CLAWS OF A DILEMMA
November 28, 2003 12:00 AM
ANNA DAVISON
NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
On the Channel Islands, a war is being waged.
It's claws vs. talons, as endemic foxes fight for survival against their
voracious new neighbors, golden eagles.
Now three wildlife biologists who have been involved in fox recovery efforts
have taken a stand for the imperiled animals.
They say the winged nemeses have got to go. And soon, even if it means
shooting the few birds that have evaded capture.
"It's a difficult thing to do, but it's what's necessary," said Rosie
Woodroffe of UC Davis, a member of the Fox Recovery Team and one of the
biologists who weighed in on the conservation conundrum in an article in
today's issue of Science magazine.
"You've got a choice between a handful of golden eagles, which are quite
common," she said, "and three subspecies of island fox that live nowhere
else in the world. It's unfortunate, but you've got something that's
irreplaceable and unbelievably precious."
Golden eagles, which took up residence on San Miguel, Santa Rosa and Santa
Cruz islands over the past couple of decades, have decimated the fox
population, biologists say. On Santa Cruz Island -- the largest -- fox
numbers plummeted from 1,500 to fewer than 100 in just a decade. Foxes are
now considered extinct in the wild on San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands.
Around 2,000 Channel Island foxes now survive, down from about 6,000 a
decade ago.
The National Park Service has moved 31 golden eagles off the northern
islands in the past four years, leaving fewer than 10 birds. They're also
going to rid Santa Cruz Island of thousands of feral pigs that offer an
enticing food source for the eagles as well as destroy native plants and
archaeological sites.
But the foxes' fate is all in the timing, according to Dr. Woodroffe and her
colleagues Franck Courchamp at the Université Paris-Sud and Gary Roemer at
New Mexico State University, who is also a member of the Fox Recovery Team.
They did some number-crunching to try and predict what would happen to the
Santa Cruz population as the pigs are picked off.
Their conclusion?
Once the remaining golden eagles are deprived of their supply of pork, they
could turn a beady eye to the foxes. And it's too great a risk for the
animals, which are expected to be listed as an endangered species early next
year.
"The successful recovery of foxes on (Santa Cruz, San Miguel and Santa Rosa
islands) depends on the eagles not being there," Dr. Woodroffe said.
"We don't want to say pig removal shouldn't happen," she added. "What we
need to do is get rid of the eagles first."
Those that have so far evaded capture are a cunning lot, Dr. Woodroffe said
-- "animals like that, you're never going to catch them."
Tranquilizer guns aren't any use, she said, because you can't get close
enough to target the birds, and even if you did, it's extremely difficult to
hit muscle.
Drs. Woodroffe, Courchamp and Roemer recommend shooting any remaining birds.
"Nobody wants to shoot the animals," Dr. Woodroffe said, "but it's a
biological necessity.
"Of course, it's much easier for us to make a recommendation to do this than
it is for them to do it," she added.
Channel Islands National Park Superintendent Russell Galipeau said he's not
going to let anyone take aim at the remaining golden eagles just yet. He
wants to keep trying to snare them all and move them to the northern part of
the Eastern Sierra in partnership with the nonprofit Nature Conservancy. The
conservancy owns most of Santa Cruz Island and is working with the service
to remove eagles and pigs and on the captive breeding program for the foxes.
Representatives of the Nature Conservancy couldn't be reached Wednesday for
comment.
"We're going to do everything possible to catch golden eagles in a humane
manner," Mr. Galipeau said.
Killing the eagles ''is an alternative that we will look into if we have
to,'' said Bridget Fahey, a researcher for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service. ''But before we do anything drastic, we are going to know that we
tried everything else,'' she said.
In 1962, Congress amended the Eagle Act to cover golden eagles, a move that
was partially an attempt to strengthen protection of bald eagles, since the
latter were often killed by people mistaking them for golden eagles, the
Fish and Wildlife Service Web site reports. The golden eagle, however, is
accorded somewhat lighter protection under the act than the bald eagle.
It would take permits and public hearings before the eagle killing could
start, Ms. Fahey said, so ''it is not something that will happen soon."
Mr. Galipeau says Dr. Woodroffe's work is good science and offers a useful
management tool, but there's another part of the puzzle: the captive
breeding program for the foxes, which includes dozens of animals on Santa
Rosa, San Miguel and Santa Cruz islands.
Because there are so many of the animals in captivity, he said, they won't
go extinct -- one of the scenarios predicted in the Science article.
True, says Dr. Woodroffe, who recommended establishing a captive population
and offered "great applause" to the National Park Service and its nonprofit
partners for their work. But those animals are not breeding well, she said,
the genetic diversity of the population is threatened, and any foxes that
are released are easy prey if even a few golden eagles remain on the
islands.
She offered a watery analogy to the park service's attitude.
"You get some goldfish. Every time one dies, you go out and get another one.
But you don't deal with the problem -- clean the bowl or whatever."
Although Mr. Galipeau said it might be possible for wild foxes to survive
with the odd eagle circling, Dr. Woodroffe is not so sure.
Just a few of the birds can be devastating, she said, and "until you get rid
of the last few eagles, they're going to continue to attract more
immigrants."
One of the remaining female birds has had three successive mates taken, Dr.
Woodroffe said, but apparently she just soars to the mainland and brings
back another beau.
"It's time to get serious about it," she said. "The alternatives have been
tried and tried and tried."
Dr. Woodroffe stressed that any eagle shootings would be a one-time deal if
the pigs were wiped out.
Without plentiful pork to tempt them, golden eagles are unlikely to wing
their way over from the mainland, she said. The territorial bald eagles that
have been recently reintroduced to the islands -- and don't dine on foxes --
should keep golden eagles at bay.
Mr. Galipeau said if it ever came time to consider shooting some of the
eagles, which would require federal approval and likely be a public process,
"it would be a very hard decision to make."
That could be an understatement, given the uproar over a poison drop carried
out two years ago to rid Anacapa Island of non-native black rats so that
native seabirds like the Xantus' murrelet and ashy storm-petrel might have a
better chance of survival.
One of the anti-poisoning activists, Rob Puddicombe of Montecito, who
founded the Channel Islands Animal Protection Association, went to court
after the National Park Service alleged he'd fed antidote to the rats.
Mr. Puddicombe, who was found not guilty of misdemeanor charges in July,
said this week he wasn't surprised to hear someone recommend shooting the
golden eagles on the Channel Islands.
"It's just another bad idea in a series of bad ideas," he said. "It's a
never-ending process, this whole business of trying to save a species at any
cost, and it seldom works out. I personally think that inflicting suffering
and death on individual animals is not appropriate for any reason, including
the questionable success of eradicating one animal to potentially preserve
another species, which appears to be going extinct anyway."
As "unpalatable" as the idea of killing some golden eagles might be, Dr.
Woodroffe and her colleagues said it's necessary to solve a problem that's
of human making.
Channel Island foxes once coexisted with the primary predator on the
islands, bald eagles, which have no appetite for foxes, Dr. Woodroffe said.
Humans then introduced exotic animals to the islands -- notably pigs, which
uprooted and trampled native plants.
Decades ago, bald eagle populations throughout the United States were
decimated by the insecticide DDT. The Channel Island birds were wiped out.
Golden eagles then swooped in in their place, lured by a good supply of prey
-- the pigs. But they also bared their talons at the unwary foxes.
''(The foxes) haven't had this type of predation in their history, so they
don't know that that looming shadow overhead means they are about to be
preyed on,'' said Fish and Wildlife's Ms. Fahey.
Although the captive breeding program and efforts to rid the islands of
golden eagles have saved the foxes from extinction, Dr. Woodroffe said, the
islands need to be restored to a self-sustaining system. This would
eliminate the need for a time-consuming and expensive breeding program; for
building fences and hunting pigs; or for trying to net golden eagles from
helicopters.
The current management system, she said, "is not, in my opinion, dealing
with the problem. It's not getting to the point where you can stop managing
things and go home or work on something else. To me, it's not conservation."
What's really needed, she said, is to get rid of all the golden eagles --
however possible.
"Although it's horrible to shoot golden eagles," Dr. Woodroffe said, "it's a
lot worse if three subspecies go extinct."
This story includes reports from The Associated Press. Anna Davison can be
reached at adavison@ newspress.com.