The Lost Fox of the Channel Islands | S1 E6 | Protecting the Wild

Today on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, find out how these tiny foxes made an incredible comeback. We got a fox, you guys. The foxes were disappearing fast under the attack of invading golden eagles. It was a dire stretch. These guys had one foot in the grave. But brave scientists devised an audacious plan to replace the fox-eating eagles with America's most iconic bird. Conservation work is difficult, but the results can be really spectacular. Ask yourself this question. Why is conservation so important? For over 60 years, we've explored stories of hope from across the animal world. Join us on new adventures for a new generation. This is Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild. This morning, we're cruising into the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. Wait, Peter. Do you see that? Oh, yeah. Look at the size of that pod. Up ahead is one of our country's most unique national parks, the Channel Island Archipelago. I'm so excited. I've never been here before. It's so nice to see how rich marine life it is out here in the Channel. We've seen sea lions. We've seen pelicans feeding. There are dolphins going by. And the whale population, they even see that a little more frequently. Awesome. This is the only place, Peter, on Earth that you can find the island fox. And each of the islands has a little different subspecies. So what we're going to see is unique just to Santa Cruz Island. I'm so looking forward to it. I'm so pumped. The island fox is one of history's greatest conservation success stories, and it's full of twists and turns. We've got a lot of ground to cover. Almost there. Oh, my gosh, Peter. Look at this view. As far as you see, you're looking at nature. No power poles, no pavement, no structures. This is the way California vegetation looked 200 years ago. I thought there was people here and activity and, you know, ranching and farming and that kind of thing. But it looks like totally uninhabited. It is. And listen, do you hear anything at all? No. How often do you get to hear no sound at all? You're right. Today, the big attraction of this pristine wilderness is camping. We'll start from here and then we'll push it back, OK? All right. Peter, Peter, come here. There's a fox. It's right here in the campsite. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Yeah. The foxes have no fear of people or predators because they evolved on these islands in rare isolation. Island foxes are the smallest canine in North America. They're related to mainland gray foxes, but they're different in a number of key ways. The island fox is one third smaller than its mainland ancestor. People always think they're pups, that they're seeing pups, but they're actually full adults. The island fox was originally brought here by the Chumash people who thrived sustainably on these islands for thousands of years. So the Chumash are the native people of this area. They were a seafaring people, and the foxes were very, very important in their cultural history. The Chumash native people considered the island fox to be a wise and sacred animal. Archaeologists uncovered foxes that were very intentionally buried with Chumash individuals. We began studying island foxes because they're such a unique species. It feels like you're in on a big secret when you're studying them. They're one of the tiniest apex predators. I mean, you think of an apex predator, right? You're thinking about a great white shark. You're thinking about a grizzly bear. You're thinking about a Nile crocodile. You're not thinking about something that's smaller than a house cat. Thankfully today, after intense conservation, these curious foxes are a common sight at the campgrounds. But just a few decades ago, they were nearly wiped out. To learn more, I met up with retired National Park Service wildlife biologist Tim Coonan. He was one of the very first to sound the alarm that the island fox was in danger. Things were very different on the islands 30 or so years ago. How were they different? This island, as many others, had been grazed heavily by sheep. Pigs had been brought to the islands by the early ranchers in the 1850s and let go as a food source, and they were running rampant all over the island. The ecosystem was not in balance at that point. For example, besides the feral pigs and the sheep, DDT decimated and eventually eliminated bald eagle nesting on the Channel Islands. There used to be about 25 or 30 bald eagle nests every year on all the Channel Islands. But by 1960, they were gone. DDT caused eggshell thinning, and those eggs were not viable. They could not hatch out. And that created an opportunity for golden eagles to come in and nest on the islands, which they had never done. Bald eagles primarily feed on fish, and the goldens that arrive and feed on mammals. Right. The island fox was in big trouble. That's right. Bald eagles and foxes coexisted for thousands of years, whereas golden eagles specialize in small mammal prey, and foxes were exactly in that prey size range. It was a case of an extraordinarily smart stealth predator that these foxes had never seen before. And death came from the sky. The foxes did not know to look up. They had not evolved with anything like this. These are journals from the 1990s when I was on the island. The catastrophic decline of the foxes could lead to their extinction. That's a pretty powerful statement. It was dire straits. These guys had one foot in the grave. They were fully in danger of going extinct. The first time Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom visited this archipelago was with hosts Jim Fowler and Marlon Perkins over 50 years ago. They didn't know it at the time, but on several of these islands, an environmental disaster was unfolding as rare island foxes were facing extinction from the sky. Santa Cruz got down to, they estimate, 50 to 60 foxes. On the northern islands, Miguel and Rosa got down to 15 foxes each. If you work for the Park Service, you have a responsibility to maintain all the elements of the ecosystem that were handed to you. You can't lose any, not on your watch. And we were losing these guys. To save the foxes, conservationists from the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy teamed up to bring balance back to the Channel Islands ecosystem. So we're currently zoomed out. If you want to zoom in, you just turn this. And then that's focus. Let's see. Hey, wow, that's an eagle nest. Looks like a mound of sticks, but it must be huge. Probably weighs a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds. There's a lot of sticks and grass there. So what about the bald eagle makes it so critical for island fox conservation? The bald eagles have been wiped out on the islands because of the DDT pollution by probably the early 1960s. Bald eagles are like the protector. The security guards of the island. Right. Having the bald eagles disappear allowed golden eagles to move onto the island. And they nearly wiped out the island foxes because golden eagles feed on land mammals for the most part. Biologists managed to carefully trap many of the invading golden eagles and then relocated them back to mainland California. And to keep the golden eagles from returning, biologists removed their favorite meal, over 5,000 non-native pigs. Finally, biologists reintroduced bald eagles back to their island home and let nature do its work. Bald eagles are a magnificent species. One, just looking at them, you know, they have this bold white head, yellow beak, these whitish eyes. They're huge. They're just amazing to see in the wild. That's part of why I took on this project, was to bring these birds back to where they belonged on the Channel Islands. Obviously, this is proof that the bald eagles have been restored here, but like, where did you start from? It was a long process. To get eagles back to this island, we used a process called hacking. We have these eight by eight foot towers about 15 feet up on telephone poles. We would collect nestling bald eagles about seven, eight weeks old from Northern California and British Columbia, put them into these towers for about a month until they're ready to fly, and then release them from the towers. We started getting natural breeding out here in 2006. And those were the first bald eagles to hatch naturally on the island in probably over 50 years. We actually began the first natural breeding on Catalina Island in 1980. When they started breeding, their eggs would all break in the nest and they still had huge amounts of DDT. So at that point, we actually started active manipulation of the nest. We used a technique which lovingly became known as the dope on the rope. We'd bring over a helicopter. I'd have a harness on, hook up to a hook. You? Yep. And then they would lift me off, carry me to the nest. As soon as they laid their eggs, replace their eggs with an artificial egg, take those up to the San Francisco Zoo for incubation, and any chicks that hatched from those eggs, we'd bring those chicks back down when they're maybe a week or so old. Wow. Go to the nest, take out the fake eggs, put in the chicks, and then from that point, the adults would just raise them. Oh my gosh. That was probably the most exciting portion of the work. Wow. So you have literally risked your lives for the lives of these bald eagles. Exactly. We now have 23 pairs of bald eagles across five of the eight Channel Islands where there were no breeding birds in 1980. How does that make you feel? It's really nice to see the results of a lot of hard work. The island ecosystem was ready for the return of the world's smallest apex predator. But could biologists save the fox when so few of them remained? Like pieces of a puzzle, multiple wildlife organizations came together to help bring balance back to the Channel Islands ecosystem. The final piece was the critically endangered island fox, but the clock was ticking. Less than 90 foxes remained in the wild. The only hope was to bring the remaining foxes into protected enclosures and attempt something that had never been done before. Breed island foxes in captivity. No one has raised island foxes in captivity, and yet here we had to do that. So we turned to the people who know how to do that. That's when the Santa Barbara Zoo quickly became a leading partner in the Island Fox Captive Breeding Program. We had the wildlife experts that had the veterinary, nutrition, husbandry experiences to make sure that that captive program was a success. They faced a huge challenge. To protect the fragile foxes from mainland diseases and parasites, the team made the decision to move their entire breeding program to the remote island wilderness. So what is happening here? Well, this is really where it all began. When we realized that the foxes had to be taken into captivity, I mean, these are the pens that they were taken to. We started out by bringing five pairs in, and then a few months later, we brought in another five pairs for a total of 10. Would you be interested to see inside? Love to see it. Yep, that's what it takes. That's what it takes. Come on in. You can imagine these kind of naturalistic features. We put in logs. We also put in platforms because they are a climbing species, and that's natural for them. And one of the important things that we did for the females was that we put in two den box sites so that she could have the opportunity to shift her pups if she wanted to. Captive breeding is anything but simple. It's not just putting a male in with a female and crossing your fingers. You know, it's not as simple as that. The Santa Barbara Zoo program was a massive success. Almost 100 pups were born, and once the bald eagles returned, this ancient landscape was finally ready for the foxes to be reintroduced into the wild. So we did start releases in kind of late 2003, early 2004, and then a few years later, the eagles were gone, and the population just skyrocketed to where it is now. We rebounded back to about 9,000 total on all six of the islands in basically 10, 15 years. I mean, that's incredible when you talk about endangered species recovery. There's something really special about seeing a wild fox be wild and exhibit all those natural behaviors that we want to see. That's what we do it for. That's so exceptional. Well, my hope is that these cages will never, ever have to be used again for the captive breeding of foxes. Me too, Peter, me too. You're watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, protecting the wild. After years of hard work, in 2016, Channel Island foxes were removed from the endangered species list. The incredible effort to save them was one of the fastest and most successful recovery programs in the history of endangered species. Being delisted doesn't mean that you just wipe your hands and walk away. It's important to have long-term monitoring efforts. You want to make sure that all of your hard work is going to continue. The Nature Conservancy manages much of the Channel Island wilderness. Now, the organization spearheads a continuing effort to keep the foxes healthy and free of mainland diseases. Laura, tell us about a fox line. What are we going to be doing? So basically, we set trap lines with evenly spaced traps across the island with the goal of ultimately vaccinating 100 foxes against rabies and canine distemper virus. And that creates a core of foxes that are vaccinated and should be resistant to any disease that's introduced to the island. We're going to check them now and see if we caught any foxes. Let's go find out. Well, fingers crossed. It's always a bit of a challenge. They're cheeky and smart and they can be tricky to trap. We have our first fox. Oh, look at that. Hey, the moment of truth. She actually was asleep, cruelly woke her up. I'm so sorry. 4.05 is the weight of the fox and the trap. All right, I've put in the weight. That's right. And here she is. Here she is. Wow. So now we're going to check and see how old she is. We're going to check and see if we can make an estimate based on her tooth condition. I would say three to five years of age. OK. So she's in the prime of her life right now, even though she's a tiny, tiny girl. So now I'm going to put this blindfold on for the rest of the workup. So this just helps them reduce their stress. OK, so I'm just going to put the vaccine in. So she's tiny. I can just curl her up into a little ball. Just at a glance, she looks like she's eating well. Her fur is in great shape. After checking her body condition, combing her for fleas and getting a sample from her ear, this little fox is ready to be on her way. Thank you for your service in the name of science. And off you go. There you go. Great. Wow. The next one's just up this hill. Right up here in these bushes? Yep. Tucked away back there. Follow me. They see that. That's the trap. And it looks to me like the door is closed. We got a fox, you guys. You see one? Yep. We caught two more foxes. Oh, I see. I see it. There it is. Yeah. Another female. All right. Girl power. And according to Laura, finding and vaccinating three foxes in a day is a great sign for the health of the overall population. Did you ever imagine they would recover so quickly? I don't think anyone expected them to recover that quickly. I mean, they were put on the endangered species list in 2004. Within five years, we were hitting our recovery targets, which is just kind of insane. All right. Here we go. Thank you, little miss. Away you go. I think the story of the Channel Island Fox and the recovery of these islands, I think it can be an example to people that conservation work is difficult and it's complicated, but it's worth doing because the results can be really spectacular. With collaboration, we can work together to make actual change. I grew up watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom faithfully every Sunday night or whenever it was on, and it was just amazing to me to see what a person could do in the name of wildlife conservation. And so it opened up a world of possibility. You gain so much personally, professionally from actually working with animals.