Sharpshooters Stalk Last 300 Pigs on Island : Environment: Hunters hired by the National Park Service kill 970. The wild swine endanger rare plants.

The professional hunters arrived on Santa Rosa Island last month with a government mandate to slaughter the island’s entire population of wild pigs, initially sweeping the island in helicopters and shooting every pig in sight.

Now, with two-thirds of the wild pigs already killed, a team of five sharpshooters continues the hunt on the ground, rising before dawn every day to scour the canyons of the 84-square-mile island 45 miles southwest of Ventura Harbor.

The hunters say there are 300 wild pigs remaining.

“We are going to get 99% of them on this first go-round,” said Wayne Long, a Northern California professional hunter whose firm is being paid $310,000 by the National Park Service to kill every pig on the island.

With about 970 pigs killed so far--their carcasses left to decompose--National Park Service biologists believe that they are getting close to eradicating the pigs originally brought to the island by ranchers in the 1850s.

It is the first step, they say, toward fulfilling a congressional mandate to protect the native vegetation of Santa Rosa, one of five islands in the Channel Islands National Park.

They blame the black and tawny brown swine, once-domestic pigs that crossed with a species of wild European boar, for endangering some of the island’s rare plants. Biologists say the feral pigs have toppled trees and ripped apart Chumash Indian burial grounds by rooting for grubs and acorns to satisfy their voracious appetites.

Yet the killing of the pigs, which typically are a scrawny 100 pounds compared to their fattened domestic cousins, has been a delicate undertaking for a federal agency most familiar with the conservation of natural resources.

Until this week, the National Park Service had kept details about the pig hunt at a minimum. On Monday, however, park employees showing reporters and photographers the devastation wrought by pigs on the island also disclosed that most of the killings have already taken place.

On the island excursion, reporters were not shown any of the wild pigs or pig carcasses. But the group was shown half a dozen redomesticated pigs captured by local ranchers and now being raised in pens to eventually be eaten.

So far, the slaughter has raised only a mild protest from an animal rights group.

“Sure they’re destructive; they’re pigs,” said Melissa O’Brien, who joined the island tour as a representative of Concerned People For Animals of Simi Valley. “But they didn’t want to come out here. They were brought here. For that, they don’t deserve to die.”

O’Brien’s group has suggested neutering the pigs to stop their reproduction, or building fences to restrict them to less ecologically fragile parts of the island. Others have proposed ferrying the pigs to the mainland, either to be butchered for food or set free in the wild.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture will not allow the island pigs to be brought alive to the mainland because they carry a herpes virus that could spread to domestic swine. And park officials said it would be unfeasible to set up a makeshift meatpacking plant to process the pork.

Furthermore, park officials said they believe that rounding up the skittish pigs would be too costly or might not work at all. Given their short gestation period and litters of up to eight piglets, Channel Islands National Park Supt. C. Mack Shaver said, “We could take 80% of the pigs a year and we wouldn’t reduce their numbers at all.”

Shaver also rejected the outpouring of pleas from recreational hunters who volunteered to join in the kill. Shaver said the idea of gun-toting sportsmen converging on the island for a pig blood bath frightened him.

“We don’t want anything to do with sport hunting,” Shaver said. “We just want to get rid of the pigs.”

After reviewing the bids, the National Park Service hired Long, president of Multiple Use Managers of West Point, Calif. Long is familiar with Santa Rosa Island from his years of running a hunt club for the island’s previous owners, the ranching concern of Vail & Vickers Ltd. of Santa Barbara.

The National Park Service bought the island in 1986 for $29 million, with a 25-year agreement to allow Vail & Vickers ranchers to use island grassland to run about 2,000 head of cattle, 1,000 mule deer and 400 elk.

Carmen A. Lombardo, a National Park Service biologist, said the cattle, deer and elk also harm the native vegetation. Park officials are negotiating a range management plan with the ranchers, but cannot expel the other four-legged intruders until the 25-year lease expires.

In the meantime, Lombardo said, the drought has greatly reduced the number of pigs from a high of about 4,000 five years ago, providing an opportunity to finish them off.

“We need to keep the pressure up,” said Lombardo, who maintains that he has shot more than 400 pigs himself.

Professional hunters have now taken over, hiking eight to 12 hours a day on carefully mapped hunt-and-destroy missions that are expected to cover the island by the end of September. “It’s the greatest job in the world, but it gets to be a lot of work,” Long said.

As the number of the surviving pigs dwindle, the hunt for them gets tougher because they are harder to find.

“The pigs really aren’t dangerous like they have been made out to be,” Long said.

But they make for difficult targets, he said. The diminutive pigs have a keen sense of smell and usually tear off into the brush at the first human scent, he said.