Catalina Restoration Project Gaining Ground

Botanist Denise Knapp was overjoyed when she discovered a patch of a rare rock cress growing in Santa Catalina Island’s remote and foggy Wild Boar Gully nature preserve.

The tiny flowering plant had not been seen on the island in three decades. But it suddenly flourished behind a fence erected two years ago to protect the area from deer and feral goats that used to browse vegetation to oblivion.

“Now, you can almost hear the plants sighing with happiness and relief,” Knapp said on a recent weekday hike into the 112-acre preserve where she had found the so-called Santa Cruz Island rock cress plant last April. “I love coming here. It has a unique assemblage of rare plants, it’s beautiful and it’s slowly returning to its natural state.”

The same could be said for much of the 76-square-mile island, whose natural rhythms had been severely altered by nonnative animals, ranching and farming.

In one of environmentalism’s emerging successes, Catalina’s native plants and animals are on the rebound because of experimental restoration efforts. While much attention has been placed on the removal of feral creatures such as goats and pigs from the island, equally important has been the replanting of native vegetation nurtured in greenhouses and laboratories, and the fencing off of sensitive areas such as Wild Boar Gully.

Peter Schuyler is director of ecological restoration for the Catalina Island Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that owns 88% of the island and is mandated to return it to its natural state. “We’ll never be completely pristine,” Schuyler said, “but we want to get rid of the major threats posed by man and [to] repair as much of the damaged landscape as we can. In five or 10 years, we’ll be well on our way.”

However, there is a risk that unforeseen consequences will result from the ecological tinkering.

For example, a successful effort to capture feral goats and ship them to the mainland has resulted in a surge of vegetation. More greenery could eventually pose a fire threat to Avalon, the island’s bustling tourism and demographic center with a permanent population of 3,000.

‘We are facing a natural system that is always changing--we don’t know exactly what’s just down the road,” Schuyler said. “So we have to be adaptable.”

The Wrigley family, of chewing gum fame, bought up most of the island in 1919 with an eye toward tourism, but later took up environmental preservation.

The conservancy, formed by the Wrigleys, shifted its policy five years ago toward the aggressive, hands-on restoration projects. Those are now producing tangible results.

2 Wild Goats Remain of 5,000 a Decade Ago

Grazing animals have been competing with the island’s native mammals since goats first were introduced by Spanish missionaries in the 1800s. Over the centuries, grazing and trampling by nonnative animals also wreaked havoc on native plants, which had evolved in the presence of herbivores no larger than a ground squirrel.

Earlier this year, all but two females of the island’s wild goat population, which only a decade ago was more than 5,000, were captured and removed.

The last 300 tusked and shaggy feral pigs on the island--descendants of animals brought to Catalina to eat rattlesnakes--are targeted for removal within three years.

A week ago, six captive-bred island foxes were released into the wilds as part of an experimental effort to revive a native population decimated by an outbreak of distemper believed introduced by a someone’s pet.

For the first time, the environmental impacts of the island’s revered but nonnative bison are being recorded, down to the number of bites of grass the beasts consume per minute. The goal: determining a herd size, which now stands at 350, that might be more compatible with the island’s native species.

The effects of those and other restoration projects are most evident near the conservancy’s inland headquarters in a broad valley known as Middle Ranch, about seven miles west of Avalon.

A week ago, 13 AmeriCorps volunteers erected a 7-foot-high, bison-proof wire fence around a 10-acre portion of weedy former Middle Ranch hayfields. It will soon be flooded with tens of thousands of handpicked and specially mixed native seeds.

“About a year from now, you’ll see a 10-inch-high blush of the first chaparral and coastal sage to grow here in half a century,” said consultant botanist Lisa Stratton. “Essentially, it will be an island of natural vegetation that will produce its own seeds, which will be carried elsewhere by wind and birds.”

Stratton, who did her doctoral thesis on the botany of Hawaii, has high hopes those seeds will eventually overwhelm adjacent pockets of prolific nonnative weeds and shrubs.

Nurturing Stock Plants at Island Nursery

At the nearby James Ackerman Native Plant Nursery--named in honor of the prominent Long Beach attorney who donated funds for its creation--a cadre of botanists, staffers and volunteers have been nurturing stock plants and cleaning and sorting 2 million wild seeds to be replanted on the island’s bald spots.

The nursery’s “seed room” is staffer Bruce Moore’s realm. Peering through a binocular microscope on a table surrounded by shelves stacked with trays and jars filled with seeds of various colors and shapes, he used long needles to chip the chaff off a tiny mound of barely visible seeds.

“A seed is the end of a biological cycle and the beginning of a new one,” he said. “Some are as large as acorns. But some weigh in the thousandths of a gram, like these,” he said, holding up a bottle of hand-cleaned Iris-leaved rush seeds.

Noting Popular Bisons’ Every Move and Grunt

Half a mile east of Middle Ranch is a field crossed by an arroyo and dotted with bunch grass and shrubs favored by bison. There, conservancy consulting biologist Juanita Constable spends up to 14 hours a day noting the massive, beady-eyed beasts’ every move and grunt.

That’s not easy. Constable has been chased by the island’s main animal earth movers several times. In June, an angry male had her trapped on the roof of her Jeep for several minutes.

Undaunted, she has returned to that field and others again and again with a spotting scope and a satchel containing notebooks, a hand-held global positioning device, a stopwatch and a gadget that measures wind speed, ambient temperature and relative humidity.

“The bison don’t take days off or time out, so I don’t either,” she said, planting the tripod of her spotting scope into the ground near some grazing descendants of the 14 first brought to the island in 1924 for the filming of the silent movie “The Vanishing American.”

“My marching orders are to collect all the information I can about these animals,” Constable said. “It’s all brand-new material. At this point, there isn’t a whit of scientific information about the ecological impact of bison on Santa Catalina Island.”

Although biologists have a hunch that the bison are recontouring fields and riparian areas with their appetites and hooves, Constable was reluctant to declare their impact without more complete surveys.

“People around here take it real personal if you say anything at all negative about Catalina bison,” she said. “After all, tourists don’t come to the island to see wild goats or pigs.”

The fact that the island’s bison are being studied at all makes Herman Saldana nervous. Saldana, 62, manages the herd for the conservancy.

“I think the conservancy ultimately wants to get rid of them, which would be tough to do because people love them,” he said. “There’s 350 of them on the island right now, which I agree might be too many. But 100 or less would be too small for the tourism industry.”

Some would call that an understatement. The bison are so important to the local economy that the Catalina Island Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau has planned a special “Buffalo in Paradise” event next spring that will feature whimsically decorated fiberglass bison placed outdoors throughout Avalon.

Biologists Plan Study of Island’s Mule Deer

Conservancy biologists also are planning an unprecedented survey of the island’s other big browsers, mule deer. Nineteen of them were introduced by Los Angeles city officials in 1930 as a hunting resource. Less than two decades later, there were 2,000 of the large foraging animals.

Today, there are about 850, and most biologists believe that is too many.

Until last year, the conservancy sponsored an annual deer hunt to help thin the herd. But the man in charge of the operation quit after finding his tires had been slashed, conservancy officials said. No arrests were made in connection with the vandalism.

Officials decided not to hold a hunt this year but say it may resume next year. After all, the absence of hunters coupled with the sudden elimination of competition from goats and pigs for food could result in a deer population boom.

“Personally, I think the citizens of California and the department would like to see deer on the island,” said state wildlife biologist Rebecca Barboza. “So, we don’t want to see all the deer go away. But I believe we can handle certain manageable levels, once we figure out what those levels are.”

‘Feral Cats Are a Very Ticklish Issue’

Less obvious is the impact of homeless and feral cats, descendants of local house pets.

“Feral cats are a very ticklish issue because they tug at the heart strings,” said Institute for Wildlife Studies biologist David Garcelon. “On the other hand, they are all over the place here. Their numbers have skyrocketed over the past five to 10 years.”

Wild cats are efficient predators with hunting instincts so strong that they are prone to kill even when well-fed. Against them, Catalina’s indigenous ornate shrew, Beechey’s ground squirrel, burrowing owls and the struggling island fox don’t stand a chance.

“We’re initiating a new study in December to document the abundance and impacts of wild cats in the interior of the island,” Schuyler said.

Much of the work in the upcoming feral cat project, like most others sponsored by the conservancy, will be handled by volunteers from the island and the mainland.

Two years ago, volunteers slowed the spread of feral pigs with the construction of more than 60 miles of so-called “anti-pig fencing” which is about 4 feet high.

Other fences have been built around areas of special concern such as Wild Boar Gully, home of the only known stand of Catalina mahogany shrubs and Knapp’s little patch of rock cress.

“It’s an exciting time to be on this island,” said Knapp, thrusting her Jeep into low gear as it wiggled up a rocky road so steep and narrow that it seemed as though she was flying. “There’s lots of new things under study, and lots of actions being taken.”