Navy Plans to Outfox Foxes, Protect Birds

The Navy has halted its controversial program of killing rare foxes on San Clemente Island, opting instead for nonlethal tools to protect an even more endangered bird on which the fox preys.

Navy biologists will trap and hold the foxes rather than killing them during the next few weeks, a critical time when captive-bred fledgling birds are released and when young birds in the wild are learning to fly, a Navy official said Tuesday.

A number of scientists had denounced the Navy’s decision this year to kill San Clemente island foxes, saying that rare animals should not be sacrificed so that other rare species could live.

But Navy experts said they were compelled to trap and kill 15 foxes this spring in an effort to save the critically endangered San Clemente Island loggerhead shrike, one of the rarest birds in North America. Only 13 island shrikes are known to remain in the wild.

The shrike and the fox live only on the Navy-owned island that the Pacific fleet uses for bombardment practice. San Clemente Island is a rocky, wind-swept isle 65 miles off the San Diego County coast.

Navy officials said euthanasia was necessary because the foxes threatened the rare shrike and because so few zoos were willing to offer the foxes sanctuary. The bird protection program called for removing and killing up to 50 foxes this year.

But now the Navy will trap and hold foxes on the island for up to three weeks, giving wild fledglings time to learn to fly and captive-bred birds a chance to adjust to life outside a cage.

Several biologists on Tuesday applauded the Navy decision to trap and hold foxes rather than killing them. The approach takes into account the well-being of more than a single bird species, they said.

“It’s the most sound conservation strategy, and one that’s in tune with the sort of conservation we should be implementing in this day and age, rather than the single-species conservation they were more used to in the past,” said Gary Roemer, an island fox research biologist at UCLA.

While some biologists speculated that public outcry had helped halt the euthanasia program, Jan Larson, the Navy’s regional director of natural resources, said that public opinion did not play a role.

Instead, he maintained, the time of year now makes the trap-and-hold approach feasible. By holding foxes captive for two to three weeks, biologists can protect captive-bred and wild fledglings. If the foxes had to be held for the entire spring nesting season, their territory might be invaded by other foxes, making reintroduction more difficult.

Larson is not ruling out more fox killing next spring, but said it might prove unnecessary if new technology is successful.

A new type of antenna now being tested would improve the current shock-collar system currently used to try to keep foxes away from shrike nests, Larson said.

Under the current system, foxes wearing special radio collars receive a shock when they cross a wire encircling the nesting area in a huge loop. But the new antenna would trigger continuous shocks when the foxes approached the nests--a method that experts hope will prove more successful.

Worries about San Clemente Island foxes have been heightened by the mysterious deaths on the Channel Islands off Ventura of foxes that belong to a closely related subspecies. The northern Channel Island foxes have been dying so rapidly that some fear they may become extinct.

In response, some fox defenders plan to petition the federal government to protect all island foxes under the U.S. Endangered Species Act--the same law the Navy used to justify killing foxes to save the shrike. While the fox is shielded only by the state Endangered Species Act, the shrike enjoys the more powerful protection of federal law.

To date, the San Clemente foxes have not suffered the precipitous decline of foxes to the north, although a new population update puts the number of San Clemente foxes at 650 to 750, well below the 1,000 foxes estimated on the island in 1994. But the fox crisis on the northern islands has stirred concern about the long-term health of the southern foxes.