Seabirds, (some of my special favorites), seem to be taking more than their fair share of hits in recent years. The latest injured party appears to be the Ashy storm-petrel, a small, gray seabird found only on the California Islands and surrounding marine waters. The Center for Biological Diversity recently petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service for listing consideration for this species, although given the workload and politics that currently regulate the USFWS, it may not actually be considered for some time.

According to the petition, approximately 89% of the ‘Ashy’ population breeds only Southeast Farallon (SEFI), Santa Barbara and Prince (offshore of San Miguel) islands. The petition references data that show sharp population declines on SEFI, and an associated PVA (Population Viability Analysis) that predicted a 46% chance of quasi-extinction (the population declining to a level from which it could not recover) within 50 years. On Santa Cruz Island long-term monitoring has documented an overall population decline, as well as the loss of nesting colonies to unknown causes.

These declines are attributed to: 1) impacts from non-native predators (mainly cats and rats); 2) increased impacts from native predators (Western gulls); 3) artificial light pollution from ships and other sources that results in both direct (birds become disoriented and collide with ships and other structures) and indirect (disruptions to breeding behavior) impacts, 4) contaminants at sea (oil pollution), and 5) climate change.

It is probably too early to know how the Cosco Busan incident will affect Ashys this year, but given that oil spills are consistently listed as a threat, SEFI is a primary breeding colony, and oiled birds of some species have already shown up on the Farallones, well, s—. But in the twisted way this world works, there will someday be mitigation from this spill, and maybe Ashys will ultimately benefit from increased research and protections before they fly off the Channel Islands forever.

The response to the San Francisco oil spill by the Coast Guard is disappointing at best, and infuriating if you think about it too much. As of yesterday afternoon CA Fish and Game reported 577 dead birds, with nearly 2000 being treated. (Both of these totals are certainly higher by now.) Oiled birds have been seen on the Farallon Islands, and oil has made its way north to the beaches of Pt. Reyes National Seashore.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the Coast Guard is going to get a good trip to the wood shed over this. The bad news is that these whippins’ take time, and the Channel Islands community should be concerned now about the capabilities of the Coast Guard to respond to a spill here.

It can’t be said that these events aren’t well planned for. Spill response drills occur regularly, usually under the direction of the CA Department of Fish and Game Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR). There is a 55 page State Wildlife Response Plan produced by OSPR, and the Area Contingency Plans (ACP) for the Channel Islands include hundreds of identified sensitive sites and appropriate response directions for each.

But the ACPs are produced jointly by OSPR and the Coast Guard, with the Guard having initial responsibility for handling response coordination. (Hence the problem in San Francisco.) Perhaps if the Coast Guard is too busy with homeland security, the responsibility for initial response should instead go to the resource agencies (along with appropriate increases in funding).

In the short term, officials and biologists around the Channel Islands will need to be even more vigilant. An oil spill is probably inevitable here, and the capabilities of the Coast Guard to manage a large spill and protect natural resources is clearly in question. The Coast Guard is second to none at saving lives at sea, but protecting natural resources is fifth on their list of five missions. (Guarding our coasts from the hoards of sea-terrorists that are apparently arriving any day is second.)

So, best wishes, and good luck, to the OSPR folks and other managers in our area who may soon have a lot more on their petroleum plates.

Sorry for the extended absence; I’ll try to be more better…

To follow up on the previous discussion, another project included in the Montrose Restoration Plan is similar to the one for San Miguel, and is called Restore Seabirds to San Nicolas Island (SNI), which in this case means eradicate feral cats. Cats have been on SNI since the early 1900’s, and were brought to the island in part to keep the native deer mouse population under control. (This is probably not the dumbest idea humans ever had, we did for example think that legally prohibiting people from drinking would actually stop people from drinking, but it ranks right up there…)

There is no question that feral cats on SNI have impacts on native species, perhaps most importantly on the endangered island night lizard (INL); the Fish and Wildlife Service has for example said that the Navy on SNI has not done enough to reduce cat impacts on INL to consider delisting. Additional impacts likely include some level of competitive interactions with island foxes and predation of deer mice, though neither of these pressures probably has population-level impacts on either species. But just like the issue of removing rats from San Miguel, the impact of cats on seabirds on SNI is unknown, and could be negligible for precisely the same reason that seabirds are not common on San Miguel (the presence of island foxes).

But cats are a different animal than rats, and should be removed from islands whenever possible. The plan to remove cats from SNI as it currently exists is a good one, and should proceed. But as of this date the feasibility study for the project has not been made public (or is well-hidden if it has). Hopefully this will be available soon, and the project can begin early next year.

It is, though, unfortunate that ‘restoring seabirds’ has become the catch phrase for justifying the eradication of feral animals from the islands; the effort has merit on its own and should be evaluated based on facts, not fiction.

A recent exchange in one of the popular ecological journals illustrates the challenges of determining impact accountability in an ecosystem context. The first two authors (Wilcox and Donlan) suggested that an approach to mitigating for marine bycatch would be to have the responsible fishing industries pay for some restoration actions. In this case they used the example of flesh-footed albatrosses on Lord Howe Island, Australia, and said that instead of requiring increased monitoring and penalties for bycatch, that funding be rested from the fisherman to eradicate rats from the island (about 2 million US$). They employed a population model to support the claim that removing rats would sufficiently increase shearwater numbers to overcome losses from bycatch. This perhaps sounds reasonable, but this is where the story gets interesting.

In the next issue of the same journal, the respected ecologist Dan Doak and his colleagues completely refuted the Wilcox and Donlan model, and made other comments on the dangers of this kind of mitigation approach. Finally, this month, Priddel, who has studied this shearwater species and in fact published the data that Wilcox and Donlan used in their model, agreed with Doak et al. that the model was applied incorrectly, and even went so far as to say that in his publication he and his colleagues specifically dismissed rats as a threat to shearwaters. He makes clear that he strongly supports the removal of rats for other reasons, but says that the absence of rats will not increase shearwater populations, as Wilcox and Donlan claimed.

The relevance of this discussion to the Channel Islands is that the suggested effects of non-native species on native populations has been used repeatedly to support and justify eradication programs. Again, in some cases the programs are beneficial, but in others the claims of ecological damage made in the supporting documents are simply unsupportable. For example, the recent Montrose Settlements Restoration Program included an action that was titled ‘Restore Seabirds to San Miguel Island.’

Without going into details, even the people who wrote this knew that this was disingenuous if not outright misleading. There have never been large seabird colonies on San Miguel proper because island foxes would prey heavily on most of these ground-nesting birds and their eggs. The restoration program is simply a euphamism for rat eradication on the island. Again, not to go too far afield, but the impacts of this project would be enormous, not to mention the fact that no one knows how many rats there are on San Miguel, how they are distributed, or even what their impacts are. There is absolutely no documented evidence and certainly no published data that suggest that rats on San Miguel have ever preyed upon native seabirds.

If someone wants to make the case that rats have ecological impacts and should be removed, let them make the case. As with Dr. Priddel, there may be valid justifications for large, expensive eradication programs. But the people who make the decisions about how this money is spent do themselves and the entire conservation community a disservice when they don’t know, or don’t choose to know, the facts upon which they claim to make their decisions.

Today there will be a big trip out to Santa Cruz Island, sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service, to publicize the release of a large group of captive island foxes. (This isn’t the last release, but by the end of this year all of the foxes that can be released will be back in the wild.) This is great news, and will certainly make a splash story with color pictures in tomorrow’s local paper. Many people will be there today, including government employees, TNC employees, and politicians, and they will all be justifiably relieved that the captive breeding program is no longer needed. Great job, and we hope those pens are never inhabited again.

Unfortunately, one group that won’t be going is the Friends of the Island Fox, or FIF. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am a board member of that organization. However these opinions are mine alone, and I have not discussed this with anyone else from the group.)

This organization is a non-profit corporation, founded by Ms. Pat Meyer. Pat heard about the island fox situation back when several of the populations were near extinction, and simply wanted to find a way to help. As a result she created this organization, and has cumulatively spent thousands of hours organizing meetings, corralling errant board members, working (very successfully) with grant writers, and interacting with many thousands of children and adults at education programs and public events (this especially with lots of help from Keri Dearborn). All of these efforts have been focused on one issue, and that is increasing support and providing information on the ecology and conservation needs of island foxes. (www.islandfox.org)

Consequently it is surprising that Ms. Meyer was not invited along on this trip, a day that will celebrate all the work that has contributed to this success. (Island fox recovery efforts on Catalina and San Miguel islands have been similarly successful, but no one throws a party like TNC!)

NPS does a great job of recognizing its official volunteers. But in this situation an outside non-profit organization that formed on its own, to try and focus and help with one important issue, was pretty well ignored. It may just be that FIF was off the radar for some reason in this instance, which is perhaps understandable given work loads, etc. But it would have been so nice if someone had gone just a step off their normal path to remember the contributions of FIF and Pat to these success.

The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service deserve credit for removing the pigs from Santa Cruz Island. This was a ginormous project, with uncounted logistical and political hurdles. The pigs are now gone, and good riddance. A recent article in the Ventura County Star provided a layman’s view of the cosmetic changes that most people will see in coming years: “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 on the island.”

Cool. But for ecologists who think about this at all, we know that there’s much more going on here, and that what is happening on SCI right now is nothing short of chaos: ‘The inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system.’ Precisely.

So, what happens now on SCI is anyone’s guess. As with most eradication programs, the ecological monitoring aspect of the project received much less funding than what was needed to truly document the resulting ecologic upheaval. As far as I know, other than some follow-up vegetation monitoring, there are no plans or projects scheduled to monitor small mammals, reptiles, landbirds, invertebrates, bats, or any aspect of ecosystem function now that the project is basically finished. Hopefully I’m wrong, and we can look forward in coming years to published results of how the island ecosystem has responded to pig removal, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the absence of monitoring or applied research data, ecologists often use to models to predict future change. This is a good approach, however to do so one needs some information on the current state of the system or elements of it in which one is interested, and in the case of large-scale management projects, the state prior to the manipulation. And the one published model that has been applied to an SCI ecological question was not successful in predicting anything; several years ago some folks said that by removing pigs prior to golden eagle removal the eagles would drive island foxes to extinction. This obviously didn’t happen, fortunately, and what this says about the model or modelers is unclear. The point is that there is nothing that takes the place of monitoring and research directed at specific questions to understand how our actions affect populations, species, and processes within ecosystems.

What happens on SCI now is anyone’s guess…

Not being a hunter, I will say right now that there must be something about this that I just don’t get. Why would anyone hunt with lead bullets when copper ones reportedly work just fine? The cost? I don’t think so. How much do hunters pay for their guns, tags, trucks, fuel, etc? No, if lead bullets were banned, alternatives would be rapidly mass produced, the market would respond and costs would go down. So, what is it? I attended a talk recently on an approach being used by the Arizona Dept. of Fish and Game to encourage voluntary use of non-lead ammunition for deer hunting in condor ranges in that state. The speaker presented X-rays of deer that had been killed with lead, and pointed out how the lead itself shatters when it hits bone. Why, he asked, and I wonder as well, would anyone then want to eat meat that is so loaded with toxic lead? I can understand, I guess, that many hunters don’t probably care about condors, but why don’t they care about the health of their families to whom they feed this venison?A recent bill to ban lead bullets in the Condor sanctuary in the Los Padres National Forest is waiting for the Governator’s signature, but we can be sure that ongoing lobbying by the NRA and others is relentless and may in the end prevail. Regardless of the outcome this issue is now of interest to a greater public than just the hunters and the Humane Society. If it doesn’t pass this year let’s hope it’s revisited again with greater support in the future.

There just doesn’t seem to be anything good about lead ammunition, other than to lead ammunition manufacturers. Given this is again the beginning of the hunting season on Santa Rosa Island, it should be understood that lead ammunition is being used there, where bald eages and foxes and other wildlife will feed on carrion. There was even an effort a few years ago by someone who said he would voluntarily provide non-lead ammunition to the Santa Rosa hunters, and they refused. Now I’m not necessarily opposed to the hunting operation per se, (an opinion that will get me hell, for sure), but it would be nice if they could just take this small extra step to help protect the island’s wildlife.

A second proposal for an LNG terminal in the Channel will begin seeing the light of day this week with several public hearings scheduled for the local area. This plans calls for the conversion of Platform Grace, which is west of Oxnard and about 11 miles north of Anacapa, for use as an LNG receiving station. The gas would then be transferred underwater to So. Cal. Gas plants on the coast.

Claims that this plan is environmentally friendly because it uses existing infrastructre seem disingenuous. The gas will be brought directly to the platform by tankers, so from the start this project would increase the number of ships operating in the channel. Likewise the claim that an increase in the use of natural gas will help the environment doesn’t float particularly well. One has to wonder how much air and ocean pollution will result from all the activities needed to convert the platform, provide the gas via tankers, build the needed pipelines, and ultimately to maintain the facility. Given the recent whale deaths, the already increasing tanker traffic in the channel, and the obvious lack of alternatives provided by energy interests and this administration for meaningful approaches to reducing energy consumption (not increasing energy production), the need for this facility in an already crowded ocean should be carefully scrutinized.

The death of the blue whale that washed up near Santa Barbara last week was attributed to a ship collision, and a second blue found dead in Long Beach Harbor just a few days later may also have been hit. Blue whales have become common summer visitors to the Santa Barbara Channel in recent years; the recovery plan for blue whales prepared in 1998 stated that the population of blues along the California coast had risen during the two decades prior to the mid-90s. This shift was attributed to a redistribution of the Northern Pacific population, however, not a range-wide population increase. Moreover, the reason for the shift was almost certainly due to increased populations of krill here in the Channel, which is good and bad news for the whales. Some studies have suggested that blue whales are slower to respond to vessel sounds and vibrations when they are feeding, so while a rich food source is beneficial, the fact that these krill stocks occur coincidentally with enormous levels of tanker traffic, (likely to be increasing in the coming decades), does not lead one to conclude that deaths of blue whales from boat collisions in the Santa Barbara Channel will be ending any time soon.

Blue whales are currently listed as endangered under the ESA.

A recent trip to Santa Barbara Island revealed the island as it breathes a deep late-summer breath, and responds in whatever way it does to the impacts of another western gull and brown pelican nesting season. It is great to see the pelicans doing so well, but there are unquestionably significant (and largely unstudied) ecological impacts of both the physical and nutrient inputs that come with this level of disturbance. In turning over abandoned pelican nests I find lots of mice and an occasional island night lizard. An obvious question then is whether pelican nests create more habitat for these species, or simply offset the reduction of habitat in other areas?

Pelicans also have an affinity for nesting directly on shrubs, (as opposed to possibly next to them?) particularly coreopsis, and the impacts to this species is also unknown. This behavior creates disturbance, along with adding nutrients to the system, a process that would otherwise almost certainly increase available microsites for seed germination. Can’t imagine, though, how any resulting seedling could then possibly survive being sat on by a bird of that size -

The USFWS is currently conducting a 5-year review of brown pelican status in response to a petition for delisting, which is supported by the Pacific Seabird Group. It isn’t clear how management of Santa Barbara Island would change if pelicans were delisted. The opportunities for research on pelican-island ecology would almost certainly increase, though, which would be good both for pelicans and SBI.