Breeding Effort Yields 11 Island Fox Pups

An innovative breeding program to increase the number of island foxes on two of the Channel Islands has had modest success, park officials announced Thursday, as animal activists petitioned the federal government to classify the species as endangered.

Eleven island fox pups have been produced in captivity on San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands, the result of a yearlong effort by National Park Service biologists to save the dwindling species, which is native to the islands off the Ventura County coast.

“No one had ever bred island foxes before,” said Tim Coonan, a park service biologist. “It means two things: It can be done, but it’s going to take a very long time.”

To help revive the fox population, biologists removed 13 golden eagles from nearby Santa Cruz Island and relocated the foxes’ predators to distant, mainland sites.

But the limited Park Service revitalization efforts need help, says an animal protection group in Tucson, Ariz., that filed a petition Thursday with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate four of six island fox subspecies as endangered.

Federal law prohibits the killing of endangered mammals on both public and private lands. Coonan said designating the island fox as endangered will likely encourage public donations to assist the breeding efforts.

The island fox is the lone carnivore unique to California, according to a written statement by the Park Service. The fox’s value to the ecosystem is immeasurable, because it is the islands’ largest native land mammal, said Kieran Suckling, science and policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, the organization that made the petition.

“The Park Service and some wildlife groups are operating on a shoestring budget to barely keep this critter alive, and they are not getting nearly enough resources to do the job right,” Suckling said. “We need a much bigger, dramatic federal effort to save this thing.”

The birth of almost a dozen pups in one year is a positive sign for the captive breeding program, Coonan said. But with only one free-roaming fox on San Miguel, 50 to 75 on Santa Rosa, and slightly more than 100 on Santa Cruz, “we still have one foot in the grave,” he said.

Suckling said the pesticide DDT was indirectly part of what put the fox so close to extinction. The banned chemical decimated the bald eagle population in the Channel Islands, which made way for more golden eagles to inhabit the area.

Bald eagles feed mostly on fish, he said, while golden eagles feed more on land mammals, including the island fox and feral pigs, which were introduced to the island by settlers in the 19th century and became easy prey for the eagles.

A steady decline in the island fox population began in 1995, according to a written park service statement. The number of foxes on San Miguel Island dropped from 400 in 1994 to just 15 last year, according to the park service. Similar drops occurred on the other islands.

The number of foxes is “going down on four islands, and they don’t have enough resources to breed on all the islands,” Suckling said. “That’s why we’re filing a petition.”

A similar request last fall to have the island foxes classified as endangered failed, Coonan said, but the park service found money to keep the breeding attempt afloat.

Coonan said between $1 million and $2 million is needed to complete the breeding project, which could take up to a decade on San Miguel Island, by far the hardest hit.

“The challenges right now are primarily to solve the remaining root causes, the feral pigs on Santa Cruz Island,” he said. The presence of pigs attracted golden eagles to the northern Channel Islands, he added.