The island fox stands 12 to 13 inches tall and weighs four to five pounds. It is about the size of a house cat and a third smaller than the mainland gray fox it descends from. It lives on six of California’s eight Channel Islands, and each island has its own subspecies.
By 2000, the foxes on San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands were down to 15 animals each. Santa Cruz Island had fewer than 80. In 2004 the federal government listed the three northern subspecies as endangered, and biologists gave them a 50 percent chance of going extinct within a decade.
In August 2016, the Department of the Interior announced that all three had recovered. It was the fastest successful recovery of any mammal ever listed under the Endangered Species Act.
What went wrong, and what fixed it
The foxes had not always been rare. San Miguel once held about 450, Santa Rosa about 1,780 and Santa Cruz about 1,400. The crash came from golden eagles, which had moved onto the islands after bald eagles were wiped out by DDT and feral pigs offered an easy food supply. On Santa Catalina Island, a canine distemper outbreak did the damage instead.
The response was a coordinated one. The National Park Service, The Nature Conservancy, the Catalina Island Conservancy and the Institute for Wildlife Studies bred foxes in captivity and released 226 of them, relocated golden eagles to the mainland, removed the feral pigs, brought bald eagles back to the islands and vaccinated foxes against distemper.
By 2015 the count had climbed to roughly 700 on San Miguel, 1,200 on Santa Rosa and 2,100 on Santa Cruz. The Santa Catalina fox, which had been listed separately, was moved from endangered to threatened at the same time.
“The remarkably rapid recovery of the island fox shows the power of partnership, focus, and science,” Scott Morrison of The Nature Conservancy said in the 2016 announcement.
Where to see one
Channel Islands National Park is reachable by boat from Ventura and Oxnard, and Santa Cruz Island is the easiest place to encounter the foxes. They are curious, they are not shy about wandering through campgrounds, and they are one of the few endangered-species stories in California that ended with a species coming off the list.
Sources
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Interior announces fastest successful recovery under the Endangered Species Act (Aug. 2016)
- U.S. Department of the Interior press release (Aug. 11, 2016)
- National Park Service, Island Fox
- National Park Service, delisting proposal news release (Feb. 2016)
