[CINC] Island fox article from The Scientist

Tue May 6 10:15:57 PDT 2008

By Margaret Guthrie

 The pace of conservation                                                   
 Endangered species need time and science to survive a world altered by     
 human disturbance; Margaret Guthrie reviews "Darwin's Fox and My Coyote"   

 [Published 25th April 2008 01:26 PM GMT]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

 Intrigued by an encounter with a coyote while out on horseback near her    
 home in upstate New York, author Holly Menino embarks on an intellectual   
 journey to discover what the coyote is doing there. Eventually, her        
 curiosity leads her to the Channel Islands off the coast of California, to 
 a remote park in Chile, to Panama, and on a coyote trapping expedition     
 with field researchers in New York. Her adventures spring to life in the   
 pages of Darwin's Fox and My Coyote.                                                                                                                  

 (Embedded image moved to file: pic24946.jpg)                               

 On the Channel Islands, Menino shadows a researcher trying to explain the  
 sudden and almost complete disappearance of the island fox, a tiny but     
 voracious predator that once sat atop the islands' food web. In Chile she  
 helps gather data on the elusive Darwin's fox -- so named because Charles  
 Darwin brought one's pelt back from his historic, New World voyage. In     
 Panama, Menino traverses the treetops in search of nocturnal, raccoon-like 
 mammals called kinkajous.                                                  

 Menino makes a good point towards the end of her book: "Somehow we need to 
 put enough drag on land degradation to give wildlife management time to    
 work through science -- and to give the animals a chance." This optimal    
 integration of natural processes and scientific effort is Menino's         
 take-home message, and it serves as the underlying theme for the issues    
 she discusses in Darwin's Fox.                                             

 She writes so compellingly of the field researchers' pursuit of            
 information that will conserve species on the brink of extinction that the 
 reader gets caught up in the quest. She documents the disappearance of the 
 island fox with such acuity, you feel the loss reading her words. She      
 considers, with equanimity, the science necessary to document the life of  
 a small carnivore and the question of how studying a housecat-size         
 Darwin's fox, whose population might be 600, is important to life on       
 planet earth. Or why it's important to find and identify species in Panama 
 before they're wiped out. Or why it's important to document the survival   
 skills and threats to a suburban population of coyotes in upstate New      
 York, and what the coyotes' survival skills tell us about the way we live  
 our lives, the ways in which we are exploiting the planet.                 

 If I were teaching high school or even undergraduate biology, I would make 
 Darwin's Fox required reading. Menino's words give urgency to the field    
 work of biologists around the world who document the lives and needs of    
 Earth's imperiled species. She writes in her final chapter, "Science is    
 long, land is short."                                                      

 Menino misses the opportunity, however, to highlight a bright spot where   
 one of the species she profiled seems to be benefiting from both science   
 at the hands of humans and the equilibrium reached by natural systems: the 
 island fox is making a comeback.                                           

 The fox owed its near extinction to a human disturbance in the delicate    
 island ecosystem it calls home. DDT pollution wiped out bald eagles from   
 the largest of the Channel Islands -- Santa Cruz Island -- in the mid      
 1900s. The disappearance of the bald eagles opened a niche for the larger  
 golden eagles, which swooped in and made meals of Santa Cruz Island's      
 feral pigs and preyed on the island's foxes. There were less than 135      
 foxes on Santa Cruz Island by 2000.                                        

 The US Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and the Nature   
 Conservancy worked together to reintroduce bald eagles on Santa Cruz       
 Island starting in 2002. The managers also eliminated the feral pigs, and  
 relocated golden eagles to the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Also   
 in 2002, a captive breeding program began for the island fox, which was    
 officially listed as an endangered species two years later.                

 Island foxes have since been reintroduced to Santa Cruz Island             
 successfully. "We have ended the captive breeding program because we       
 believe, based on evidence from the radio-collared foxes and other         
 indications, that the current fox population on Santa Cruz Island is       
 around 400," says Lotus Vermeer, the Nature Conservancy's point person on  
 the Channel Island fox recovery program. Several breeding bald eagles are  
 nesting, and nine endangered plant species endemic to the island also seem 
 to be recovering, according to the Nature Conservancy. Oak trees are       
 regenerating on the island for the first time in decades. The survival of  
 Santa Cruz Island's biological diversity appears promising, and in at      
 least one case that Menino chronicles in Darwin's Fox the animals have     
 been given a chance.                                                       

 Margaret Guthrie                                                           
 mail at the-scientist.com                                                     

 Darwin's Fox and My Coyote. Holly Menino. University of Virginia Press,    
 Charlottesville, 2008. 182 pp., $27.95.                                                                                                              

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