Hunters Filling Catalina’s Void : Ecosystem: With limited food and no predators to control animal populations, they serve a function, officials say.

Among the beach-type crowd on the boat to Santa Catalina Island, the woman and five men stood out like Crocodile Dundees. Maybe it was their bush hats, jeans and boots. Or maybe it was their rifle cases.

Clearly, they weren’t seeking mere sun and fun, but a prey some would find in the cross hairs of their telescopic sights.

Within a couple of hours they would be stalking deer in the hills above the isthmus at the west end--activity nobody on the island talks much about, particularly around Avalon at the populated east end. The killing of wild animals would be poor promotion for one of the most popular holiday destinations in Southern California, where the hunting ethic is not widely appreciated.

But the legal hunting of deer--as well as wild boar, turkey and even an occasional buffalo, antelope or peacock--has long been quietly practiced on the island, where sport serves conservation.

Doug Propst is president of the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy, to which the Wrigleyfamily deeded 86% of the island in 1975. He said hunting is necessary to keep the wildlife from destroying the island and, in the process, itself.

“Most reasonable people understand that these things have to be controlled,” Propst said.

Catalina animals have no natural predators. There are, for example, no mountain lions to keep the deer population in check.

Wild goats, which once numbered more than 50,000, nearly ate the island. They munched much of the landscape into moonscape, leaving little more than the prickly pear cactus that proliferates all over the island and no protection for the topsoil. Whatever rain fell was washing the island back into the sea, turning ranges of hills into denuded, rutted badlands.

“Whenever it rained, there would be a big, brown ring all around the island,” says Randy Bombard, who has lived on Catalina most of his life.

The deer are less numerous--and voracious.

“But they’re in and out of everybody’s garden around Avalon,” Bombard said, not mentioning that they also consume the eight species and subspecies of plants found only on Catalina.

Bombard and Kathy King run Catalina Island Hunting as part of Doug Bombard Enterprises, headed by Randy’s father. To hunt Catalina, you go through them. The opportunities are limited, but the demand is not great.

Although the California Department of Fish and Game allotted a quota of 300 deer this year--about a third of the estimated population--fewer than 100 tags have been requested, and no more than six hunters, in two groups of three each, can hunt at any given time. Only 50 or 60 deer were expected to be killed during the season ending Nov. 11.

A significant change this year was a return to hunting with rifles after a two-year moratorium during which only bow hunting was allowed. That followed the death in 1988 of a hunter from Pacific Palisades, who was mistaken for an animal and accidentally shot by a companion while hunting wild pigs. Authorities said he was not wearing an orange hunting vest and that he was in an area where his companion did not expect him to be.

Meanwhile, Bombard’s outfitting insurance premiums soared, and he returned to rifle hunting this year with the tightest of safety restrictions. The archers had taken only 18 deer in two years.

“I more or less insisted that we’ve got to go back to a rifle hunt,” Propst said. “The archers tried hard, but it just doesn’t work. They don’t get the deer we need to take off.”

The largest mammal considered as native to the island is the little Channel Islands fox, and it is speculated that Indians might have brought him 1,500 years ago. All of the larger animals were imported in this century, except for the goats, which historians think were left by Spanish explorers before 1820.

The first deer were shipped over by the Los Angeles County Forestry Department in the 1930s, about the time the pigs were brought from Santa Cruz Island to root out rattlesnakes. The buffalo were imported for movies in 1924. All stayed and thrived, especially the goats.

Attempts to transfer them to the mainland from other islands have historically resulted only in massive animal deaths caused by stress, so in recent years they have been otherwise eradicated. The deer, pigs and buffalo are closely watched.

“Times have changed,” Propst said. “We didn’t have the awareness then that we do now about taking care of the ecosystems. When I came here, our mandate was to get Catalina back in shape and make it into a producing cattle ranch. As we worked with it, we realized this isn’t a cattle ranch. It’s a rare place in the world, a place to be handled differently.”

Most deer hunts in the state are for bucks only, but the DFG has permitted Catalina to have either-sex hunts.

“We won’t have a problem as long as the state cooperates with us,” Propst said. “(Animal) population on any island has to be carefully controlled. They just can’t move over the ridge to the next range, because it isn’t there.

“We have had people say, ‘If you don’t want them, why don’t you capture them and take them off?’ Those programs just flat-out don’t work.”

Like goats, deer respond poorly to relocation. Ten years ago, the DFG tried to move 200 deer from Angel Island in San Francisco Bay and 82% died within a year, most of stress, disease or other causes not found on the island.

Bill Clark, a DFG expert on wildlife relocations, said, “When you take a naive deer that hasn’t been exposed to fast-moving cars or predators, it’s pretty tough.”

Larry Sitton, a DFG biologist in Long Beach, said, “We would prefer to see the deer kept within (habitat) carrying capacity by hunting, which has always been our philosophy.”

The island is coming back. Bombard notes greenery on the hills around the isthmus that once were mostly red dirt.

His veteran hunting guide, Chris Peterson, says, “It’s getting greener every year since they got rid of the goats.”

Conservancy Ranger Steve Dawes, English-born but an island resident for 29 years, drives a visitor over some of the dirt roads that crisscross the spine of the island, looking down on the familiar coves where mainland boaters spend their weekends.

A small nursery at the conservancy’s Middle Ranch headquarters grows endangered species of plants, and fences have been built around the remaining groves of irreplaceable ironwood trees.

Dawes is encouraged to find water standing in places that have normally been dry this late in the year. Springs, drawing on the island’s water table, keep a few small creeks trickling even during droughts.

“We’re seeing some basil sprouts that we didn’t see before,” Dawes says.

And quail--thousands and thousands of quail. If it were allowed, Catalina would have some of the best quail hunting anywhere.

They are similar to but larger than the state bird, the California valley quail, but they are a unique subspecies of Catalina quail. Therefore, like all other native creatures on the island, they are protected.

But from heights rivaling Mt. Orizaba, at 2,100 feet the highest point on the island, other hills are barren, and Dawes says, “That’s probably what the whole island would look like if there wasn’t any game control.”

And the other side of the picture, Dawes says, is that “there’s nothing worse than having so many animals that they can’t support themselves.”

The buffalo are of some concern, although there are only about 200.

“We’ll probably take that down to about 100,” Propst said. “We’d like to have a nice little herd for people to see, just like we want to have deer to see. It’s fun to see them in the wild--just so they’re not impacting anything.”

Buffalo, like elk and bighorn sheep, are better able to withstand relocation. Some have been shipped to ranches around the country. The rest roam the interior, fenced off from sensitive areas.

The only buffalo hunts are special shoots to eliminate aged or crippled animals--such as the one with a twisted right rear leg that limped down the road ahead of a pickup truck carrying Peterson and three deer hunters.

“Normally, that animal would be taken out by a pack of wolves or a big cat,” Bombard said. “But none of that’s here.”

Ray Wenzel of Bellflower has hunted on the island since the mid-’60s.

“Turkey, buffalo, pigs, everything they’ll let us shoot at,” he said. “One of the most elusive game I’ve hunted out here is turkey. It was the fifth year before I got one. We’ve even hunted peacock. You’d think they’d be easy, but they’re not.”

Wenzel pulls out his wallet to show a picture of a rare, spiral-horned black buck antelope he bagged on the island several years ago--one of the exotic animals imported when William Wrigley Jr. had thoughts about making the island a game ranch.

The Bombards’ two pickup trucks are rigged like safari wagons, with roll bars across the bed so hunters can stand and scout the terrain as they move along the roads. They hunt nowhere near Avalon or any other populated area, and rifle hunts are conducted only on weekdays, when there are fewer visitors to the island.

Wenzel’s hunting companions are his wife, Terry, and friend Stan Kurtz of Whittier. For a while, they alternately drive the roads and walk game trails through the brush and cactus. Wenzel chews on an unlit cigar while throwing rocks into cover where deer might be resting.

Because the deer have no natural predators and are not heavily hunted, they are not easily spooked, and in the heat of the day they are all bedded down. It isn’t until the canyons are in shadow that the first one is seen emerging from beneath some scrub oaks.

It is a handsome buck, with forked antlers, moving across the opposite side of a canyon about 150 yards away. Because Terry Wenzel has never taken a deer, she will get the first shot. She steps out of the cab and off the road, loads and waits.

Soon the buck turns downhill and notices the hunters on the opposite side. He stands transfixed, facing them head-on. The shot is perfect, through the breast and into the heart.

A member of the other hunting party will shoot a doe, and Peterson will lead Kurtz to a spiked buck the next morning. Bombard expects the hunter success rate to be nearly 70% this year, down about 10% from most years.

“The drought has slowed down reproduction,” he said. “But there are still canyons we can spotlight at night and see 60 deer.”

That, to Propst, seems manageable.

“To carry forward our purposes, we have to have real tight control so we can have native plants restored, our watershed restored, stop the erosion. It’s a delicate balance. But it’s working.”