their numbers returned to a high of about 800.

The ecologists fear that the island fox, a unique subspecies of its mainland cousin, may face another threat introduced by mankind. Averaging only four pounds, the fox has disappeared from parts of the island inhabited by once-domestic cats that have reverted to the wild.

“We have no documentation they kill foxes, but they are twice their size,” said Ronald Dow, chief ecologist at the Point Mugu Naval Air Station who also is responsible for the island’s environment. “A big fox is five pounds, and we have found cats that are 12 and 13 pounds. And the cats are totally carnivorous.”

For now, Dow hopes the fox can outsmart the feral cat, or at least outlive it.

He and other Navy ecologists have decided to concentrate on other aspects of an ambitious program to return much of the island to its natural state and minimize the Navy’s imprint on the island’s fragile and unique ecology.

In coming months, the Navy will close its landfill on the island. It will burn paper waste and recycle the rest of the trash produced, dispatching it aboard barges to the mainland. The Navy also has plans to engage the California Conservation Corps to sweep the island for miles of wire cable, abandoned building materials and other military refuse.

Much of the rusting shrapnel and other hardware is left over from an earlier era when the Navy had other plans for the island and the Army used one end as an artillery range. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to clean up,” said Lt. Cmdr. Steven Buske, commanding officer of the island naval station.

In one of the most painstaking tasks planned by ecologists, Dow and his staff hope to eradicate every non-native plant from the island and stop new species from arriving or taking root. Principally, they want to protect rare plants, including four species found only on San Nicolas Island, from being choked out by more aggressive plants from the mainland.

On a recent morning, senior ecologist Thomas W. Keeney uprooted a tumbleweed near the ramp for unloading barges from the mainland. “They come in on the tires of trucks and equipment,” Keeney said, looking at the tumbleweed, also known as Russian thistle. “Once Russian thistle gets started in a windy area, it’s all over.”

Keeney said he has proposed that trucks and equipment from the mainland be cleaned before being allowed on barges headed for the island.

The ecologists have plans to fill in some deep gullies caused by runoff from the Navy’s 10,000-foot runway and other projects. They also hope to stop erosion by replanting barren land overgrazed by herds of sheep in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To hold the soil and propagate rare plants, they plan to collect the seeds of native flora, grow them in nurseries and reintroduce the seedlings in new patches.

Although the island is already restricted to Navy personnel and invited guests, ecologists hope to add further restrictions on breeding grounds for 25,000 California sea lions, 15,000 elephant seals and 1,000 harbor seals. Any human presence, they said, causes seals and sea lions to stampede for the water, abandoning--if not trampling--their pups during the winter pupping season.

They also want to prevent the island’s few visitors from disturbing the nests of the Brandt cormorant or the Western gull--two birds known to abandon their young when startled.

To some Navy employees, the ecologists’ high-minded plans seem out of place for a Navy base that tests the latest and most deadly missiles. But support for their environmental work stretches to the top, with each commander at Point Mugu’s Pacific Missile Test Center in recent years voicing heightened concern about the environment.

Rear Adm. William E. Newman, ranking officer on the base, has emphasized his commitment to reinforce the Navy policy of good stewardship of its natural treasures. “Let it be known that those are my personal sea lions out there,” Newman told base officials when he assumed command last month.

That mandate also extends to conserving Indian relics on San Nicolas Island. The 16-member environmental staff includes a resident archeologist who has marked and catalogued 95% of the Indian sites on the island.

“The earliest site we have out here is 6000 BC,” archeologist Steven Schwartz said. “On the mainland we don’t have any well-documented sites earlier than 3000 BC.”

Compared to the mainland, the island has excellent research potential because its desert climate preserves artifacts, and it has no gophers or other burrowing animals to disturb buried relics, Schwartz said.

Little is known about the Nicolenos, the tribe that kept foxes as pets when it inhabited the island. Despite the tribe’s mystery, the plight of its last surviving member is well known. The woman, who was marooned alone there for 18 years, provided the inspiration for the popular children’s book “Island of the Blue Dolphins.”

More recently, San Nicolas was chosen as a new home for a colony of sea otters. Introduced to the island by the U.S. Department of Fish and Game, the otters were relocated as part of a program to preserve the species by establishing an independent colony. It is feared that the main otter population between Point Conception and Monterey could be wiped out in the event of an oil spill.