When asked to describe their trip to the Channel Islands, many visitors will fall back on the trope that it’s like seeing the California of 250 years ago.
But these eight islands are no before-the-fall Edens. While Santa Catalina, the most accessible to the general public, is the only island with towns, all of the Channel Islands’ ecosystems have been altered by familiar environmental invaders: the non-native plants and animals introduced both accidentally and deliberately since the incursion of the Spanish.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Isolated by saltwater moats, the islands have evolved into unique habitats, parallel Californias closely related to but distinct from one another and the mainland. Six of the islands even have their own subspecies of island fox, the smallest in North America and California’s only endemic carnivores.
It’s not entirely clear how the island fox, whose closest relative is the mainland’s gray fox, reached the islands. “One of the leading theories is that they rafted to the northern islands when sea levels were lower,” says Katie Elder, wildlife conservation manager for the Catalina Island Conservancy, “and then were brought to the southern Channel Islands by Indigenous people.”
Once they arrived, evolution did its thing. “There’s a weird rule of thumb about islands,” says Elder. “If an animal is larger than a cat, it will get smaller. When they’re smaller than a cat, they get bigger.”
While the subspecies vary in size, island foxes typically weigh under six pounds, about a third of the weight of most mainland gray foxes. Even so, they’re the islands’ largest native land mammals, apex predators without natural enemies. They’re pretty fearless, even a little naïve.
The foxes have faced a host of threats, from rodenticides and a raccoon-born distemper outbreak on Santa Catalina Island to death from above. DDT poisoning killed off the islands’ bald eagles, which don’t prey on mammals, allowing golden eagles to move into the northern Channel Islands. These eagles feasted on feral pigs and ranch livestock and also made meals of the foxes, reducing the Santa Rosa Island population to just 15 animals by 2000. “They were easy picking,” says Elder.
With the reintroduction of bald eagles and the relocation of golden eagles, fox populations rebounded. Now 2,500 live on Santa Rosa, resuming their role as a keystone species that maintains the island’s delicate ecological balance. The foxes also happen to be adorable environmental ambassadors and give the public a reason to care about the Channel Islands. “Island foxes are just so charismatic,” says Elder. “People love them.”•
