Park Service Probing Report of Sheep Killings

The National Park Service is investigating a report that a team of hunters on Santa Cruz Island working for an adjacent property owner, the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, killed sheep last weekend on park service land.

Holly Bundock, spokeswoman for the park service, said federal authorities will review a videotape taken Saturday that purportedly shows the carcasses of 17 sheep--including five ewes said to be on park service land--gunned down Friday and Saturday by conservancy hunters.

“We’ll find out if there’s any truth to the matter, and take appropriate action,” said Bundock, speaking for Ventura-based Channel Islands National Park. “No one is authorized to hunt on park service property. If the allegations are true, there are federal and state laws that deal with this.”

Nature Conservancy officials could not be reached for comment late Monday. Previously, they had said last weekend’s effort was intended to scare some of the 2,500 sheep that live on park land. The park service owns 10% of the island, the conservancy 90%.

The park service is participating in an adoption program to get the sheep off the island, but few will be moved until April at the earliest.

Until the sheep are gone, the conservancy has said it will continue its long-standing control program. The program’s primary goal is to push sheep back onto the park’s property, but it also calls for killing the animals if they cannot be scared back.

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Last weekend, John Morgando, a former caretaker on Gherini Ranch before the park service seized it this month, said he videotaped the dead sheep Saturday.

“Most of the sheep were in no man’s land near the Nature Conservancy boundary,” said Morgando, who worked on the Gherini Ranch from 1990 to 1992. “Five looked like they had been dumped in a drainage area that leads right to the ocean. Five more were about a half mile onto the old Gherini property. They were all ewes and their udders were full of milk.”

Kathy Jenks, animal regulation director of Ventura County and coordinator of the sheep adoption program, said the controversy would have been avoided if local conservancy director Diane Elfstrom-Devine had stopped the hunts as requested by Jenks and Channel Islands Park Supt. Tim J. Setnicka last Friday.

“This is exactly what Tim and I had tried to lay out to Diane Devine. We asked her to put this off,” Jenks said. “We told her there would be people watching. This could all have been avoided.”

The conservancy, which has killed about 36,000 sheep on its portion of the island since the early 1980s, maintains the hunts are necessary to keep feral sheep from destroying rare plants, bushes and trees on its property.

Elfstrom-Devine said last week that she cannot allow the sheep, which took a long time to control, to migrate back onto the conservancy’s preserve.