Barely visible on a map of the continental U.S., this national park is one of the most inaccessible – and most captivating.
-- For weeks, I had been promising my kids they would see baby foxes. It was my way of selling our camping trip. We were headed for the remote Santa Rosa Island, off the coast of California, where a boat would drop us off for the better part of a week. While there I also planned to find time to talk to local researchers about an effort to restore the island's native cloud forests and the remarkable program that brought the island fox back from the brink of extinction.
The Channel Islands are a tiny blip barely visible on a map of the continental United States. For the most part, the turbulent ocean separating them from the mainland left them isolated through the ages. Around World War II, it was a destination for the well-heeled who came to bag wild game. Earl Warren, who served as California's governor and the country's chief justice, hunted there, and so did crooner Bing Crosby. Laurel and Hardy once filmed a movie on one of the island's cattle boats.
Historically, there were many different species whose cooperative action formed a cloud forest. The island's forest canopy has some incredibly large and ancient trees that belong to a species of oak that also grows on islands throughout Southern California. Historically, these trees grew in small groves and relied on other, more scrubby species in the cloud forest to provide a deep, wet bed of leaf litter to keep their acorns moist.
[Clarification : The first shot in this video is of San Miguel Island, which is just west of Santa Rosa Island] McEachern also pointed out some elderberry bushes that they planted a year earlier."Just for kicks," she said. Island foxes are a distant relative of the California gray fox, which is found on the mainland. Their dwarfism is a classic trait often seen in isolated populations of island dwellers. Because island resources are limited and may fluctuate year by year, island foxes have adapted to an unusual diet of plants, Jerusalem crickets and a smattering of smaller animals like lizards and island deer mice.
Populations plummeted, Shaskey said."We were down to 15 individuals on San Miguel Island, 15 individuals on Santa Rosa and just under 70 on Santa Cruz Island."
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