
 
 A pair of island foxes, which have made a quick comeback from the brink of extinction. (Photo courtesy of Chuck Graham via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) 
 
 The Channel Islands, off the coast of Southern California, are the only home of a species of tiny fox that looks like a plush toy. How the island foxes got there from the mainland is up for debate — maybe with Native Americans, maybe on storm debris. But fossils show they’ve lived on the islands for many thousands of years. 
 
 Along the way, these descendants of mainland gray foxes evolved into four-pound “island dwarves” whose size was better suited to survival in their isolated habitat with its slim resources. Though they are omnivores the size of a cat, in this environment they were long the top predators. They ate lizards, birds, deer mice and plants. 
 
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 The foxes’ decline started when 19th-century settlers brought livestock to the islands and some of their pigs escaped. The feral swine attracted golden eagles, which dined on piglets and saw the little foxes as excellent snacks. The petite canines had never evolved defensive instincts, and predator was now prey. 
 
 “They have this naive, adorable little personality,” said Christina Boser, the Nature Conservancy’s island fox ecologist. “They’re not really scared of people,” let alone raptors, she said. 
 
 The foxes on one island, Santa Catalina, were also ravaged by canine distemper brought by dogs. In this out-of-whack ecosystem, the foxes’ numbers on the four islands plummeted to fewer than 200 by the late 1990s, a drop of 90 percent. In 2004, they were declared federally endangered. 
 
 But just 12 years later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday announced that the foxes of San Miguel, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz islands had so rebounded that they were being taken off the endangered species list. That makes them the 37th species ever removed from the list due to recovery — and the protagonists of the fastest mammal recovery in the Endangered Species Act’s 43-year history. The Santa Catalina island fox was downlisted to threatened. 
 
 “It shows that we can do recovery,” Dan Ashe, director of Fish and Wildlife, said in an interview this week, adding that the Obama administration has delisted 19 species. “Here you have an example of one that, for mammals, is getting off the list in record time due to a lot of collaboration.” 
 
 
 
 An island fox. (Photo courtesy of Dan Richards/National Park Service) 
 
 Ashe was referring to critical comments about the Endangered Species Act, one of which is that many plants and animals seem to be permanent residents on the list. Other detractors say it takes too long for at-risk species to get on the list, a case biologists make in a new study that found the process takes an average of 12.1 years. 
 
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 The island ecosystem that facilitated the foxes’ rapid downfall also made their recovery simpler than it might be for mainland species. They were also beneficiaries of intense cooperation between groups including the National Park Service, which manages five of the islands, and the Nature Conservancy, which owns most of Santa Cruz. 
 
 The recovery effort involved trapping and captive-breeding the foxes on the islands, which are 12 to 70 miles off coast, so as not to expose them to mainland parasites. Between 2005 and 2006, more than 5,000 feral pigs were killed using helicopters, snipers, traps and dogs, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2007. The predatory golden eagles were trapped and relocated to the mainland. Bald eagles, which had lived on the islands before being wiped out by DDT poisoning, were brought back. (Fortunately for the foxes, those eagles like to eat fish.) 
 
 By 2008, more than 230 captive-bred foxes had been released into the wild, Ashe said, and they reproduced magnificently. Today, there are nearly 6,000 foxes on the four islands. 
 
 
 
 An island fox pup that once might have been a golden eagle’s snack. (A. Little/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) 
 
 Boser, who began working on Santa Cruz in 2006, said that there was a time when the traps she set for monitoring purposes hardly ever caught a fox. 
 
 “I was out there last week and put down 10 traps and caught nine foxes,” she said. Before, she added, “you took a picture with a fox, because this was a rare thing and this was exciting. Now you’re seeing them on the roads and the fields and all over the place.” 
 
 Today, Boser said, the biggest threat is disease. Although visitors are prohibited from bringing dogs to Santa Cruz, “we see dog poo on the beaches,” she said, so all the foxes must be vaccinated against rabies and canine distemper. Dogs are also the reason the Santa Catalina foxes are still listed as threatened — pooches are allowed there, so the chance of another epidemic remains, Fish and Wildlife said. 
 
 Boser called the foxes’ comeback “totally exciting,” but she said there’s more to be learned from the animals. Researchers have found that the foxes are the least genetically diverse reproductive species ever studied. Knowing more about how this affects their fitness in an isolated place with so few resources, Boser said, could hold lessons for mainland species that live in island-like habitats, such as the mountain lions of Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Mountains. 
 
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 Dan Ashe, Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, at podium, announces that the island fox, a species on the endangered list since 2004, is being taken off the list, at a briefing on Santa Cruz... (Associated Press) 
 
 LOS ANGELES (AP) — Not long ago, foxes native to the Channel Islands off the California coast teetered on the edge of extinction. 
 
 They have rebounded to the point where U.S. wildlife officials on Thursday removed three subspecies of island fox from the roster of federally endangered species, hailing their comeback as the fastest recovery of any mammal listed under the Endangered Species Act. 
 
 The diminutive foxes that roam San Miguel, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz islands were placed on the endangered list in 2004 after their populations were nearly wiped out by golden eagles. 
 
 Scientists credited the swift recovery to an effort to relocate predators and breed foxes in captivity so they can be reintroduced to the wild. 
 
 "We're ecstatic that we've reached this point so quickly," said Steve Henry, field supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's office in Ventura. 
 
 About the size of a house cat, the island foxes — with their gray coats and reddish-brown ears — are only found on six of the eight Channel Islands where they have lived for thousands of years. 
 
 Populations have returned to self-sustaining levels ranging from an estimated 700 foxes on San Miguel Island to 2,100 foxes on Santa Cruz Island. 
 
 Centuries ago, ranchers and farmers imported nonnative animals such as pigs, cattle and sheep to the islands. Golden eagles migrated after native, fish-eating bald eagles were wiped out by the discharge of chemical DDT off the coast. 
 
 The golden eagles preyed on piglets and hunted foxes. By 2000, there were only 15 foxes each on San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands and 55 foxes on Santa Cruz Island. 
 
 The wildlife service partnered with the National Park Service, Nature Conservancy and Catalina Island Conservancy to hatch an aggressive plan that included moving golden eagles to Northern California, reintroducing bald eagles to the islands, vaccinating foxes and breeding them in captivity. 
 
 The effort was not without controversy. Thousands of pigs were shot and killed, angering animal rights groups. Wildlife officials said eliminating pigs was necessary to force golden eagles to forage elsewhere and help the foxes bounce back. 
 
 The islands' remoteness also played a key role in the foxes' resurgence, giving scientists better control over recovery efforts than if they happened on the mainland. 
 
 Years ago, "you would not have seen a fox. Now, you go out there and you don't have to wait very long before a fox crosses your path," said Scott Morrison of the Nature Conservancy, which co-owns Santa Cruz Island. 
 
 Funding for the yearslong recovery came from public and private sources and included volunteer time. Officials did not have an estimate of the overall cost but said the captive rearing and monitoring portions of the program cost about $20 million. 
 
 With the fox delisting, 19 animals and plants have been pulled from the endangered species list since President Barack Obama took office, more than previous administrations, wildlife service director Dan Ashe said. 
 
 The last U.S. mammal to be removed from the list in record time was the eastern Steller sea lion in 2013 after more than two decades. Since the Endangered Species Act passed in 1973, 37 species have recovered. 
 
 Biologists planned to monitor foxes on the northern Channel Islands by conducting periodic health checks and tagging select foxes with radio collars. Technician Stacy Baker used a tool Thursday to examine the teeth of a 3-year-old female fox on Santa Cruz Island. After giving it a clean bill of health, the fox scampered into the underbrush. 
 
 Foxes on Santa Catalina Island — a tourist destination — also are recovering but not as fast as their counterparts on the northern Channel Islands. Their numbers plummeted in the 1990s after an outbreak of canine distemper, likely brought over from the mainland. 
 
 Federal officials downgraded the status of the Catalina foxes from endangered to threatened because disease outbreak remains a concern. 
 
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 Reed Saxon contributed to this report from Santa Cruz Island. 
 
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 Follow the reporter on Twitter: @SciWriAlicia
– The little island foxes of California are back, maybe for good. Three fox subspecies found only on the state's Channel Islands have made a big comeback since they were placed on the endangered species list in 2004 and have just been removed. No mammal on the list has made a faster recovery, reports AP. The foxes are only the size of house cats and had nearly been eradicated by golden eagles. How that happened illustrates an odd chain reaction: Those carnivorous eagles had been drawn to the islands in the 19th century when settlers brought livestock, the Washington Post explains. They feasted on piglets, then discovered the foxes—which had been on the islands for thousands of years—and all but wiped them out in the ensuing decades. The recovery plan had several components. Wildlife officials first moved the predator golden eagles to Northern California and re-introduced fish-eating bald eagles to the islands. They also bred foxes in captivity for release in the wild. Now an estimated 6,000 of the diminutive critters are back on the islands, up from the perilous figure of under 200 not too long ago. "We're ecstatic that we've reached this point so quickly," says a US Fish and Wildlife Service rep.