Land of the Vanishing Foxes - helping the San Miguel Island foxes survive

Animals, Jan, 2000 by Deborah Knight

No one knows how or when foxes came to the Channel Islands. The best guess is that it happened 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, when large amounts of ocean water were locked up in glaciers. With sea levels far lower, the northern Channel Islands formed one large island only about six miles from the coast. Probably a fox or two rafted out, caught on storm debris washed down a river mouth. As the glaciers melted, sea levels rose and divided the one island into four. Foxes survived on three and evolved relatively rapidly into separate subspecies.

Foxes weren't the only surprising mammal to reach the islands. Wooly mammoths probably swam out, and their descendents, like the island fox, shrank in size. Remains of pygmy mammoths have been found dating to a little over 11,000 years ago, roughly when humans first arrived. Whether humans caused the extinction is unclear. Although, the earliest archaeological sites contain island fox bone material that shows burn and butcher marks, the inquisitive little animals also seem to have charmed the new arrivals. At one ancient burial site, a male and a female human pelvis lie facing each other, and in between them the skull of an island fox. Foxes were also buried by themselves, much as one might bury a pet. These early islanders probably took foxes with them in their plank canoes to three of the more southerly Channel Islands. There the animals evolved into another three subspecies.

Until recently the island fox was a common sight on San Miguel. The resident ranger remembers seeing 11 at one time. In the 1970s a researcher who came out to study the foxes and was camped on the island woke up in the middle of the night to feel something on his feet. He looked down and saw a fox curled up in a ball at the end of his sleeping bag.

Many days San Miguel is swathed in fog and buffeted by 40-mile-per-hour winds. Even today, transportation to and from the island is problematic (see sidebar, page 12). By boat it is a six-hour ride, and the lack of a pier means landings must be accomplished through the surf in a small dory. When the fog lifts, a six-seater plane picks up and delivers Park Service staff, landing on a dirt strip. The ranger and park researchers are often the only ones here. The surf booms on ancient rocks, sea-lions bark in the distance, and the landscape feels primeval. Rutz savors the sense of stepping back in time to the way the California coast used to be.

With funds for staff so limited, Rutz sometimes stays on the island for weeks on end. "The stakes are really high," he says--the fate of an entire subspecies. He goes to sleep thinking about foxes, wakes up thinking about foxes. He'll dream he has left all the doors to the pens open and the foxes are gone. Once he dreamed he was trying to trap foxes but kept catching dalmatians. Years ago, before he'd ever worked with wildlife, he once dreamt that, running naked with a wolf pack, he found himself confronting five men with rifles out to shoot the wolves. Now, in order to save wild animals, he is putting them in cages.