Wood, the iconoclast bobcat trapper turned grassroots extinction warrior, began recruiting troops to his new mission. He looked for outdoor sorts requiring no handholding—hunters, fishers, people of the land. Experience with traps was optional. (Wood figured it would take more work to untrain bad habits than to teach the right ones from scratch.) Allowing that there would still be night shooting to bag trap-shy cats, Wood looked for those handy too with the rifle and spotlight. And allowing that such night hunting was illegal in Mexico, the résumé Wood was seeking fairly well described the poacher.
Which fairly well described Miguel Angel Hermosillo. Hermosillo was working as a crew member of an eradication attempt already under way, directed by Tershy and Croll’s Mexican partners from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He was also a part-time worker with a Mexican railroad company. His skills also involved shooting deer for money and for meat, under cover of darkness and out of earshot of the law. Unlike others Wood would attempt to train, Hermosillo grasped not only the intricacies of Wood’s technique but their purpose. Hermosillo was no longer hunting for money but for the cause.
Wood took Hermosillo under his wing, taught him his techniques and trapping sets, trusted him to run the lines in his absence. Hermosillo spoke no English. Wood spoke no Spanish. Wood spoke to Hermosillo using his Spanish-English dictionary and a stick, drawing pictures in the dirt. The two understood each other perfectly. When Wood reported back, the first thing he recommended to his bosses was that they hire Hermosillo. The first employees of Croll and Tershy’s fledgling island campaign thus comprised a retired bobcat trapper from California and, now, an itinerant deer poacher from Mexico.
And so, Wood began adding to his little ragtag battalion of island conservationists. By night the hunters would lure their quarry, squeaking like mice and wailing like wounded rabbits, aiming their headlamps and .22 rifles into the cat’s incandescent green eye-shine. By day they checked their traps and ran the dogs. Jack Russell terriers—two-thousand-dollar dogs from elite hunting lines that had proved their mettle on U.S. mountain lions—joined the teams, tracking Baja cats and rabbits and flushing them into the gunners’ sights.
As Wood made the rounds, his reputation transcended from that of master trapper to that of Baja’s patron saint of island fauna—St. Francis with a twist. It turned out that Wood the cat whisperer had a magical way with people too. Wherever he stopped, he would pull out his little book of photos, filled not only with telling scenes of the feral cat’s seabird carnage but also with images from back home—pictures of animals he’d hunted, fish he’d caught. With his pointing finger and phrase book Spanish he charmed all hosts. By his second visit to Baja, Wood never again needed to book a motel or hail a taxi. His new best friends wouldn’t think of him staying anywhere but in their homes.
And if Wood wasn’t ambassador enough, he came with his sidekick Freckles. Early on Wood had picked up the little white terrier as his hunting companion. Freckles was a bit of a runt, the last pick from an otherwise star-studded litter. Her grandfather was none other than Wishbone, of TV fame, a talking, daydreaming, well-versed-in-classic-literature kind of dog. Wishbone’s undistinguished little granddaughter Freckles overcompensated for her size with a tenacious talent rounding up island cats and rabbits, and a star power that threatened to steal her master’s stage. Tourists cruising the islands would occasionally spot the now-legendary Bill Wood on his rounds and come running, gripped in celebrity fever. “Where’s Freckles?” they would yell.
SURFBOARDS AND BIRKENSTOCKS
Within two years of Bill Wood’s arrival, Croll and Tershy’s team had gathered two more linchpins to their Baja campaign. Brad Keitt had come to the team as a young college graduate and old buddy of Tershy’s, with the résumé of an itinerant windsurfer, kayaker, eco-tour guide, and fellow seabird junkie. When Tershy offered Keitt a project in need of a student—involving a mysterious ocean-wandering seabird named the black-vented shearwater, nesting almost exclusively on a little island called Natividad (which also happened to feature a world-class surf break)—Keitt’s decision wasn’t one of yes or no, but whether to pinch himself.
Keitt’s academic questions concerned the natural history of a bird hardly known to science, and in danger of remaining that way forever. The black-vented shearwater bred nowhere else but the northern coast of Baja. More precisely, 95 percent of the world’s black-vented shearwaters gathered each season on the single island of Natividad, an island now swarming with cats.
The original sources of those cats—as hoped-for hunters of mice—were the four hundred or so people of Natividad’s fishing community. The island’s fishermen had come to consider the shearwaters as just another kind of nocturno, a generic term lumping together all burrowing seabirds of the night. Keitt gave them another way to think of the shearwaters. He shared with them his discoveries, of a bird with wings that could fly it all the way to Canadian latitudes, then propel it to incredible depths of the sea in pursuit of little fish. He would relay such tidbits to those making their living diving for abalone and lobster and watch for that aha moment when the particulars hit home. “You mean these birds dive deeper than we go in our scuba gear?”
Keitt took school groups on field trips to the shearwater colony, snaking fiber-optic probes into the birds’ burrows, amazing the kids with live videos of shearwater chicks never before imagined. It was a secret village of birds, hidden all this time, right beneath their feet.
He convinced Natividadans young and old that this amazing and beleaguered bird living in their midst was their bird. Isla Natividad was soon sprouting billboards and T-shirts emblazoned with images of the black-vented shearwater. The school and its soccer team had a new mascot.
When Keitt then showed the villagers what the feral cats were doing to their shearwaters, the massacres amounting to one hundred birds per week, the islanders didn’t just agree that the cats should go; they demanded it.
Keitt’s arrival at island conservation was soon followed by that of Josh Donlan, a long-haired, footloose biology major out of Virginia’s James Madison University. Donlan had capped his college career with a twenty-year moment, deciding that before any grad school or meaningful employment he would sample the good life. After crossing the United States, adventuring all the way to Alaska, he eventually found himself paddling a kayak the length of Baja, on a four-month tour of the Gulf of California. He was drawn to the islands, putting ashore and exploring their miniature universes of evolution. For a young biologist looking to make sense of an otherwise complicated world, this was the holy land. But for all the seductive rawness of Baja, it was one decidedly unromantic evening on an island called San Jorge that finally hooked him to the place. On his first night on San Jorge, Donlan awakened to the scurrying of little feet and the thumps of little bodies jumping against the walls of his tent. There went the holy land.
As Donlan continued his tour of the islands, the pattern repeated. It became more the rule than the exception to find the Baja wilderness running with urban rats and feral cats, its fabled seabird colonies littered with carcasses. And if it wasn’t the rats and cats eating Baja alive, it was crews of donkeys, goats, and rabbits mowing the delicate island flora to nubs. This was a paradise in need of rescue.
Donlan, like Keitt, was soon thereafter enrolled in the graduate program at UC Santa Cruz, ostensibly as a master’s student of biology under Tershy and Croll, in practice a new recruit to their eclectic squad of island saviors. Donlan declared that his first official order of business was to return to his baptismal shores of San Jorge and rid that island of rats. He loaded up his truck, snuck a load of brodifacoum across the Mexican border, enlisted a crew of local fishermen to help spread it, and within the year had made the island safe again for its seabirds. For the twenty-five-year-old aspiring biologist in Birkenstocks, having enlisted in conservation’s losing war against extinction, it was a heady initiation to the front lines. With a truck full of poison, a few fishermen, and no fanfare,
Donlan had rescued an island.
And so it came together, this unlikely coterie of conservationists—a veritable motley crew of egghead academics, professional poachers, ex-hippies, trappers, Latinos, and Yanks—allied in the cause of island species. The team officially became the Island Conservation and Ecology Group, mirrored in name and mission by their Mexico comrades, Grupo de Ecología y Conservación de Islas. Bankrolled by shoestring budgets and unjaded optimism, the island conservationistas started clearing islands of their animal threats, one after the other.
The crews would one day look back fondly on those halcyon days of misadventure among the Mexican islands, of runaway hunting dogs and run-ins with drug runners, of tense moments at the border, their trucks loaded with guns and ammo. There would be breakdowns in the middle of the desert, breakdowns in the middle of the sea, little vessels full of island crusaders with their little dead engine in pieces on the floor, drifting helplessly toward the black horizons of the Pacific. There was an inadvertent collision with a whale. The prevailing philosophy for coping with the daily dangers was epitomized by Wood’s wife, Darlene. “She didn’t say too much,” said Wood. “She just raised my life insurance.”
Within five years of their opening salvos in Baja, the cross-border team of island conservationists had cleared invaders from nine islands. They’d eradicated rats from San Roque and Rasa islands, rabbits from Natividad, and goats and burros from two of the San Benito Islands. They’d eliminated cats from the islands of Isabel, Asuncion, Coronado Norte, San Roque, and Todos Santos Sur, with those harassing the shearwater haven of Natividad soon to follow.
In an age of endless bureaucratic delays and budgetary overruns, the little crew of academics from Santa Cruz and their unlikely allies from the rowdier side of the tracks would eventually protect eighty-eight species of Baja’s singular fauna, along with 201 seabird colonies. For less than fifty thousand dollars per rescue, the island saviors had quietly engineered one of the most potent and streamlined campaigns for conservation ever imagined.
Yet those halcyon days of anonymity were not to last. With success came stature, and a call for help from a besieged island called Anacapa, an island lying within sight of Los Angeles.
Chapter 8
ANACAPA
IN 1853, TWELVE miles off the coast of Southern California, the paddle steamer Winfield Scott wrecked upon the rocky shores of Anacapa Island. In the year 1990 an oil tanker named the American Trader had an unrelated misfortune, running over its anchor off the coast of Huntington Beach. Separated by more than a hundred years and nearly as many miles, the two events would eventually converge to trigger a landmark battle in U.S. conservation history.
The American Trader’s punctured tanks disgorged four hundred thousand gallons of Alaska crude, which would very publicly kill some thirty-four hundred seabirds. Of the thirteen-million-dollar settlement the court imposed on the tanker’s owners, one and a half million was to go toward undoing some of the damages.
The most worrisome mortalities from the spill had been borne by the Xantus’s murrelet, a robin-size seabird numbering just a few thousand breeding pairs short of extinction. One obvious way for the offenders to make amends was to make someplace safe again for the murrelets to breed. And one obvious place to do so was Anacapa.
Anacapa is three slips of jagged rock in the archipelago comprising Channel Islands National Park. Bearing a footprint of little more than one square mile, Anacapa’s physical dimensions belie its biological capacity. Its razor-edged cliffs, pocked with caves and crevices and surrounded by forbidding moats of seawater, constitute what would otherwise be prime real estate for nesting seabirds. If not for the rats.
The long-forgotten wreck of the Winfield Scott, like that of the American Trader, also disgorged a bit of cargo, albeit in the form of a stowaway rat or two. The results of that little uncelebrated landing on Anacapa—adding more strange blood to an island already beset by immigrant cats, sheep, and rabbits—would dwarf the Trader’s oil-slick body count.
By the end of the twentieth century the black rats of Anacapa had decimated the Xantus’s murrelet in one of its final refuges. Moreover, the whole of Anacapa’s specialized biota had apparently fallen under the rodents’ giant shadow. Crabs and urchins on the beaches, lizards, grasshoppers, and wildflowers on the hills and headlands—all had become easy prey.
The rats of Anacapa had more intimately impressed themselves upon East Anacapa’s park rangers and tourists as the ubiquitous little gremlins forever breaking into foodstuffs and camping gear. Park workers had tried fending off the rats with a few snap traps and the poison warfarin. Their weaponry and resolve proved too weak. They invariably left the wilder reaches of Anacapa unguarded, leaving an eternal wellspring of rats to spill forth wherever the coast was clear. Time went on, the rats kept coming, money ran short, and the white flag went up.
With the serendipitous spilling of the American Trader’s oil, and the windfall of mitigation money that washed ashore in its wake, the National Park Service got serious about taking Anacapa back. It sent for help from a troop who’d recently been making a reputation for themselves on similar terrain south of the border, in Baja, calling themselves the Island Conservation and Ecology Group.
THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
By now it was clear to both the Park Service and the band of island conservationists from Santa Cruz that to merely control the rats was to forever bail the leaking boat. The only permanent fix for Anacapa’s rat problem was, to their minds, eradication. And the only practical means of accomplishing that was the potent blood-thinning poison brodifacoum, broadcast by helicopter and blanketing Anacapa shore to shore.
The aerial technique had begun working wonders down under in New Zealand, where the Kiwis were clearing rats from islands tens of times larger and hundreds of times more remote than Anacapa. But this was the United States, land of legal hurdles, bureaucratic hoops, and litigation. Its citizenry had grown suspicious of those professing to perform noble acts of public service while raining dangerous chemicals upon their heads. Their society had been rudely awakened by Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic exposé, Silent Spring, which raised the specter of a world blithely poisoned by the pesticide industry—of a toxic world where no birds sang, where cancers ran wild, and where the well-being of humanity itself lay in doubt.
Americans had become suspicious as well of their own government’s ongoing war against wildlife. Troops of tax-funded trappers, shooters, gassers, and poisoners had been slaughtering American wildlife by the millions every year for nearly a century. Operating under the official sanctions of the U.S. agency Animal Damage Control (later rebranded as Wildlife Services), the exterminators went after blackbirds, prairie dogs, coyotes, cougars, and wolves and a host of similarly pigeonholed vermin across the country. Too often they killed indiscriminately, too often to the demise of innocent bystanders, and too often arrogantly, in the face of repeated rebukes from scientists and humanitarians. It had become all too easy to lump such government-sanctioned fouling of American soils and wanton slaughters of wildlife with the island saviors’ ironic mission of killing for conservation. Anacapa would of course be questioned. To think of dropping truckloads of poison on a national park within sight of the sixteen-million-person megalopolis of Los Angeles was to aim a slingshot at a hornet’s nest.
The Anacapa campaign was to be led by a newcomer to the Island Conservation crew, a rising expert on brodifacoum, the predominant anti-rat weapon of the day. Gregg Howald had conducted his graduate research on Langara Island, off the coast of British Columbia, probing for chinks in brodifacoum’s solid record. Langara’s eradication history had been triggered by the arrival of ship-jumping rats, which over the decades had reduced a world-class colony of some two hundred thousand ancient murrelets to less than fifteen thousand. With the advent of brodifacoum and Rowley Taylor’s bait-station protocol, in 1995 the rats were attacked in turn. Langara, measuring thirteen square miles, was a project nearly twenty times the size
of Taylor’s battle for Breaksea, and more than ten times the size of Howald’s Anacapa campaign to come. But the issue raised by Howald’s investigation created concerns beyond the mere upping of acreage.
Among the dead of Langara, Howald had uncovered a small but especially worrisome number of rats lying exposed to the scavengers—rats that were supposed to have died in their dens. One rat was found hanging thirty feet high in a hemlock, its hindquarters and internal organs ominously missing. Testing their suspicions, Howald’s team captured a sample of bald eagles. Each had brodifacoum in its blood. So too did the thirteen dead ravens they came upon. One dead raven appeared to have been scavenged in turn. Lying dead beside it was a bald eagle.
The Langara eradicators went on to accomplish their primary objective with yet another record-smashing performance, all thirteen square miles cleared of immigrant rats in less than four weeks. But Howald’s work had added an unofficial asterisk to the record book. “We conclude that there is a very real risk to some avian predators and scavengers,” reported Howald and colleagues, “from both primary and secondary exposure to brodifacoum when used to remove rats from seabird colonies in the Pacific Northwest environment.”
SHELTER FROM THE STORM
The cautions from Langara didn’t bode particularly well for those now looking to remove rats from seabird colonies in the Southern California environment of Anacapa. Anacapa came with big potential for collateral casualties, the biggest in the form of a mouse. The Anacapa deer mouse was a Channel Islands native, a Dumbo-eared, doe-eyed mouse with an endearing touch of island tameness. Its DNA profile set it slightly but significantly apart from all other deer mice, but unfortunately for the purposes of the eradication crews it was still at core a rodent, a chisel-toothed opportunist every bit as vulnerable as every rat they were out to kill.
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