Countywide : Avalon’s Pet Fox Is Well, on Way Home

Fauna, the rare, blind, 13-year-old Santa Catalina Island fox whose travails have made her an Avalon celebrity, is returning home.

Dr. Matt Wyatt on Thursday declared the five-pound fox recovered from an unusual and experimental form of laser surgery for her most recent malady, a cancerous tumor in her ear, and will escort her by boat back to Avalon on Saturday.

“She’s fit, she seems to be going strong and I want to get her back to her natural habitat,” said Wyatt, who has tended Fauna for the last four weeks at the Animal Hospital of Anaheim.

The ear operation was the most recent chapter in the saga of Fauna, who is the oldest known living member of her species, urocyon littoralis catalinae , and who has become a popular tourist attraction. In 1984, she was adopted by the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy after being discovered wandering, partially blind, around Avalon Airport.

The conservancy, which also takes care of buffalo, seals and other foxes on the island, created a special habitat for Fauna near Avalon Airport, where she is known for her friendliness and responsiveness to human contact.

“She’s been blind since she was very young and has learned to adapt well,” said Wyatt, 38, a veterinarian from Long Beach who works with the conservancy and in hospitals in Avalon and Anaheim. “Her nose is her most powerful sense. She can be in a sound sleep and if you put a carrot in her cage, she will pop up and look around for it. She finds her way around pretty well with just her nose.”

But Fauna was given little chance to survive. The cancerous tumor, the size of a golf ball in her right ear, resisted a conventional operation in March. On June 7, she was moved to UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute, where she underwent an unusual form of surgery using experimental diode lasers and a procedure called photodynamic therapy, in which a dye reacts with the laser to kill cancerous cells.

“Fauna appears to be completely healed,” Beckman’s Dr. George Peavy said. “Her hair is growing back in. She’s doing super.”