Photo by John Krist
Star staff

A bald eagle chick is readied for release on Santa Cruz Island.

SANTA CRUZ ISLAND — Roaring and bucking like an arthritic rodeo bull, the Toyota Land Cruiser lurches in low gear up a road that appears to have been carved into the side of a cliff by acrobats with garden trowels. To describe the rocky dirt track as steep, narrow, rough and uneven would hardly do justice to its rudimentary nature.

Reaching the summit of the ridge without incident, we coast along for a few blessedly level yards and stop. Lotus Vermeer shuts off the engine and silence abruptly engulfs us, along with a cloud of red dust.

When the air clears, we have a gazillion-dollar view of the sky-blue Pacific lapping at the island's ragged edge far below. We clamber out, slap grit from our clothes, and set off through knee-high grass toward a stand of oaks a few yards away. Vermeer, Santa Cruz Island project manager for The Nature Conservancy, scans the prickly vegetation like a kid hunting for Easter eggs.

"There's one," she says, pointing toward a thatch of dry grass beneath a gnarled oak.

Almost lost in the bleached stalks is a green seedling. Perhaps six inches tall, it almost certainly sprouted this past spring. We look around and spot other tiny seedlings pushing their way through the grass. Nearby, the branches of scrub oaks are loaded with acorns.

They don't seem like much to the casual eye, but acorns and oak seedlings represent an ecological turning point on this largest of the Channel Islands. Vermeer and I may well be looking at the first new generation of native oaks to take root and survive their initial summer on Santa Cruz in more than a century.

During two days of dusty, bone-jarring travel through the rugged interior of the island, we see other evidence of ecological rebirth: stands of native bunch grass and buckwheat colonizing eroded slopes, platoons of young Bishop pines deployed across ridge tops, glossy green bristles of coyote brush displacing invasive weeds. These subtle symbols of regeneration represent evidence that after more than two decades of hard work, one of the most ambitious ecological restoration efforts in American history has reached a pivotal moment.

"We don't want to always be on a life-support system," Vermeer says, describing the almost desperate urgency with which biologists and land managers have struggled to reach this point in the recovery process.

The story of that journey has been one of political controversy and biological setbacks. It has offered lessons about unintended consequences and the tenacity with which the past insinuates itself into the present. And it has served as a powerful reminder of the unseen but powerful linkages that transform a disparate collection of life forms and natural processes into an ecosystem.

Out of the past

The stage for the Santa Cruz restoration project was set more than two centuries ago, when Spanish priests and soldiers established Mission San Buenaventura on the mainland. European diseases introduced by explorers and settlers, combined with forced relocation to the mainland mission settlement 19 miles across the Santa Barbara Channel, emptied Santa Cruz Island of its Chumash inhabitants, who had occupied it for thousands of years with little discernible effect on its unusual plant and animal communities.

California Governor Juan Alvarado granted the depopulated island in 1839 to Andrés Castillero, who stocked it with cattle. In 1857, Castillero sold it to American William Barron, who in 1869 sold it to the Santa Cruz Island Co., a ranching concern incorporated by 10 San Francisco investors. In 1880, Justinian Caire became the company's majority stockholder and, under his direction, the cattle-ranching operation expanded greatly. Sheep, pigs and horses joined the cattle herds, and in 1884 the ranch expanded into the wine business, constructing a winery and planting vineyards.

Over the next century, the island continued to function as a ranch, with only minor changes: Prohibition ended the winery operation, and sheep became the primary livestock, as many as 100,000 of them chewing their way through the island's fragile assemblage of native shrubs, trees, grasses and succulents. Unlike the Chumash, these later inhabitants had a dramatic effect on the native vegetation. As early as 1883, visitors reported that the island appeared to be severely overgrazed.

Through sales, marriages and inheritances, portions of the island passed through the hands of a number of different families. Ultimately, through a complex series of swaps, purchases, gifts and forced sales, the island ended up in the hands of The Nature Conservancy — a private, nonprofit conservation organization that acquires and manages ecologically significant land — and the National Park Service. TNC controls 76 percent of the island's 62,000 acres, including the topographically complex western and central regions; NPS owns the eastern 24 percent, much of it a broad plateau. The entire island is part of Channel Islands National Park, and the two institutions cooperatively manage their holdings.

When they acquired the island, the partners took over more than just a chunk of rocky real estate and a collection of weathered ranch buildings. They also inherited an ecological disaster. And for 25 years, they've been trying to unravel the skein of human-induced disturbances that has entangled nearly every native plant and animal on Santa Cruz — a community that includes more than 1,000 species, 12 of them found nowhere else in the world and 48 of them found only on the Channel Islands.

At the core of this effort has been a campaign to remove the ungulate legacy of the island's ranching past: feral animals descended from livestock brought to the island and abandoned decades ago. The most recent of those efforts officially concluded Aug. 28, when the Park Service and Nature Conservancy jointly announced the completion of a two-year effort to eradicate feral pigs.

"For the first time in 150 years, there are no feral ungulates on the island," Vermeer says. That simple and direct statement does not even hint at the long and rocky road biologists and land managers had to follow to arrive at this destination.

'A slaughter'

The Nature Conservancy launched its initial eradication campaign in 1982, targeting the feral sheep roaming its part of the island. At first, the conservancy's lethal removal effort attracted little public notice. But in 1984, television reporters stumbled upon the story, and the broadcasts brought nationwide attention. Little of it was complimentary.

A CBS evening news broadcast featured aerial footage that juxtaposed sheep running across the island landscape with images of dead animals. "Carcasses now dot the hillsides," the reporter intoned. "They kill as many as 200 a day, but will not allow us to photograph the shooting."

A story broadcast around the same time by Santa Barbara's television station began with the anchor referring to the project as a "slaughter of sheep," and included similar helicopter shots of fleeing animals and bloated carcasses.

The reports played up a seemingly delicious irony: Environmentalists were killing animals, while an association of hunters was protesting the killing. The supposed role reversal was, however, journalistic fiction. The hunters were not opposed to shooting sheep, per se. They just preferred that they be the ones to do it.

The TV anchors also failed to remark upon the reason it was so easy to photograph living and dead animals from the air: The island was mostly barren, not so much as a blade of grass to be seen across thousands of acres. About the only vegetation visible in the videos was clinging to sheer and inaccessible rock faces, or consisted of small, isolated stands of trees and brush too tall to graze. Everywhere else, the denuded ground might as well have been the surface of the moon.

Vermeer and I are watching this archival television footage on a laptop computer in the old tack room at the island's central valley ranch complex, which The Nature Conservancy has adapted to serve as the preserve's headquarters. The building has been converted into a communal kitchen, and several TNC staff members and visitors have just finished a very late dinner, followed by a rigorous cleanup that borders on the obsessive-compulsive. This is a behavioral adaptation forced upon the island's humans by the far more numerous deer mice, which would overrun the place in a heartbeat if given the chance.

Reminders of the island's ranching past are everywhere. The barn, a couple steps from the tack room, is now a machine shop but also harbors a collection of vintage saddles. My overnight accommodations are in a converted cowboy bunkhouse. The old sheep-shearing shed serves as a warehouse.

Time does not exactly stand still on Santa Cruz, but it certainly creeps along at a slower pace than it does on the mainland.

The Nature Conservancy's sheep hunt continued despite protests, wrapping up in 1988 after an estimated 36,000 animals had been killed. In 1997, after taking control of the east end of Santa Cruz from the last private holdout, the National Park Service began removing about 9,600 feral sheep from its share of the island. But because those animals technically were the private property of the former owners, NPS could not kill them; it was forced to round up and ship them, alive, to the mainland for resettlement.

Photo by John Krist
Star staff

Biologists plan to release the last captive Santa Cruz Island foxes Oct. 8.

Simultaneously, NPS removed a small herd of feral horses from its property, prompting unsuccessful lawsuits and ineffective protests from Santa Barbara equestrians and history buffs. The horses and sheep were gone by 1999.

Eagles, pigs and foxes

The most complex eradication and restoration effort commenced a year later. Wildlife biologists began trapping golden eagles, which had recently established residency on the island and begun preying relentlessly on the diminutive island fox, driving it to the brink of extinction. Biologists also began reintroducing native bald eagles, restoring a population that had been eliminated in the 1950s by DDT contamination, in the hope that a robust population of territorial carrion-and-fish eaters would keep the golden eagles from returning.

Biologists also trapped dozens of island foxes — which are related to the mainland gray fox but constitute a distinct species — and launched a captive-breeding program to boost the population. And they began preparing to kill all the feral pigs that were roaming the island, destroying native vegetation, spreading weeds, contributing to erosion, disturbing archaeological sites and serving as an attractive food source for golden eagles.

The pig extermination was conducted in phases by a professional hunting outfit from New Zealand. The island was fenced into large enclosures, followed by trapping, aerial gunning from a helicopter and hunting by armed men who scoured the rugged terrain on foot with tracking dogs.

Protests and lawsuits again erupted, but failed to halt the hunt. The eradication encompassed the entire island, resulted in the death of 5,036 pigs, and was completed in 2006. The hunters and biologists continued looking for stray animals for another year before declaring the island pig-free.

In the dimly lit tack room/kitchen, Vermeer taps a few keys on her laptop and pulls up a series of plots that show the paths taken by hunters as they meticulously worked their way across the island's rumpled topography. Each hunter, helicopter and dog carried a GPS unit that periodically recorded its location throughout the day. Each evening, the data were downloaded and mapped.

With each tap of the key, a set of squiggly brown lines appears on the map, showing the routes of a sequence of hunts. By the time Vermeer is finished tapping through the data, the entire island is covered by brown pixels, except for a few vertical slopes. The message in the high-tech display is this: It is very unlikely that any pigs remain alive on Santa Cruz unless they sprouted wings.

When we're finished with the PowerPoint show, we grab flashlights and head outside to go fox spotting. Overhead, the sky is ablaze with stars. We may be only a half-hour by air from the edge of a metropolitan sprawl of 18 million people, but the extravagant cosmic display makes it feel like we're about a hundred miles out in the desert, or perhaps at a backcountry site in the High Sierra.

Our first destination is the kitchen compost pile, about 100 yards from the tack room. Island foxes are omnivorous and will eat fruits and vegetables as readily as they munch mice. Sure enough, we spotlight a fox poking around in the discarded vegetable scraps. Nearby is an island skunk — the other "large" terrestrial mammal native to Santa Cruz — similarly sampling leftovers. The skunk ignores us, but the fox glides quickly away, silent as a ghost on delicate legs, its eyes gleaming in the flashlight beam.

Vermeer and I make a thorough circuit of the dark ranch grounds, but spot only the one fox, which is not really surprising given how rare they remain. There are an estimated 300 or so roaming the island now, only 10 percent of the estimated population before eagles began eating them. Eighty-eight of those 300 foxes were born in captivity, and many are trapped annually to be weighed and checked for illness.

Next month, believing the imminent threat of extinction to have passed on Santa Cruz at least, biologists will free the last captive foxes from the island breeding pens.

"No more foxes in boxes," Vermeer says.

A tenuous balance

The next morning, we squeeze ourselves back into the battered old Land Cruiser and set out on another white-knuckle tour of vertiginous game tracks pretending to be roads. The Toyota has no doors or windows, and although Vermeer's skillful driving keeps us firmly on all four wheels, I figure the lack of restraints may come in handy. If we slip over the edge of a cliff, it will be easier to jump out before the vehicle plummets into the canyon below.

A panicky bailout never becomes necessary, and our tour of ridges, canyons and secluded beaches provides additional evidence of the island's rejuvenation. Many native plant species have already recovered to a significant degree on the TNC property, thanks to 20 years without grazing by sheep. Now those plants targeted by pigs — notably oaks, whose acorns were scavenged mercilessly by rooting swine — also are rebounding. So are pines, a rare succulent known as live-forever, buckwheat and other natives. Volunteers are helping TNC establish a native-plant nursery to produce stock for a revegetation program that soon will expand the return of island flora.

Invasive weeds continue to pose a vexing problem, particularly sweet fennel, which has taken over broad swaths of the island. Even this situation, however, contains a glimmer of hope. Fennel sprouts primarily on disturbed soil, which is why the pigs — rototillers with hooves — played such a key role in its spread. But in the absence of pigs, the fennel stands are being invaded now by a botanical native, coyote brush. It's a shrub that grows year-round, unlike fennel, and it is much taller when mature, allowing it to shade out the competing invasive weed. In many places, the fennel is dying back under this onslaught.

Sheep gone, cattle gone, horses gone, pigs gone, golden eagles gone. Bald eagles back, 30 or more nesting on the northern islands and producing chicks. Foxes free and rebounding, on Santa Cruz at least, their population on this island having tripled in the three years since they were federally listed as endangered.

What all this means is that, for the first time in anyone's memory, the story on Santa Cruz Island is mostly one of optimism. A tenuous balance has been restored, and the stage of recovery now beginning on the island involves birth, not death.

"This project, it's one of the few that's about success," Vermeer says. "It's about hope."

— John Krist is a senior editor and Opinion page columnist for The Star. To read more of his work, visit www.johnkrist.com.