The pace of conservation

Intrigued by an encounter with a coyote while out on horseback near her home in upstate New York, author Holly Menino embarks on an intellectual journey to discover what the coyote is doing there. Eventually, her curiosity leads her to the Channel Islands off the coast of California, to a remote park in Chile, to Panama, and on a coyote trapping expedition with field researchers in New York. Her adventures spring to life in the pages of Darwin's Fox and My Coyote.


On the Channel Islands, Menino shadows a researcher trying to explain the sudden and almost complete disappearance of the island fox, a tiny but voracious predator that once sat atop the islands' food web. In Chile she helps gather data on the elusive Darwin's fox -- so named because Charles Darwin brought one's pelt back from his historic, New World voyage. In Panama, Menino traverses the treetops in search of nocturnal, raccoon-like mammals called kinkajous.

Menino makes a good point towards the end of her book: "Somehow we need to put enough drag on land degradation to give wildlife management time to work through science -- and to give the animals a chance." This optimal integration of natural processes and scientific effort is Menino's take-home message, and it serves as the underlying theme for the issues she discusses in Darwin's Fox.

She writes so compellingly of the field researchers' pursuit of information that will conserve species on the brink of extinction that the reader gets caught up in the quest. She documents the disappearance of the island fox with such acuity, you feel the loss reading her words. She considers, with equanimity, the science necessary to document the life of a small carnivore and the question of how studying a housecat-size Darwin's fox, whose population might be 600, is important to life on planet earth. Or why it's important to find and identify species in Panama before they're wiped out. Or why it's important to document the survival skills and threats to a suburban population of coyotes in upstate New York, and what the coyotes' survival skills tell us about the way we live our lives, the ways in which we are exploiting the planet.

If I were teaching high school or even undergraduate biology, I would make Darwin's Fox required reading. Menino's words give urgency to the field work of biologists around the world who document the lives and needs of Earth's imperiled species. She writes in her final chapter, "Science is long, land is short."

Menino misses the opportunity, however, to highlight a bright spot where one of the species she profiled seems to be benefiting from both science at the hands of humans and the equilibrium reached by natural systems: the island fox is making a comeback.

The fox owed its near extinction to a human disturbance in the delicate island ecosystem it calls home. DDT pollution wiped out bald eagles from the largest of the Channel Islands -- Santa Cruz Island -- in the mid 1900s. The disappearance of the bald eagles opened a niche for golden eagles, which swooped in and made meals of Santa Cruz Island's feral pigs and preyed on the island's foxes. There were less than 135 foxes on Santa Cruz Island by 2000.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy worked together to reintroduce bald eagles on Santa Cruz Island starting in 2002. The managers also eliminated the feral pigs, and relocated golden eagles to the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Also in 2002, a captive breeding program began for the island fox, which was officially listed as an endangered species two years later.

Island foxes have since been reintroduced to Santa Cruz Island successfully. "We have ended the captive breeding program because we believe, based on evidence from the radio-collared foxes and other indications, that the current fox population on Santa Cruz Island is around 400," says Lotus Vermeer, the Nature Conservancy's point person on the Channel Island fox recovery program. Several breeding bald eagles are nesting, and nine endangered plant species endemic to the island also seem to be recovering, according to the Nature Conservancy. Oak trees are regenerating on the island for the first time in decades. The survival of Santa Cruz Island's biological diversity appears promising, and in at least one case that Menino chronicles in Darwin's Fox the animals have been given a chance.

Margaret Guthrie
mail@the-scientist.com


Darwin's Fox and My Coyote. Holly Menino. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 2008. 182 pp., $27.95.

(Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly indicated that golden eagles were larger than bald eagles. In fact, the birds are roughly the same size. The Scientist regrets the error.)