Catalina Foxes with Lauren Dennhardt and Katie Elder

Michelle Fullner (0:00)

This episode is brought to you in part by the California Collection by Nature's Seed and the Patreon support of Listeners Like You.

In the summer of 1957, what would eventually become one of the most famous environmental success stories of all time was quietly nudged into action. It wasn't a pleasant nudge. It involved dead birds. After aerial spraying of DDT over a Duxbury, Massachusetts forest, a newspaper reporter named Olga Huggins wrote a letter to a friend.

She explained that, The harmless shower bath killed seven of our lovely songbirds outright. We picked up three dead bodies the next morning right by the door. They were birds that had lived close to us, trusted us, and built their nests in our trees year after year. The friend who received this letter was spurred into action. Over the course of the next four years, she wrote a book about the impacts of harmful pesticides, including DDT, on the environment and human life. The book became a best seller, catalyzed movement, led to the banning of DDT, which allowed bald eagles to recover from their perilously low population sizes, and even influenced the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. This friend was Rachel Carson, the book Silent Spring. I'm glad this is a famous story, grateful for its lasting influence. When I tell my kids about Rachel Carson, they listen with rapt attention. But today, I want to tell you another environmental success story. This one, lesser known, but still at home in the long tradition of successes, sparked into action by someone, or many people, simply noticing, just as Olga Huckins noticed the fate of her backyard birds. This story starts with the residence of an island off the Southern California coast, noticing foxes. The island, Catalina, is home to a subspecies of island fox found nowhere else on Earth. Six of the eight channel islands have unique fox subspecies, all of them smaller than mainland gray foxes. And in the late 1990s, Catalina's foxes started dying at alarming rates.

Residents on the island, used to the mischievous house cat-sized misopredators, darting between shrubs in the Chaparral and wandering into their houses, started instead to see sick, dying and dead foxes on the island. What happened next is a story that belongs among the greats of conservation history, a story that has only grown in potency over the past 25 plus years. So join me as I board the ferry in Long Beach, follow a pod of dolphins across the San Pedro channel, and arrive on an island to be guided by not one but two excellent guests to teach me about the Catalina Fox and its ongoing story. First, I chat with Lauren Dennhardt, biology PhD and senior director of conservation for the Catalina Island Conservancy. Next, I get up painfully early in the morning to get a firsthand look at the foxes themselves with Katie Elder, wildlife conservation manager at Catalina Island Conservancy, who earned her MS in biology from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I'm Michelle Fullner, and today we're taking a closer look at a fox we almost lost, with Lauren Dennhardt and Katie Elder on Golden State Naturalist.

The town of Avalon on Catalina Island resembles something you might expect to find along the Italian Riviera. Pedestrian streets, houses dotting the hillside, expensive shops laid out along the beach, sailboats bobbing placidly in the harbor. This is where I met up with Lauren in the Avalon office building of the Catalina Island Conservancy, set two stories up above a narrow street, threaded through by golf carts, conservancy trucks, and the occasional miniature garbage truck. I'd come to the island not for the European vibe though, but to see the tiny foxes endemic to Catalina. Hopefully up close enough to validate the effort that went into getting my rabies booster while already on the road. The morning after my chat with Lauren, I would head out to the wilder parts of the island on a fox trapping expedition with a team of biologists. But before that, I needed to learn about what made these little foxes so special, how they'd almost been lost, and what went into an ongoing monitoring program.

First, where did these foxes come from?

Lauren Dennhardt (4:14)

They're descended from gray foxes. They evolved somewhere between 6,000, 12,000 years ago. Don't know how they got here. They could have come over naturally, like rafted over, or they could have been introduced by the Gabrielino Tongva, who were the original inhabitants of the island.

We don't know.

Michelle Fullner (4:34)

So we're not sure about the origin of these foxes, but Lauren shared what we do know.

Lauren Dennhardt (4:39)

There's eight channel islands. Six of the islands have their own subspecies of these foxes. So there's like a Catalina Fox, there's a fox on San Nicolas Island as well, Santa Cruz Island.