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.