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Notes from the Santa Cruz Island Reserve

You could spend a lifetime studying a hedgerow, or a pond.

ROGER DEAKIN, Notes from Walnut Tree Pond, 2009

July 6

I get to the dock early, but prior to my arrival eighty-five Ventura Junior Lifeguards have already queued up along the main pier. Three encaged harbor seal pups are waiting dockside as well; the young pinnipeds exhibit more sang-froid than their escorts, a team from the Fort McArthur Marine Mammal Care Center, who seem concerned that junior lifeguards might take interest if they notice the seals. The lifeguards and the escorts are only going out to the island for the day; the seals and I have other plans.

I have been careful to follow the rules. I’m limited to sixty pounds1 of personal and/or research gear, plus ten pounds per day food allowance. That gives me 170 pounds, not counting a corpulent daypack that carries camera, computer, binoculars, a just-published hardback, and my journal. But no piece of luggage can weigh more than forty-five pounds. And no cardboard is allowed on the island. I’ve got four pieces of “luggage” in the form of a cooler and three plastic tubs, each weighing forty-two pounds. Exactly. And if I’ve forgotten anything, I’ll have to do without it until July 16.

I’m wearing my new boots, which were far too heavy to pack. I’ve brushed them out carefully, per instructions, so that I’m not transporting any seeds from Hastings.

I stack the tubs atop the cooler on a hand dolly, and roll toward the dock, ready to be weighed. Two scraggly backpackers, weighed down with water containers, have formed a line. When the attendant sees that I’m obviously a researcher going to the field station, he waives me along to the far catamaran—no need for college professors to stop at the scales. I realize, to the dismay of my persistent thirst, that it had not been necessary to limit myself to a one-pint-per-day ration of beer.

A thick marine layer blankets the southern California coast, and we run into a medium swell. Although Independence Day has already come and gone, the infamous June gloom is still here. One of the junior lifeguards sitting near me on the upper deck announces loudly to his companions that they should go downstairs to the bow and “get splashed.” They hustle away, thee brave boys on a mission, only to return, five minutes later, drenched. Two of the three change into dry sweatshirts. I’m guessing that their mothers must have anticipated this scenario. What a shame the third fellow was born into a family where a single hoodie was considered sufficient to get a lifeguard through the day!

I watch as hundreds of low-flying sooty shearwaters pass us by—stern to bow, off the port side—all within half a meter of the water’s blue-gray surface. They blend in as if a permanent feature of the seascape, their stiff, narrow wings outstretched in a posture unique to the procellariid family of the tubenose order, which includes the fulmars and the petrels as well. A fellow in a windbreaker that identifies him as a member of the Channel Island Naturalist Corps joins me at the upper deck rail, and tells me that there are more sooty shearwaters on this earth than any other bird. Bar none. It has recently been estimated, he adds, that there are 20 million of these birds worldwide.2

When I tell him that I did not know that, he mentions that their annual migration is “forty thousand miles.” I knew this, of course, but I keep my casual familiarity with shearwater natural history a secret just in case our voyage ends up taking longer than it’s supposed to.

Sure enough, the boat slows, and the captain urges everyone to the bow to view a herd of common dolphins. The junior lifeguards stampede forward, squealing with delight at the spectacle ahead even before they’ve witnessed it. It turns out to be spectacular, nevertheless. I estimate the herd size to be around 750 animals, while the first mate estimates it at six hundred. There are several humpback whales around as well, apparently feeding on whatever prey the dolphins and shearwaters are enjoying. I count three whales, the mate counts four.

The dolphins streak in two by two to play briefly in our bow wave before it’s someone else’s turn. I’ve spent dozens of hours watching this performance from the bows of dozens of boats, and still have not discerned precisely what the rules of the game are. It’s good to hear the joy of the junior lifeguards, many of whom are watching the play of dolphins for the first time. Their joy reminds me of what my joy should resemble. I recall the first time I encountered a large herd of common dolphins off the entrance to Monterey Bay. What bliss! We’d been whale watching, Carol and I, in a new boat, but when the dolphins showed up we decided that dolphin watching was a superior activity, at least for the time being.

We circle around for a good ten minutes before the engines finally rev and our voyage continues. Chagrin is expressed by the junior lifeguards as with a single voice, “Awwwwwwwww.” The mate, on the intercom, reminds us all that this is a transit, not a whale-watching charter.

The reserve director, Dr. Lyndal Laughrin, had arranged to pick me up at the Prisoner’s Harbor dock, but the steward from The Nature Conservancy is there instead. Lyndal, who has a cold, has to be somewhere else this afternoon, but will try to catch up with me this evening if he’s feeling better. In the meantime, I’ve been assigned Room 4, one of the private rooms, and I’m free to move in.

We pass through a massive gate, well marked to keep out trespassers, that demarcates the lower third of the island, which is part of Channel Islands National Park, from the upper two-thirds that are controlled by The Nature Conservancy. To open this gate one has to be TNC staff, or one of the many ecologists working on restoration projects here, or someone such as myself with a permit to conduct research through the UC Santa Barbara field station, or faculty of one of the classes being taught at the field station. The restricted part of the island is nicely underpopulated: free of backpackers, lifeguards, and ne’er-do-wells.

It’s a long, rocky, but riparian road to the field station, long enough that it’s easy to forget we’re on an island. We pass thrice through axle-high running water. Great swaths of the valley floor are covered with invasive fennel, a yellow-topped member of the carrot family that grows thick in clusters taller than me. The steward tells me that it has taken over almost all of the land that was previously tilled for agriculture.

We emerge from the riparian zone into the island’s main valley, and drive past the original ranch buildings, many of which are exquisitely built of bricks that were molded and fired on site. The brick winery, a brick chapel, and a brick stallion barn, together with freshly painted wood-framed houses, shearing sheds, barns, and outbuildings, create the impression that time has been suspended on this ranch. After this, the field station comes as an architectural disappointment. Plywood, mostly, thrown together by work crews with orders to build expeditiously.

On arrival, the first call I hear is the wakka-wakka of an acorn woodpecker, almost as if a spokesbird for the species wants me to know that although I’ve departed the mainland, I haven’t been abandoned by Melanerpes formicivorus. Feeling strangely at home in this anomalous place, I locate Room 4, which is much smaller than my previous studio and lacks the historical gravitas to which I grew accustomed during my days in the Hastings schoolhouse. While I will enjoy being in a queen-sized bed this time rather than a lower bunk, I will not enjoy having my own kitchen and bathroom such as I had previously. I check for a cell-phone signal—I’ve been warned that a local system has been installed but that it only works within a hundred meters of the main office. Room 4 is close enough, it would seem. I text my wife the news of my arrival.

Two researchers show up in a white pickup truck. They are female, they are energetic, and they are quite dusty. They are here to shower and to resupply, in that order. We introduce ourselves, not by university affiliation by rather by our respective projects: they investigate intertidal invertebrate colonization as part of a study that goes back to the 1990s. They are returning from a site they visited at 5:00 this morning, and are eager to be off to the showers. By the time I unpack my food supplies and make lunch of ham and cheese rolled up in a flour tortilla, they return, hair still wet. They grab a frying pan and some cutlery, toss some food into a cooler, toss the cooler into the truck bed, and are off, intending to camp out at their next site tonight so they don’t have to leave at 3:00 in the morning to get there in time. The tide waits for no woman. They tell me they’ll return this time tomorrow, and they warn me not to leave sandals outside my room, or anything else, because the foxes will steal them.

As they depart I see my first island fox, which trots along smartly around the corner, one building over. It sees that I see it, and lies flat, its ears back. I’ve seen bobcats do this in the wild, with mixed success, as if they really believe they can become invisible. I wonder whether this tiny fox realizes that I’m new to the station.

I have been reading up on these island foxes, and I know that the Santa Cruz Island subspecies, Urocyon littoralis santacruzae, is the most diminutive of the six extant subspecies. Still, I had not expected this degree of insular dwarfism. The fox across from me is smaller than a house cat.3 They say that adult island foxes will weigh four pounds, but I cannot imagine this one tipping the scales much beyond three.

It actually seems to shrink, lying there, as I watch. Has it flattened itself more over time? After I’ve stared at it for a full minute, I make a single sharp kissing noise, at which point its ears perk up. Gotcha. Even though the fox realizes that its invisibility scheme has not worked this time, it holds its position. It seems to want to learn about me as much as I want to learn about it. But what I really want at this moment is to take its portrait. I head to Room 4 to get my camera, but when I return the fox has vanished—this time successfully.

My new friend belongs to the same genus as the gray fox over on the mainland, but through the process of adapting to the limited food resources on an island, it has evolved to be a much smaller critter. The theory is that smaller animals can make do with smaller territories, especially during periods of food scarcity. Island foxes stand no more than five inches at the shoulder, and their tails are two vertebrae shorter than those of their gray fox ancestors. It is easy to see how golden eagles could have preyed on them, back in the days when Aquila chrysaetos terrorized this island. A golden eagle would easily be four times the size of a Santa Cruz Island fox.

Island foxes are among the cutest mammals on the planet. I’m told that they have gray fur on their heads—it seems bluish to me—and that their sides are a ruddy red. The belly is white. Lacking natural predators, they tend not to find humans intimidating, indeed appearing tame even though they are technically wild. I have been told that they will approach to within three or four meters if I sit quietly outside the field station at dusk. I plan to spend a lot of time sitting quietly outside at dusk.

The island fox is currently on the rebound from endangered status. There were two thousand foxes on Santa Cruz Island in 1994, but canine distemper and golden eagle predation reduced the numbers to under 135 by 2000. A stable population of one hundred animals was left in the field while a captive breeding program was initiated with twenty-five foxes. The population hit a low of fifty-five, and as recently as 2004 it was estimated that there was a 50 percent chance that the island fox would go extinct within a decade. That didn’t happen, of course, and the current population on this island is estimated at 2,100. In short, the fox I just saw is one of conservation’s biggest success stories even though the population is still reliant on conservation efforts. A month ago, at a meeting of the Island Fox Working Group, we’d all reminded each other of the need to remain vigilant. On an island like this, things can go horribly wrong in a heartbeat.

Or horribly right. This field station changes its complexion in a heartbeat. I go from feeling I have the whole place to myself to, quite suddenly, sharing it with two faculty, three grad students, and twenty-two undergraduates from the University of California system. They are engaged in a course on California ecology known as the Natural Reserve System Field Course. The course is open to students from all the UC campuses, and has been characterized as “fifty days of nonstop nature.” They’ve returned to the field station just long enough to shatter my midafternoon solitude—I had just taken a writing break to observe a trio of ash-throated flycatchers. The young naturalists expeditiously use the restrooms, refill water bottles, and demolish a two-pound bag of tortilla chips. Then the whole assemblage blasts off in three pickup trucks, students in the back, to go tide-pooling. Low tide has been scheduled for 5:00 this afternoon.4

How I wish there had been something like that when I was in college! A shame to have gone through school in an era when people thought of education as a thing that took place while students sat in rows of desks. Straight rows.

I spend the afternoon writing, unpacking, poking around the library, and attempting to fit my literary aspirations into the space that has been provided. During the hottest part of the afternoon I conduct a quick survey of butterflies in the field below the field station office, but the closest thing I see to a butterfly is a variegated meadowhawk, a dragonfly. This dearth of Lepidoptera seems strange, and yet I have much to learn about this ecosystem.

As afternoon turns to evening the temperature drops and the class returns. One of the faculty who runs this class “meets” me, or maybe not. We both have a strong impression that we’ve met previously, recently, but neither of us can figure out where, because it wasn’t at the island fox meeting in early June. We run through the possibilities: we were both in the UK about a year ago, but I was in Scotland while he was in London. Was it Mexico? Were you at an AASHE conference in Minneapolis? A Christmas bird count in Point Reyes? What did you do last summer? Finally, his fiancée joins the conversation, and I recognize her the moment she recognizes me. Last December, I had run a twoday workshop for the University of California system at the Sedgwick Reserve in the Santa Ynes Valley, where she made one of the presentations. He had accompanied her to Sedgwick, just as Carol had accompanied me, but neither significant other had participated in the workshop other than for the dinner and social the first night, at which time the four of us had enjoyed each others’ company.

The more time I spend in these reserves, the smaller my world gets. And that’s a good thing, because it speaks of a growing ecological community. We might not all know each other, but we all know people we all know.

July 7

The dawn chorus here on the island surprises me. I was expecting a concerto dominated by song sparrows, which I’ve seen in abundance here at the field station. Instead what I hear are ash-throated flycatchers, at least a dozen of them, and little else. The bird checklist I got from the National Park Service lists them as rare summer residents on Santa Cruz Island, but they are certainly abundant in this valley.

I step out of Room 4 at sunrise, eager to get my topographic bearings. I keep having to remind myself that I’m on an island, since the steep hills lining the valley block out ocean views entirely. I soon become convinced that, other than me, the only things up at sunrise hereabouts are island scrub-jays, acorn woodpeckers, ash-throated flycatchers, and a solitary island fox that seems to want to keep its distance. I’m not getting full-throated biodiversity here, not on this walk. This, perhaps, is the strongest indicator that I’m on an island. I caution myself not to be disappointed. And I remind myself of how hard these Channel Islands have been hit by the current drought. It’s much worse down here than what I experienced in Carmel Valley a week ago.

I have breakfast with Dr. Kathryn McEachern, a botanist with the United States Geological Survey who lives in Ventura. She speaks softly with the remnants of a Tennessee accent. She is here surveying an endangered plant, Hoffmann’s rock cress, Boechera hoffmannii, endemic to at least two of these Channel Islands and listed as an endangered species.5 It’s a short-lived perennial that is partial to rock outcroppings in the shade of oaks but will also live in chaparral. Today there are fewer than two thousand of these plants alive, anywhere, and half of those are part of outplanting experiments conducted by Kathryn. She’s here at the field station, with family and friends who are functioning as additional research assistants, to resurvey the outplantings and determine how many are surviving, although she points out that the plants they’re looking at this week are the “great-grandchildren” of the vegetation she actually planted.

I ask her how the restored plants are doing as a general rule, and she answers almost plaintively that the drought is taking its toll. As the oak canopy thins out, leaf litter and dropped branches are making it difficult for the rock cress seeds to germinate. Kathryn tells me that the seeds are too small and the leaf litter is too thick. The good news, however, is that the specimens in her outplantings are doing as well as plants in their native locations. Boechera hoff-mannii is a bit less endangered now than it was a few years ago.

As far as the world of plants is concerned, Kathryn is hopeful when it comes to the future of Santa Cruz Island. She has been here long enough to witness the changes to the vegetation since the removal of grazing animals, and she asserts that the speed with which the ecosystem recovers blows her mind. Given half a chance, nature is once again proving that it can do the heavy lifting of ecosystem restoration once domesticated animals stop functioning as key-stone species.

It’s not all good news, of course. The fennel went wild after the removal of the grazing animals. Ungulates kept it in check, relatively speaking, and now it flourishes, even in drought conditions. Kathryn tells me that it seems to be able to self-irrigate by drawing moisture from the fog, using its fine filaments to help droplets condense.

I hear song sparrows singing, finally. The time has come for a midmorning stroll. Since I’ve just been writing about fennel, I decide to spend some time with it. The field below me was mowed, probably at the end of the rainy season. The fennel is rebounding stealthily in the mowed area, unlike most of the grasses, and when I come to the edges of the mowed sections it springs up well over my head, perhaps ten feet tall. Each stalk is topped by spreading umbral of dull yellow flowers, an inflorescence typical of the carrot family, apiaceae. Its leaves are similarly carrot-like, almost feathery in texture. I look for pollinators and see nothing more than yellow jackets and hoverflies. I realize, once I’ve walked through fifty meters of flowering fennel, that I’ve not seen a single butterfly.

Nor have I seen a single raptor yet during my time on the island.

I continue my walk, my eyes to the ridgelines at this point. Yesterday evening, when I finally caught up with the reserve director, I mentioned that I wasn’t seeing any raptors. He insisted that they should be around, especially red-tails. The unasked question was whether I was missing them, but the author of these field notes doesn’t miss hawks.

This late in the morning I should be seeing raptor activity in a valley this big. From my present vantage point I can see a mile of ridge in every direction on each side of the valley, but I’m not seeing a single red-tail. I make a mental note of this before returning my focus to butterflies, and once I get back to Room 4 I look up the red-tailed hawk on the checklist for this island, where it’s listed as an uncommon permanent resident—basically the same rating that has been given the bald eagle. This particular checklist defines “uncommon” in the typical way: while it’s present in small numbers in suitable habitat, it is not certain to be seen on any particular day.

Strange, to go a couple days without sighting North America’s most common hawk.

There is an extensive insect collection in one of the labs near Room 4, and I visit it to find out what sort of butterflies I should be seeing hereabouts. The specimen drawers are enclosed in two side-by-side vaults, and I search the first vault in its entirety before discovering that Lepidoptera are located in the second. For some reason, the second vault smells much more strongly of mothballs than the first did, but I push on regardless, wondering how long it’s been since someone investigated this collection. When I finally pull out the main drawer of butterflies, I discover that I should be seeing many of the same species I was seeing at the Hastings reserve: anise swallowtails, monarchs, California sisters, common buckeyes, painted ladies, red admirals, variable check-erspots, et cetera.

I resolve to keep my eyes peeled in this matter, especially for the anise swallowtail, for whom fennel should serve as a larval host plant.

Shortly after lunch, the field station becomes a cloud of dust. The students have returned from their final outing, and all are in the process of packing, scouring, sweeping, mopping, and rolling up tents. They have it down to a science at this point; this is the penultimate stop in their fifty-day learning adventure. All that’s left, at the next field station, is to execute a research project and write it up for a grade. I pity my colleagues who, after having lived with their students 24–7 for the better part of two months, will have to conclude the experience by grading a stack of science papers twenty-two deep.

Eager to leave the dust and the noise behind for a while, I familiarize myself with the five instars of the anise butterfly’s caterpillar, as well as the appearance of its egg and its chrysalis. The first two instars appear black to me, although the field guide calls them a dark brown, with an irregular white band around the middle. The third and fourth instars become more green after each molt, maintaining the white band, and the fifth instar is predominantly green, but striped, looking like something that fell off a tiger. The egg looks like a tiny pearl, and the chrysalis appears leaf-like, with a distinctive shape that I’m certain to remember.

I head out into the afternoon heat. The sea breeze is at least an hour away, which makes this a perfect moment to hunt butterflies and caterpillars. I start on a hillside, examining the close fennel stalks with naked eye while scanning the ones farther back with my binoculars. I look at young plants, old plants, plants thick and thin. I check down toward the base, and back up at the top, careful to investigate the undersides of leaves and umbels. I do this for at least five hundred plants, at the somewhat hasty rate of about six per minute. In the time this survey takes, I don’t see a single swallowtail, a single egg, a single caterpillar. Worst of it all, there is not a single chrysalis. Even if the species was in diapause, I should be able to find these.

Nor do I see or hear a hawk of any sort. There are ravens here, a family with three fledglings, gathered on a single eucalyptus branch, the fledglings trying unsuccessfully to sound as ominous as their sire. They are cute, in their own way, but not in the same league as an island fox.

The sea breeze finally kicks in, and I return to the field station, ready to pour a tall ice tea.

On the way to what has now become my private refrigerator, I bump into the intertidal researchers, who have just returned from their overnight. They report having slept poorly because a mother fox and two kits investigated their sleeping bags repeatedly throughout the night. I mention that a retired colleague had warned me not to camp out on this island without a tent. Back in his research days he’d had a fox piddle on the feet of his sleeping bag. The fox was apparently scent-marking turf.

The intertidal researchers once again scurry off to the showers.

I decide to investigate the online literature regarding the local anise swallowtail population. I find a 1984 article from the Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, by Scott E. Miller, called “Butterflies of the California Channel Islands.” It indeed lists Papilio zelicaon as residing on this island. In talking about the long history of the island’s “weedy hostplants,” Miller endorses the theory of another entomologist, J. A. Powell, that Channel Island insects are undersaturated, and that they periodically go extinct in times of stress and then recolonize later. Now all I have to do is figure out when was the last time someone observed anise swallowtails around here.

Next, I scan a recent (2014) paper, “Contributions to an Arthropod Inventory of Santa Cruz Island, California,”6 and find that Papilio zelicaon is not listed in their survey results.

Hoping that citizen science might shine some light on this mystery, I check with iNaturalist, searching within the parameter of the entire island, not just the reserve. Recent observations are listed for acmon blue, American lady, California sister, gray hairstreak, red admiral, California skipper, marine blue, western pigmy blue, mournful duskywing, common buckeye, echo azure, hedgerow hairstreak, northern checkerspot, checkered white, common checkered-skipper, monarch, and the pale swallowtail, Papilio eurymedon. However, there are no recent observations on iNaturalist of anise swallowtails. Zip.

Neither is there an observation of a red-tailed hawk. Indeed, the only raptor observations listed in iNaturalist are the American kestrel, burrowing owl, and osprey. I should point out that there’s nothing conclusive about the lack of an iNaturalist observation. On the other hand, it’s less of a mystery at this point why I wasn’t finding caterpillars on the fennel this afternoon. I’m becoming concerned that the only anise swallowtail left on this island might be the one pinned to the specimen drawer in the lab behind me.

A shame there aren’t any caterpillars munching back all this fennel.

I’ve been at the desk too long. I get up to take one last look for raptors, and I resolve that on my return I’ll switch from writing to reading. I’ve brought Terry Tempest Williams’s new book along this trip, The Hour of Land, and I’m hoping that chapter 2, written about Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, won’t be quite as reverential as last night’s chapter turned out to be.

The ravens are right outside my door as I emerge. They’re perched in a live oak this time, still working on the voice of the next generation. They fly off as I pass, and reconvene atop the barbecue pit, a cast-iron affair made from the bottom half of an ancient mooring ball. Perched there, black tricksters on a black grill, they seem to be lecturing me in their telepathic way that I’ve spent too much time indoors today. Why am I at a field station if I intend to spend half the day indoors?

The problem with tricksters is that they occasionally hit the mark.

July 8

I wake up at first light, hearing the dawn song of a nearby passerine that I’m having difficulty placing. High-pitched, somewhat mechanical, highly repetitive. Almost annoying at this hour. I wonder whether it’s a Pacific-slope fly-catcher, which makes me think that bugs aren’t going to have much chance around here, especially with the overabundance of …

That’s it! Perhaps. I sit up in bed, listening for the dawn chorus of the ash-throated flycatchers. They have not roused yet, and will not do so for at least another hour. Meanwhile, I have stumbled on a possible solution to the butterfly problem that so intrigued me yesterday. With an unusual density of flycatchers in the area, a large butterfly like the anise swallowtail wouldn’t stand much of a chance. If the ash-throated flycatchers don’t get it, there are black phoebes and Pacific-slope flycatchers to contend with, all three of which are common in this valley.

I throw on a hoodie and slide into some socks—it’s too early to bother with trousers. I’m up, I’m on the Internet, and trying to confirm the diet of the ash-throated flycatcher. BirdWeb tells me that “insects are the most common food.” Not helpful. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology website says, “Captures insects off vegetation and on ground. Flycatches somewhat less often, usually using different perches in between sallies.” Slightly more helpful. And then I notice, on the same page, that the ash-throated flycatcher “nests in cavities, such as woodpecker holes.”

Of course! That explains the unusual density of flycatchers in this neighborhood, where the other most common bird is the acorn woodpecker.

I switch to Google Scholar, entering the scientific name, Myiarchus cinerascens, and the word “diet.” Not much there, except for an article that mentions that, in addition to flycatching, flycatchers feed on caterpillars.

Uh-huh.

Before closing the computer and heading up to breakfast, I attempt to satisfy my curiosities one step further. Last night, shortly after I’d fallen asleep, I heard a strange animal noise that sounded almost cartoonish. Screechy, bark-like, high-pitched, multitonal, insistent. The sort of noise you’d expect a squirrel to make if a squirrel weighed four pounds. Or maybe how a poodle with acute tonsillitis would bark. On a hunch, I switch over to YouTube and search on the keywords “island fox bark.”

Sure enough, that was my mystery noise.

I’ve accepted an invitation to accompany Kathryn McEachern in the field this morning as she finishes up her annual survey of the endangered Hoff-mann’s rock cress. Also accompanying Kathryn will be her son, Carson, who is about to begin his sophomore year at Western Washington University, and an intern, Morgan, who recently finished her undergraduate studies at Berkeley.

Kathryn shows up in an extra-dirty pair of white jeans with the knees worn through. Although she will spend the greater part of the morning on her knees, measuring and evaluating plants, she doesn’t bother wearing knee-pads. I hearken back to the only botany class I ever took, where a hand loupe, dissecting kit, and kneepads were all required equipment, and ask why she doesn’t wear them. She shrugs her shoulders, and says, “I suppose I should … but I never do.”

We’ll be using an unmarked National Park Service pickup—4WD Super Duty—to shuttle us this morning, but before we begin Kathryn takes pictures of the passenger-side door, pointing out that she’d “wrapped it around a tree yesterday,” as she put it.

The truck is as huge as it is powerful, but Kathryn doesn’t like it. As we pull out she complains, “It’s too big for these roads. You’ll see.”

Even though we will never exceed the ten-mile-per-hour speed limit on this island, I fasten my seat belt, just in case my door springs open. Meanwhile, Kathryn explains that they don’t have access to all-terrain vehicles because all federal vehicles are purchased by the General Services Administration, and are required to meet certain requirements such as being “made in America.” No Kawasaki Mules like we had up at Hastings.

We park at the base of a hill where the road up is too steep for this particular truck. The question comes to mind whether any road too steep for a Ford Super Duty 4WD pickup might be a bit too steep for me, but I remove my field vest and saddle up my pack anyway. At least the ravens won’t be scolding me for sitting indoors this morning. And at least we’re climbing a north-facing slope.

The road quickly inclines to the point where my heels won’t reach the back-slope, and every step is a matter of toes and the balls of my feet. My calves are screaming before I get even close to the point of wheezing, but I push on, because one never wants to be left in the dust by a botanist.

Kathryn turns around at one point and, in her just-above-a-mumble Tennessee lilt, says, “It’s kinda steep.”

I huff agreement.

It’s at that point that I hear, for the first time on this island, the distant-sounding screech of a red-tailed hawk. I pause, snatch up my binoculars, and scan the far ridge, less to confirm the identification, more to catch my breath. Kathryn continues walking; perhaps she’s seen hawks enough for a lifetime. But the hawk is nowhere to be seen; it must be over the next ridge.

The higher we climb into the chaparral, the more serious this drought appears. We have entered a biome that evolved to flourish in arid conditions, but the flora here is clearly struggling. There are dead manzanitas everywhere, and half the ones that still have vegetation already have a few dead limbs. Kathryn reports that even though it’s been no drier than the previous year, “this year the drought seems more profound—it seems very suddenly to have gotten worse.” She searches for words, and only comes up with a sentence fragment, “A new state of nothingness.”

She points out a native patch of rock cress that I can barely see under the chaparral. It’s smaller than I anticipated, but exquisite. I kneel down on all fours, and when I squint from its own level I can imagine the plant as a fire-works display, with a rosette burst at the base and a slender stream of flowers shooting higher. Gently, Kathryn encourages me forward, explaining that her patch is just up the road.

We get to the field site just as I hear the redtail again—this time I see her as well. She is huge, and from her molt pattern I surmise that she’s a first-summer subadult, just getting the first couple red feathers in a tail that’s mostly still showing brown, banded juvenile plumage. I watch her soar until she again crosses over the ridge. When I lower my binoculars I notice that Kathryn has been waiting for me to finish my observation. “There used to be birds here,” she says. She points to a dead manzanita just uphill from us, saying that a scrub-jay used to perch here and scold the researchers when they were first planting seedlings.

She invites me to walk around the plot and look for new shoots, but instructs me to be careful where I step. One doesn’t want to tread on endangered seedlings. I take out my camera and begin photographing the plot while Kathryn begins setting up her survey. She talks while she works, and I ask questions about the recovery plan, which was adopted in 2002. The plan lays out specific criteria for removing this plant from the endangered species list, commonly referred to as “delisting.” It specifies that there need to be more than two thousand viable plants spread over at least ten populations on this island. These populations need to be either stable or increasing, and there needs to be evidence of natural recruitment for a period of at least fifteen years that includes the normal precipitation cycle.

Kathryn asks, rhetorically, what it means for a population to be viable and self-sustaining in an era of climate change. She continues by asking, “How do we even know what the normal precipitation cycle is?”

I don’t have an answer—she knew I wouldn’t—but I assure her that it’s a worthy question.

When the survey begins I move uphill, camera in hand. I stop at an island bush poppy in full bloom,7 and snap off what would have been a full roll back in the days of film. This poppy is an endemic evergreen shrub, and these individuals reach almost twice my height. The leaves are a bluish green that even I can see, the four-petaled flowers bloom a slightly more mellow yellow than a buttercup, and it seems to be the only plant within a couple hundred meters in any direction that is not doing poorly. The island bush poppy is an example of an island gigantism,8 which is to say that it grows to twice the size of the mainland species from which it descended.

My hopes are somewhat elevated when I return to Kathryn’s site. There’s nothing like large yellow flowers to take your mind off a drought. I photograph her from a distance, at least whenever her head pokes up above the level of the chaparral. Most of the time she is on hands and knees, calling over to Morgan a plant’s measurements, and describing whether the plant is vegetated, reproductive, et cetera. Morgan, sitting nearby on mineral soil devoid of vegetation, records everything on preprinted charts. It is obvious that the team has spent many, many hours doing this, their conversation animated only by the flow of data from researcher to recorder.

I sit uphill in silence, enjoying the competence in Kathryn’s voice. It occurs to me that this is how to save a species from extinction, not so much by making speeches as by making observations. If Boechera hoffmannii is around a century from now, it will be because a botanist got down on her knees to collect seeds, and then again to plant seedlings that she’d grown from those seeds, and then numerous times again to figure out why some of them thrived while others did not. No speech required, just a bunch of stoop work, no doubt followed up by a fair amount of paperwork. However, although grant applications need to be written and reports filed, the most important part is to check with the plants themselves to see how they’re doing.

The survey moves downhill, slowly—what Kathryn calls “botany speed”—for ninety minutes. They measure and describe every subject plant they can find, marking them for next time with numbered toothpicks. We gather together, finally, at the bottom of the plot, searching to make certain that there are no more seedlings, and then together hike back up to the starting point to retrieve our gear. I depart first to give my old knees the time they’ll need to negotiate such a steep descent. Within a few minutes Carson catches up, but he slows to my pace to accompany me, telling me that the best part is yet to come—there are cookies waiting for us in the cooler in the pickup’s bed.

Fig Newtons. Glorious.

We do not return directly to the field station. This will be Kathryn’s last day at the reserve, and she wants to fill the pickup with diesel so that it’s full for whoever uses it next. This involves climbing a steep, somewhat technical jeep track to a US Navy outpost atop a hill at the eastern edge of the island, a road better suited to burros than Fords. The navy defines this mountaintop base as an “instrumentation complex,” but the hellish nature of its long driveway makes the installation seem sinister. Near the top we pull up to the huge, aboveground diesel tank, but it runs dry after we pump a couple gallons. There’s no one around with whom to discuss this.

Kathryn leaves me a half gallon of 2 percent milk that’s only a week old. Soon after her party leaves, the intertidal researchers leave as well. They’ll be departing on the same boat, since there’s only one boat a day. If you want to leave the island, I was originally told, you will do so at 4:00 p.m. Or swim.

I feel suddenly alone at the station. When I arrived, there were two groups of researchers plus a class of twenty-two. Now it’s just me. But within half an hour I hear trucks coming up the valley floor, and a biology class from UC Santa Barbara arrives, fresh off the boat. They look clean. They’re only stopping here briefly to coordinate supplies before moving on to a remote site, but I’m assured that they’ll be back tomorrow evening.

I return to my study to write, but when they zoom off I start thinking that it might be happy hour. Yes, I can distinctly hear today’s ration of beer, my meager pint of refreshment, calling my name. I respond obediently, and am surprised when I walk into the main field station to discover another class inside, this one from Western Washington University. A smaller class, significantly less clean—they’ve been backpacking for a few days. Some of them have made it to the showers, others are setting up their tents in a grassy spot east of the main building. I look around for their leader, Adam Dillon, who I’d met a month ago at a meeting of the Island Fox Working Group that was held at the Santa Barbara Zoo.

We shake hands, renew our acquaintance, and I ask, “Why the tents?”

“This is a field course,” he replies. “Even though it costs us the same to camp here as to bunk the kids, I feel better with them sleeping outdoors.”

Yes. I would have expected Adam to say this. He’s the real deal. Tall, slender, hair prematurely gray, the wings of Mercury tattooed to his calf. Still working on his PhD dissertation at Colorado State. For the past four years Adam has been trapping foxes here in the Channel Islands. I had been invited to assist with one of his operations, but couldn’t make the date work. And now I’m sharing a field station with his class of twelve undergraduates.

This course is called Wildlife Recovery and Reintroduction: The California Channel Islands Project. I ask whether there’s a lecture tonight, hoping that I might attend, but the course has moved beyond the point of lectures. The students will spend this evening prepping for an exam to be given in two days. Tonight they create the flash cards, tomorrow night they memorize them.

July 9

Deeply committed, now, not to spend any part of another morning indoors, I decide that the time has come to attend to island scrub-jays. At breakfast9 I ask Adam whether he can recommend a good site, preferably within walking distance, to observe scrub-jays, and of course he can. Hike west along up the valley until I pass through the next eucalyptus grove, and then through a large wash until I get up to a grassy knoll. “Great spot,” he assures me, “although there are plenty of scrub-jays around the field station as well.”

Yes, I’ve seen them here, but I’m thinking that I’d like to get away from the station again this morning. It’s starting to feel a bit downtownish, and I’m hankering for a less civilized landscape.

I decide to travel light, with just binoculars and a spotting scope, treating this as something of a scouting expedition since my destination, the grassy knoll, shouldn’t be more than a mile away. It’s a pleasant walk, almost entirely flat, and the section through the eucalyptus grove is heavily shaded by tall, creaky angiosperms¹⁰ that must be more than a hundred years old and are well over thirty meters tall. The wash, which comes next, is entirely dry, but relatively birdy, with a few species I haven’t yet seen on the island, including the chipping sparrow and the horned lark.

The wash also contains a few butterflies, I’m happy to report, including umber skippers, an American lady, and a California sister.

The grass knoll, on the far side of the broad wash, turns out to be a wonderful place from which to observe jays, the drawback being that the profusion of color here steals one’s attention from corvids. My first distraction is a hooded oriole, a male in vibrant yellowish-orange breeding plumage. It sits atop a small oak across from a northern flicker, and makes the flicker, despite the deep red of its malar feathers, appear drab. The local color palette is rounded out by the cinnamon of black-headed grosbeaks and the rufous flanks of a spotted towhee.

It might be me, but the island scrub-jays seem bluer out here than they did back at the field station. They are certainly a much brighter blue than the scrub-jays I was seeing a week ago on the Hastings reserve. By comparison they are also larger, have a proportionately stouter bill, and a more harsh call. Even the field guides point this out.

Not only is the island scrub-jay endemic, occurring only on this island, but it is also the only insular land bird in either the United States or Canada. The explanation for this is that scrub-jays seem incapable of crossing significant amounts of water. This makes sense given the fact that they never migrate, but we don’t really know why they never cross a large body of water in the first place. As I stand here on the grassy knoll, watching them, I never see one fly more than fifty meters.

I remain here on the knoll more than two hours, wishing throughout the second hour that I’d at least brought a camp chair and a writing table. And some water. I resolve to come back tomorrow, properly equipped, and make a day of it.

I begin my afternoon writing session in earnest, energized by the prospect of returning to the new observation post tomorrow and spending a day hard-core with the scrub-jays. The writing is interrupted early on, however, because three ecologists, two from The Nature Conservancy and one from the Division of Wildlife, have stopped by the field station, and the director here wants them to meet me and hear about my project. They have been working on a program to exterminate invasive Argentine ants, a project that seems to be nearly complete.

I ask whether anyone in the group has recently sighted an anise swallowtail, but none of them have been paying attention to butterflies. I’m given the names of a few entomologists with whom I might consult.11

They leave all too soon—the boat back to the mainland doesn’t wait for ecologists. I return to my field notes as well as a bit more research on island insect populations. Despite the interruptions, I finish up before I qualify for overtime pay, and I switch back to reading Terry Tempest Williams right around 5:00. It’s no use, however—before I get three pages into the text, the crew from UC Santa Barbara returns, and four new faculty move into the neighborhood. Three of them are research faculty—marine biologists—and one is a professor of oceanography. At this point all six of the private rooms here at the field station are filled with faculty, and I’m the only one not encumbered with students. Or should I say “blessed”? With two classes now present at the field station, another day at my remote observation post is looking better all the time.

The two classes don’t mix much. The class from WWU is “dry” in the sense that they have no alcoholic beverages. The class from UCSB is anything but. They are surprised to learn about my one-pint-per-day beer ration, and one of the TAs, Sarah, presents me with a one-pint IPA, and invites me to dip into their inventory at will. They will also be barbecuing tri-tips this evening, and I’m invited to partake of that as well.

The tri-tips are enormous. There is just enough room on the monstrous grill for UCSB’s steak and WWU’s chicken. I note that the WWU students have moved to the picnic tables on the other side of the field station to enjoy their repast, seemingly outnumbered by a superior force. After dinner, they prepare forlornly for their final exam tomorrow morning, soberly working their way through hundreds of flash cards.

July 10

I leave the field station heavy this morning: tripod, spotting scope, camera with two lenses, binoculars, lunch, two liters of water, and a folding beach chair I’ve borrowed from the reserve director. I imagine that I will appear like an absolute beast of burden, in the unlikely event anyone sees me along the road.

My heart is a bit heavy as I hike. I exchanged e-mail with my wife this morning. After an early hike, she and her sisters will be cleaning out my mother-in-law’s condo in an assisted living community, getting it ready to put up for sale. My mother-in-law has had to move to a basement room where she will get around-the-clock nursing care, which she now needs. She was in her midfifties when I married her daughter almost thirty-nine years ago; time has robbed her of a great deal of spunk. I resolve to visit her as soon as I get off this island.

During my first hour of observations, the longest flight I observe of any island scrub-jay is eight seconds. These are not precise seconds, just me counting off “one thousand one, one thousand two …” in my head. Just after the start of my second hour, however, a scrub-jay stays airborne for seventeen full seconds before it disappears from view. This will be the longest flight I observe all day.

My observations are often distracted. A fox comes trotting along, emerging from the east side of the manzanita in whose shade I’m sitting. I have my notebook on my lap at that point, pen in hand while my camera rests atop my scope case. I pick it up slowly, zoom all the way out, frame the fox precisely and then press the shutter release button only to discover that I haven’t yet turned the camera on. By the time I switch it on, reframe, and refocus, all I get for my efforts is a well-framed portrait of the fox’s tail. I’m getting pretty good at these tail shots.

On hearing my shutter click the fox disappears into the grass, and here I’m using the term “disappear” literally. Two scrub-jays land on its footprints, posing thoughtfully for me. After snapping off a few shots I realize that these birds stand every bit as tall as the fox did, measuring from the ground to the crown of the head. I file this away as a good thing to have learned.

The sun finally climbs high enough that the mesquite I’ve been sitting near no longer provides shade. A nearby evergreen shrub, a toyon, stands more than twice my height, a stature that makes an impression in a neighborhood devoid of proper shade trees. The promising toyon is far enough off the beaten path that I don my gaiters before packing up my kit, a precaution against ticks.12 Not paying attention, I put them on so that the logos point toward each other from the inseam of my trousers. Oh, the fashion faux pas one gets away with when wearing gaiters on a Pacific island with severely restricted access.

There’s a narrow, well-traveled fox trail leading through the tall grass toward the toyon. By “narrow,” I mean that the trail is slightly less wide than my boot. No more than ten paces in, I come across a significant pile of dung, composed of at least twenty dark little fox turds, each the size of your pinkie finger, lying in the middle of the trail. The message here, I’m guessing, may be that this trail is going to lead to a whole bunch of ferocious foxes, and no unauthorized entry will be tolerated. Stepping over the pile, I continue to follow the trail, but before I can travel another ten paces I come upon a second dung pile, equal in size to the first. The message this time seems to be “WE TRIED TO WARN YOU!”

Within the next ten paces I come to the first tree of a small grove where no tree is itself more than ten meters high. Here the grass has all been packed down—I suppose that this must either be a sleeping area or a lovely little day lounge out of the late-afternoon sun. I do not tread through it, opting instead to go the long way around to where I can commandeer shade between the toyon and a manzanita much larger than the one I just abandoned. It is here that I set up the best observation post I’ve had in years.¹³

My view, looking south, slopes down through about twenty-five meters of tall grass, after which it is more heavily vegetated. Willows mix in with live oak, toyon, manzanita, mountain mahogany, and what appears, through my scope, to be a chokecherry. I watch four scrub-jays converge on a rounded toyon a stone’s throw below me, then I notice that there is nothing man-made in my entire view, not a fence post, or a transmission tower up on the ridge above, not even a jet contrail.

Even without factoring in aesthetic consideration of nature unsullied by human artifact, the spot is so beautiful that I have no need to delve into its historical ecology. It is enough just to sit here and appreciate it—not for what it used to be in bygone days, not even for what it’s become since restoration efforts began. Just for what it is. Now. Imperfect. At this moment.

As midmorning settles in I focus more on listening, less on watching. The scrub-jays are mostly silent, and the greater part of the anthem emanating from below comes from ash-throated flycatchers. They seem just as dense here as they did back at the field station. Woodpeckers, quail, wrens, and grosbeaks add their voices. The bird nearest me, a spotted towhee, is the most insistent, his check-mark-shaped trills bordering on impatience. Whatever it is he wants, he wants it now.

Every now and again the entire valley falls silent. It’s possible that they’ve all become aware of something that has escaped my attention. A falcon perhaps, flying behind me, its view obstructed by my toyon? Whenever these silent moments happen I become aware of insect noise: flies, yellow jackets, and whatever other buzzy things are out there. Leafhoppers? There are no honeybees, however. Those were one of the first of the human-introduced species to be eradicated, and it lowered the population of invasive star thistles dramatically. My memory flashes back to Natasha, back at Hastings, pulling out star thistles with her bare hands.

Midmorning becomes late morning, and my eyes are finally drawn up to the chaparral on the opposing side of the valley. An artist painting that slope would need an entirely different palette than would be employed to paint the valley floor below. Where there’s green, it’s a much cooler green, and it intersperses with dead-stick gray. I take a few photographs so that I can come back to this spot and make comparisons if this drought ever ends.

As we approach noon I keep having to scoot my chair back deeper under the toyon to take advantage of what shade is left. The shrub/tree functions more and more as a blind. A flycatcher lands on a branch a couple arm lengths away, in full sunlight, its crest looking like a bad haircut at this distance. It flies off when the day’s first breeze pipes up, bringing with it a puff of ocean coolness. In an instant, regardless of whatever my wristwatch might have to say about the matter, Zephyrus transforms morning into afternoon. Down below the birds shift their domains, the one on this shrub moving to that, the one on that shrub moving to this.

I watch as a scrub-jay glides for three seconds from the top of a live oak and then plops down into the tall grass, disappearing completely from view. I grab the binoculars because I’ve noticed this behavior several times today, never really understanding what these birds are up to. I scan the grass where it landed, and I’m fortunate to see it return to the tree with an acorn in its bill. Of course! These scrub-jays are considered scatter hoarders. They cache acorns, but they don’t store them in granaries like the acorn woodpeckers. Rather, they hide them in numerous caches, and they have an amazing ability to remember precisely where they’ve hidden food.

I want to see a scrub-jay retrieve another acorn, but it’s not to be. At the point where the sun has moved far enough west that I’m nearly bereft of shade, yellow jackets, the bullies of the meadows, begin to harass me. I’m not usually skittery about wasps, but the yellow jackets have been ganging up on people here on the island, and warnings have been posted at the ferry landing and in the field station.

I remind myself that these little yellow brutes are part of nature, the nature I’m here to write about. I search my memory for what I can remember of the natural history of the western yellow jacket. They are a thick-bodied, social, predatory wasp. They nest in soil cavities or tree hollows, and will defend the nest entrance aggressively. They prey on insect larvae, but will also feed on carrion or rotting fruit. Unlike honeybees, they are not equipped to carry pollen. Their stingers are not barbed, which means they are not left in their victims, which means that a single yellow jacket can sting repeatedly. And, I remember reading somewhere on the Channel Islands park service website, swift movements will attract more yellow jackets. Oh yes, and only the queens hibernate to survive the winter. The males all die.

That’s it, Vespula pensylvanica. I’ve run through my entire trove of yellow jacket lore without coming across a single redeeming factor. I search the horizon for my old friends, the flycatchers, hoping that they might want to come eat a few of these pests, but all the useful birds seem to be on siesta break.

I slowly pack up my kit, careful to avoid swift movements, and vigilant not to leave anything behind for the fox.

I listen for hawks on the way home, thinking that if I were red-tailed, I would be riding the thermals on an afternoon such as this, ascending on warm air until I found something cool. I make it back to the field station, however, without hearing anything new.

July 11

I had met Dr. Lyndal Laughrin, who runs the field station here, in early June at the annual meeting of the Island Fox Working Group. The meeting was hosted by the Santa Barbara Zoo, and when I walked in to what was obviously a conglomeration of eighty-some field-hardened wildlife experts, two things were immediately clear:

1. Everybody in the room knew everybody else.
2. Except for me.

I had corresponded with Lyndal to set up this visit to the field station, and then had attended the Santa Barbara meeting at his suggestion. And it was Lyndal, of course, who saw a stranger walk into the room, and who figured out it had to be me, and who came up and introduced himself. We’ve been friends ever since.

I was tempted, at first, to write about the working group. It’s almost a complete nonentity on paper, an unincorporated gathering of people concerned about an endangered animal, working without any of the usual organizational accoutrements such as officers, bylaws, a budget, a website, or staff. Although there were a few other academics in the room, most group members worked for a range of agencies, including the United States Navy; the National Park Service; various zoos, local conservancies, and natural history museums; The Nature Conservancy; the US Fish and Wildlife Service; the California Department of Fish and Wildlife; and a nonprofit environmental consulting firm, the Institute for Wildlife Studies. There were a lot of smart people in the room.

Lyndal was clearly the archdruid of this particular sect. He started working on this island in 1965, back when it was still a privately owned ranch, and did his PhD research on island foxes. He’s pretty much been here ever since; the US Census Bureau lists the population of Santa Cruz Island as “2.” Those two are Lyndal and his wife, Ann.

When Lyndal started working on island foxes, little was known about them beyond a basic description. He filled in many of the gaps in the fox’s natural history: diet, behavior, population dynamics, and basic ecology. During that initial research, the field station director left and Lyndal became interim director. That was in 1970, and he’s been running the place ever since.

He picks me up late, having cleared his deck of all work for the day. He is wearing a white, button-down oxford shirt, camouflage trousers, hiking boots, and a broad-brimmed hat. Santa Cruz Island executive attire. We load our gear into the back of his white, open-air jeep. Within a few hours all will be covered in dust—driver and passenger included.

“I hope your planning to spend the day,” he says while he loads in a small cooler. I indicate that, yes, I packed a lunch.

I don’t have a chance for final goodbyes to the UCSB group, who will have departed before we return to the field station. They are in session, discussing the results of an experiment conducted previously. As much as I enjoy this field station’s quietude when students are not around, I will certainly miss this group’s energy.

The jeep is in its 4WD low range, and hasn’t been in any other range for years. It sounds like a hot rod, having had its catalytic converter removed so as not to cause grass fires. This is standard procedure for island vehicles, few of which will ever travel a paved road again. We will not exceed ten miles per hour all day, and will spend the greater amount of our journey at half that speed. Lyndal proposes a figure-eight route that will take us through numerous geological zones, and I indicate that I am disposed to follow his lead.

The tour takes on the tone of a lecture, or at least a seminar. As we drive through the eucalyptus grove that I’d hiked in the previous two days, Lyndal tells me that one of the trees in this grove is officially the tallest flowering plant in North America. I detect a note of pride in his voice as he details how the plant was measured, and by whom.

Geology emerges as this morning’s theme, and I’m amazed at how knowledgeable Lyndal is on this subject for someone who trained as a vertebrate zoologist. As we climb up the valley westward, he points out evidence of the major tectonic fault that divides the island, and under his guidance I’m able to see how the far side of the valley is moving in an opposite direction relative to the near. We stop and get out anytime we pass an endemic plant, or a buckwheat varietal, or vertebrates of interest such as a gopher snake that Lyndal suspects I might want to photograph. His off-road driving philosophy is simple: always drive as if you have no breaks, and stop the jeep before you look at anything interesting. He explains that most of the off-road accidents that happen here occur when the driver is observing wildlife. Distracted driving.14

These old ranch roads were originally horse trails, and the jeep’s tires are often perilously close to the edge, especially on the steeper sections. The steward has placed multicolored Styrofoam crab floats and net buoys, an endless supply of which wash up on the local beaches, in places where particular attention needs to be paid.

Once we top out on the rim we shift from chaparral to grassland moving toward bishop-pine woodland, and our conversation shifts from geology to botany. I notice that Lyndal is mostly using common names, and without really thinking it through I try a little experiment to determine whether he’s dumbing things down for the benefit of someone from the environmental humanities. We are driving past scattered clusters of low-lying cactus, which he had referenced as “prickly pears” a few minutes back and which botanists would usually refer to by the genus name, Opuntia. When I ask whether the opuntia are native to the island, Lyndal doesn’t skip a beat, and narrates the ecological history of opuntia in this ecosystem, including how ranchers attempted to get rid of it by introducing a cochineal scale insect, Dactylopius coccus, with the help of agricultural scientists from UC Riverside in the early 1940s.

This, of course, is what one gets when one unlocks Pandora’s box: entomology laced with historical ecology, served up by a vertebrate zoologist. Lyndal pulls the jeep over, and we examine the nearest patch of opuntia for cochineals while my guide explains how the opuntia population has tended to stabilize in recent years, and why this has happened, even though the stands of opuntia are nowhere near historic levels. He finds a small, silver-white mound on one of the cactus pads, explains how the insect parasitizes the opuntia, and then asks whether I was aware that the Aztecs made a scarlet dye of these very chochineals. Cochineal dye?

I confess that I was not aware of this.

The landscape transforms shortly after we continue our journey, and we are now driving through a forest of tree skeletons. The pine cones are still in place, but the needles have been dropped by most of these plants. I am taken aback at the number of bishop pines that have recently died, their leaf litter still piled below, and I observe out loud that the ravages of the drought seem more severe here than they were back in the chaparral. Lyndal doesn’t respond to this, perhaps because it’s so obvious that coniferous woodland would have a more difficult time adapting to drought than chaparral. I ask him to estimate the percentage of bishop pines that have died on the island as a result of this drought, and he gives me a range between 80 and 85 percent. It’s truly grim.

Over the course of our first few hours together, we talk about what has changed since Lyndal started studying the foxes here as a grad student in the late 1960s. The foxes were not protected back then, and some were being sold through the pet trade. The island was still a working ranch when he started trapping foxes here, a seriously overgrazed ranch with thirty thousand sheep and eight hundred head of cattle. I find his perspective fascinating—both he and the field station he runs predate the involvement of the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy. He tells me that he originally got his job because Dr. Sterling, the owner of the ranch, trusted him and wanted him around. Apparently, whatever Dr. Sterling wanted, Dr. Sterling got, at least as far as the University of California was concerned. The result was good, in this case, because the field station had originated strictly to conduct geological research, but once Lyndal came aboard, its mission expanded to include field biology.

We drive.

We come to a crossroad, and Lyndal asks, “How’s your time looking?” When I reassure him of my flexibility in this matter, he takes a side road to where we can observe a massive bald eagle nest on the coast. There is, of course, nothing I’d rather do at this point. The all-stick nest proves worthy of our time. I can’t tell how deep it is, looking down from above, but it’s as large in diameter as a tractor tire. Probably every bit as thick. We have arrived a bit late for the nesting season, however, and the fledglings have already fledged by now. Undaunted, Lyndal takes out his binoculars, scans the far ridge, and says, “There’s one.”

This will become a pattern throughout the rest of the day: Lyndal will generally be the first to spot a bird precisely because he knows these particular birds, including where they like to roost. I accuse him of having great eyes, but it’s more than that—it’s history.

The bird ignores us although I have no doubt that it’s aware of our presence here on the top of a neighboring ridge, two tall fellows standing next to a white jeep. We are able to determine that it’s an adult even though it’s silhouetted in such a way that makes it difficult at first to perceive its white head and tail. When it turns its head our way, however, I’m able to make the call. Even then, I have trouble gauging the eagle’s size through my binoculars; there are no trees nearby on the ridge where it perches, and this makes it difficult to judge scale. It seems enormous as I view its magnified image, but this may be because the ridge is closer than it appears. Or maybe it’s just a huge specimen. Haliaeetus leucocephalus can reach almost a meter in height when it perches, and this bird seems every bit that tall as it surveys the gray seascape below.

The history of these eagles has been well documented in the scientific literature. The ranch used DDT to control insect pests in the 1950s and 1960s, and the eagles were wiped out as a result. Golden eagles colonized the island subsequently, preying on human-introduced species such as sheep. When the sheep and feral pigs were finally removed as a conservation measure, the eagles did something that should have been predictable, at least in retrospect—they began preying on island foxes. At the point when the fox population crashed, it became apparent to the conservation community—and of course Lyndal was an instrumental part of this conversation—that we needed to get rid of the golden eagles and bring back the bald eagles, which tend to prey on fish, not foxes.

It wasn’t as easily done as said. The eagles had their own fans, so lethal means of eradication were never permitted. Capturing golden eagles turned out to be an enormous challenge, requiring four years of intensive, creative, and expensive efforts that ran the gamut from shooting net guns from a helicopter to developing robotic eggs that could be substituted for real eggs in the nest—the counterfeit eggs were designed to inject sedatives with spring-loaded hypodermic needles, but never worked in the field. Then, once the golden eagles had been deported to the farthest corner of northeastern California, bald eagles had to be reintroduced so that the golden eagles would not recolonize the island. And now the fox population of this island is approaching historic levels. Simple.

Within an hour we’re back to the fork in the road, and we turn down toward the historic Christy ranch and, more important, the beach where we’ll have lunch. My luncheon tends to be a simple affair, flour tortillas with peanut butter, jelly, and cream cheese, which I’ve christened “the Philadelphia PBJ burrito.” They taste especially good on a beach, providing you can keep the sand from becoming a condiment. I’ve also brought a juicy plum along, and it turns out to be a perfect complement to the burritos.

There are no shorebirds on this beach, which I find strange. Instead, ravens function as the local sandpipers, poking through the littoral zone with their enormous bills. Lyndal speculates that they’re going after mole crabs.15 As we watch the ravens chasing and then retreating from the swash, it grows suddenly chilly. The wind has shifted and an afternoon fog begins to roll in. We both put on our vests, and will soon add a windbreaker layer as well. This fog will chase us for the next few hours, always threatening and yet never quite engulfing us.

Lyndal again asks how I’m doing on time, which is his way of offering to drive me out to Point Frazer. I assure him that I’m having the time of my life, and we’re off, driving now through a low-lying coastal sage biome that presents a whole new palette of plants to learn. Lyndal seems to know them all. Various hearty buckwheats, including the indigenous Santa Cruz Island buckwheat, intermixed with California sagebrush, black sage, lemonade sumac, and goldenbrush. As we roll through this scrub, on a hillside that many would describe as “barren,” Lyndal describes a rich and diverse ecology.

We park the jeep again, the road having reached its westernmost terminal. Ahead there are still a couple hundred meters of pickleweed and red sand verbena before the island itself ends. The verbena, Abronia maritima, is in bloom, and looks more pink to me than its common name would indicate. Lyndal instructs me to check out the tide pools, telling me that he’ll catch up after a while. I snatch up my camera and binoculars, leaving the daypack in the jeep because I don’t expect to be gone more than a brief moment. But the pools themselves are spectacular, better than any of the tide pools to which I’ve taken my own classes over the years. I am surprised to see Sally Lightfoot crabs, Grapsus grapsus, congregating on the rocks this far north. Old Baja amigos. These are pools where one could easily spend a day, especially if properly equipped to get into the water, as I am not. Still, I’m able to decipher many of the hidden secrets of these pools, sitting up on the cliff and gazing through the clear water with my binoculars.

After a half hour down in the tide pools I head up to the terrace that leads out to the point, and Lyndal soon joins me. The ankle-high plants here are salt tolerant, and we find fox trails but do not see foxes. Salt crystals encrust everything here, and I wish the sun would break through the gray marine layer just for a moment to make them sparkle. Every now and again we come across a scatter of gull feathers and bones, which Lyndal suggests are probably the result of a peregrine falcon’s hunt. The kills seem recent.

Suddenly, there is an eruption of gulls, somewhere between one and two hundred, shrieking off the cliffs at the end of the point. Lyndal and I raise our binoculars simultaneously, and I ask, “Peregrine?”

Lyndal spots the marauders first. Two bald eagles have buzzed the colony of gulls, causing this feathered flare-up. The gulls scream murder as the eagles dive down out of our view, perhaps to steal a few eggs. Or nestlings? I laugh, once they’re gone, and Lyndal looks at me quizzically. I indicate the heavy camera slung down by my hip, and explain, “I’ve just missed another once-ina-lifetime shot.”

Lyndal has a smaller camera around his neck, a device that I had not previously noted. He laughs that he missed the shot as well. We will both get a chance at lesser shots a few minutes later when the eagles head across the bay. Lyndal seems to know where they will land, and when they do so, even though they’re more than a mile away, he points them out as they perch shoulder to shoulder on the far side of a cove. Such a shame I didn’t bring my scope today!

We make a short hop over to an active archaeological site in a huge shell midden nearby. Lyndal points out depressions where habitations have long ago capsized. This midden is actively being studied, but the archaeologists are not currently at the field station, and they’ve covered their trench with plywood. Lyndal carefully opens it up at one end, and we peer down. It’s full of shell, mostly abalone shell, and Lyndal points out how the shells along the side grow smaller as the midden grows higher—clear evidence of overfishing around this site.

“So much for the myth of the Native American community achieving ecological balance,” Lyndal comments.

We return to the jeep, now heading back to the east. While we drive, I ask what he considers the advantage of having spent almost five decades living and working on this island. His answer comes as no surprise after our time together: he talks about the perspective of having been able to learn the island beyond the limits of his own discipline. The people who “pop in periodically” for short visits don’t get to do this, he explains. But after fifty years of trailing around with other scholars, he has been able to “learn the island” through the lenses of their expertise. Archaeologists, geographers, botanists, marine biologists, entomologists, pathologists, restoration ecologists, and even fellow zoologists have all contributed to Lyndal’s understanding of the ecosystem in which he lives. He assures me that although he no longer functions as a principal investigator, he is still very much learning about the Santa Cruz Island ecosystem.

Grinding along slowly, we flush a gray, big-headed bird the size of a robin. Without seeing more than tail feathers, Lyndal identifies it as an island loggerhead shrike, Lanius ludovicianus anthonyi, a somewhat notorious predator that feeds on lizards, grasshoppers, and even small birds. This is a subspecies I’ve never seen before, although I’m familiar with its near cousins both in mainland California and Baja California Sur, not to mention similar-looking relatives occupying the same genus in the British Isles, where they are commonly called “butcher birds.”16 The particular shrike that we just flushed exists on two islands, here and Santa Rosa, but according to the latest survey there are only forty-two individuals on this island. I feel privileged to have seen one of them.¹⁷

We enter into the final loop of our figure eight, once again climbing to a high ridge. I can see a broad panorama of seascape from here, but there’s too much fog out there for us to see other islands. For the first time today it’s my turn to spot a noteworthy bird, a falcon soaring on my side of the jeep. We stop and watch the largest male kestrel I’ve ever seen, able to follow it for several minutes as it forages at the head of a canyon that drops off to the north.

The trail from here down toward the ranch is perhaps the steepest I’ve ever descended in a jeep. At times Lyndal has to shift down into the granny gear, causing the old engine to backfire nervously. I’m glad I’m not driving, just as I’m glad for Lyndal’s modus operandi, descending this trail as if he had no brakes. This is clearly not a road that Little Dog could have handled.

We don’t return to the field station until almost 7:00. When we park, Lyndal leaves the key in the ignition, telling me that I’m welcome to use the jeep on my adventure tomorrow.

I’m as dusty as I’ve been in years, and almost too weary to cook. The main station house, which has been swept and mopped to the point of excess, seems a lonely place without collegians in the kitchen. I see, near the sink faucets, a red gift box, the sort you might find in a confectioner’s shop. Beneath it is a note written on a coffee filter that says, “John, ENJOY the India Pale Ales in the walk-in fridge! Hope the island provides enough material for your book! Cheers! Sarah & UCSB EEMB 170!”

I wander out to the walk-in fridge. There I find a one-pint IPA for every remaining day of my stay. These dear students—someone else’s students!—have just doubled my beer ration until I return to civilization.

I return to the kitchen, still weary, still dusty, but full of cheer. I open the confectioner’s box, and find that it contains one homemade truffle for each remaining day of my stay, including tonight.

Cheers, indeed.

July 12

I return to the field station early this afternoon, at least relative to yesterday’s return, with unusually spotty field notes. Thanks to a helicopter, I’m even dustier today. And perhaps a bit more toxic.

A creature of habit, I check my e-mail first. A former student-advisee-TA from Montana has written to request yet another letter of recommendation. I’ve previously recommended this kid for a Fulbright, an internship with the White House Climate Office, and a Rhodes Scholarship, all of which he received in due time. He paid me back by getting his honors thesis published—I had served as his adviser for that as well—and presenting me with a signed copy of the literary journal in which it was published on my most recent birthday. So now that we’re all square he wants me to recommend him for a seminar. He signs off his e-mail, “Hope you’re enjoying them foxes!”

I write back that I’ll get the recommendation out as soon as I return to campus and that “yep, them foxes is mighty fine.”

During the first year of this former student’s undergraduate year, he enrolled in a lower-division seminar I teach structured around wolf literature. Despite the topic, at the beginning of the quarter I lecture about how environmental scholars should, when possible, resist the allure of charismatic mega-fauna, or at least recognize it for what it is. We need to be just as concerned about the future of nematodes as we are about wolves or polar bears, even though it’s easier to raise money to preserve predators.

That admonition in mind, I’m happy to report that I did not spend today with the foxes, although I’ve seen a few because they’re hard to avoid around here. Rather, the highlight of my day was watching a helicopter dropping bait beads of sugar water laced with thiamethoxam, an insecticide. These beads are being dropped in areas of Argentine ant infestation. The bait stays hydrated for sixteen hours before desiccating, the hope being that the ants will forage the beads within that time frame.

I had been invited to observe this process by Ida Naughton, a second-year PhD student working out of UC San Diego. Ida has been working full seasons out here for the past three years, usually working a two-weeks-on/four-days-off schedule. She studies evolution and ecology, with a strong concentration in Hymenoptera, an order that comprises wasps, bees, and ants.

Most people would cluster hymenopterans, especially ants, on the non-charismatic side of the animal kingdom. Scholars like Ida will tell you that we need to pay attention to them anyway. When it was discovered that Argentine ants had established on the island, they were considered one of the major threats against biodiversity, third only to (1) nonnative vertebrates such as sheep and pigs, and (2) honeybees.

Argentine ants are considered such a strong threat because they take out the native ants, many of which have coevolved with plants to form mutualistic relationships. Islands are particularly vulnerable to invasive ants; Argentine ants have wrought extensive damage on islands such as Maui and Christmas Island. They form megacolonies, and once that happens they may consume bird nestlings, frogs, crabs, lizards …

The one good thing you can say about Argentine ants is that they don’t disperse via wings. They pretty much get where they are going by attaching to human cargo. The worst thing about Argentine ants is that, so far, they’ve never been completely eradicated once they’ve established somewhere new. A few years back, scientists with The Nature Conservancy developed this new technique using the bait balls—which the manufacturer calls “Magic Beads”—and they’ve made major progress toward the eventual elimination of these ants from the island. The cool thing is that they don’t have to worry about killing the native ants with the bait balls, because they only drop them in areas where Argentine ants have established, and the invasive ants have already killed all the native ants in those areas.

The other cool thing about this method is that they avoid applying the bait balls until later in the day because the balls last longer at night. This meant that I could devote the morning to catching up with my field note transcriptions, which were lagging due to yesterday’s long tour of the island with Lyndal.18

It was a nostalgic joy to drive the jeep solo. Two of the first vehicles I ever owned were jeeps, starting with a 1948 Willy’s CJ2A painted battleship gray. It didn’t have a heater and I lived in Colorado, so it tended not to be the most practical vehicle I ever owned, but I was in love with it anyway during my bachelor phase. The best thing I can say about it is that I never rolled it, although I had it up on two wheels for the longest three seconds of my life.

There are fox prints all over the driver’s seat when I climb aboard. A private message from a charismatic friend.

I arrive at precisely 1:00, having not been out here long enough to be functioning on island time. At least I’m not five minutes early. I am intercepted by Christie Boser, who runs this island on behalf of The Nature Conservancy. There is a film crew from Wired magazine present, and she seems flustered to have an educator show up as well. When she asks what I am doing I reply that I will be working with Ida, and remind her that we had discussed my pending visit at the Island Fox Working Group meeting.

“Oh, nobody told me you’d be here today.”

I had e-mailed her several days ago, hoping to get a moment together, but one tends not to press the point about such things when there’s an incoming helicopter flying at low level, especially when a six-hundred-pound hopper bucket is slung six meters below the chopper.

The hopper bucket passes directly over us, low enough to end all conversation.

After the chopper reloads and zooms off I am instructed to park the jeep up by the orchard and wait for Ida’s return. She shows up a few minutes later, accompanied by a recent college graduate named Michaela who has just started working with the ant project. Both Ida and Michaela are swaddled head to toe, including T-shirts wrapped around their heads that they’ve transformed into makeshift dust barriers. In terms of fashion, they remind me of something straight out of a Mad Max dystopian film, only petite. Ida, being a fellow academic, seems glad to see me, and not at all worried about me screwing up the filming.

“Just stick with me.”

This turns out to be easier said than done. Ida immediately takes over the ground crew. There are sixty 2,500-liter casks lined up, square casks, plastic, and her job seems to be to direct one of the forklift operators to pick them up and dump them into the hopper loader, which in turn is ready to refill the helicopter as quickly as possible when it returns. She calls me over and pries the lid off one of the casks. Contained inside are gleaming beads, all of them clear, each the size of a large pearl. Magic Beads glistening with sugar water and poison.19

The helicopter returns every few minutes, hovering just above the hopper loader while forklift operator no. 2 positions the loader over the hopper. It only takes seconds for the hopper to be reloaded with Magic Beads, but in that amount of time it’s able to kick up more dust than Lyndal’s jeep kicked up in nine hours of running dirt roads yesterday. Absolutely phenomenal.

I, of course, have one of those multifunction head sleeves that can be fashioned as a pretty cool dust bandana, cowboy style. It’s back in my duffel at the field station. I finally figure out a way to defend against the dust, but it’s not nearly as elegant as Ida and Michaela’s system. It involves pulling the handkerchief out of my back pocket and holding it over my mouth and nose right before the next swirling cloud of dust hits. At that point I’m certain that I look much more like an out-of-place college professor than a cowboy, but that sort of displacement is the price one pays writing in the field rather than a sterile office. And I can worry about the dust in my ears later.

The film crew seems to have suffered through all the dust and heat they can handle, but the cinematographer wants one last shot. He huddles with Christie and she calls instruction up to the helicopter on her walkie-talkie. Ida and Michaela vanish, but I stay close to the cameraman, expecting something good. Sure enough, the helicopter flies straight west up the valley, pivots tightly, and then begins a strafing run directly overhead, flicking on the hopper broadcaster moments before flying overhead. Yes. Thousands of Magic Beads are released for our cinematographic entertainment. I snap off a few shots with my still camera, and then lower my head, hoping that my Tilley hat will absorb the brunt of the abuse.

It does.

The next time there’s a lull in the action I ask Ida whether she’s seen anise swallowtails on the island. She explains that she’s not really an entomologist, just a hymenopterist, and that she rarely ID’s butterflies past genus. This characterizes the modern world of science, of course, where being an entomologist, one who specializes in insects, is perceived as being a broad generalist in a universe where we encourage our budding scientists to specialize. I push her a bit about whether she’s seen any genus-level swallowtails, and she says she saw some in the spring, in March or April. She assures me that they must be on the island, and refers me to the insect collection in the field station. I tell her that I’ve seen the Papilio zelicaon specimen, but that I can’t locate a record of them being included in butterfly surveys since 1986, and that they don’t appear on iNaturalist either.

She asks whether I’ve been inspecting inside the bracts of fennel, and I ask her to show the best way to do that. We walk over to the nearest fennel plant, and she shares her technique, pulling the bracts back gently even though this is a hearty invasive species that stands up pretty well to a machete. She looks momentarily puzzled, having expected to find aphids here, but there are none. She grows more interested in my swallowtail observations at that point, and suggests that the yellow jackets might be preying on the caterpillars.20 In the end, she promises to keep an eye out, and to email me if, when, and where she sees P. zelicaon.

Feeling glad to have formed this new alliance with one of the ant people, I retreat from the field of battle. Once one watches the first dozen helicopter reloadings, there’s not much more to learn unless you’re a pilot. And I crave the relative peace of the jeep, which seemed so noisy and dusty only yesterday.

I return to the field station in second gear, enjoying the probability that I won’t meet up with traffic on this road. I can barely see through the jeep’s windshield at the moment, and I resolve to clean it, and my glasses, and my body, as soon as I make it to the station. The jeep and I stay well below the island’s ten-mile-per-hour speed limit, even though there’s a cold IPA waiting for me at home. I don’t pop it open until I’ve gently inspected inside the bracts on a dozen fennel stalks, coming up empty each time.

July 13

The foxes woke me up last night at what had to be the witching hour.

I had dozed off while reading the annual supplement published by the checklist committee of the American Ornithologists’ Union. Imagine that. The checklist comes out once per year to denote which species have been split apart, which have been lumped together, and what birds simply received a new name. Of note, the western scrub-jay was split into two new species, the California scrub-jay and Woodhouse’s scrub-jay. Which means not only that the brand new field guide I purchased a month ago is now out of date, but so are the field notes I wrote earlier this month at Hastings. Also of note is that the sooty shearwater, referenced earlier in this chapter, is no longer Puffinus griseus. Now it’s Ardenna grisea. In essence, the entire puffinus genus was split. There must surely have been a reason for this.

Back to the foxes.

At first it sounded as if two foxes were gearing up for an altercation. After listening for a while, however, it seemed less as if the foxes were expressing displeasure with each other, and more as if they were raising a joint alarm about a third party. But who could that be in a neighborhood such as this. A gopher snake?

I fell back asleep pondering this query, and was awakened shortly thereafter by a single fox barking directly outside my window. Quite loud, quite close. Remembering that I was the only person occupying the field station dorms these past two nights, I found myself wondering whether I was the source of foxly concern. Did they want me out of the field station? Had they grown weary of my clumsy attempts to photograph them?

Once more, sleep.

Perhaps due to the disruptions, my internal clock allowed me to sleep in this morning, almost until 6:00. I read through the BBC while still in bed; today they get a new prime minister. But when I emerge from Room 4 to head up to the kitchen to put on the teakettle, I discern the faintest hint of skunk, not as if a skunk has sprayed, but clearly indicating that one is in the neighborhood.

I recall a conversation with Carson, Kathryn’s college-bound son, a week ago about what had changed since he was a boy visiting this field station. He told me that before the foxes came back, skunks would often den beneath the station. It could get pretty ripe, according to his childhood memories.

The island spotted skunk is endemic to the two largest Channel Islands, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa. Unlike the foxes, the skunks have not formed separate species on each island, which suggest relatively recent colonization. They are only about one-third the size of the foxes, weighing in at less than a kilo. This is another case of dwarfism; the island spotted skunk is considerably smaller than the mainland species from which it descended.

The skunk population expanded on this island when the fox population dropped during golden eagle predation, probably because the skunks are nocturnal while the eagles only hunt during the day. It is thought that the skunk population is currently at carrying capacity here on the island, which would normally be around a dozen skunks per square kilometer. This capacity has likely diminished during the drought.

Island foxes and island spotted skunks are the only two terrestrial carnivores on this island, and they compete for the same food resources: deer mice, lizards, large insects, and fruit when it’s available.

It occurs to me, while I write this, what may have been the bone of contention last night. There is an apple tree on the other side of the wet lab across from Room 4. This tree is the halfway point between my room and the restrooms. Several times, over the course of the past few days, I’ve seen a fox foraging there. Yesterday, I saw a fox pick up a fallen apple and trot off with it a good hundred yards down the path before turning left and disappearing into the oaks.

My conjecture about last night, based solely on what I heard then and what I smelled this morning, is that a skunk may have ventured into the neighborhood hoping to harvest apples, but the foxes defended their trove of fruit by barking loudly enough to wake me up.

I make a mental note that if I have to visit the restroom this evening, I should take a headlamp to light my way. And perhaps a camera.

This will probably be my last full day on the island, and although I’ve enjoyed dozens of fox sightings, both around the field station and beyond, I haven’t yet gotten an excellent photo of one. This will be my priority today.

Although I decide that my best strategy will be to set up under the apple tree, when I emerge from Room 4 I notice a fox foraging in the field below. While I suspect that this is a fox I’ve tried to photograph before, the same fox that always turns its tail toward me, I head toward the field, like Charlie Brown running up to kick the football, ready to give it another try. I avoid looking directly at the fox, and choose a path that is merely passing by, not directly aimed toward it. Out of my peripheral vision I can see the fox give me a low look, as if to ask, “Really?”

Yes. Really. I kneel down on one knee, raise the camera to eye, focus, frame, and shoot a fox with the most bored expression projected by any mammal this side of a house cat. I don’t move, thinking that surely it will improve its disposition. Thirty seconds pass by, and then the fox closes its eyes.

My recurrent secret fantasy over the years has been to run off and become a wildlife photographer. The problem, however, is that I seem to bore predators.

Within a few minutes the fox seems to forget that I’m stalking it, and resumes its foraging. I remain still, and as I watch I realize that there is nothing about the behaviors I’m observing that would make me characterize it as “sly.” Or even “clever.” Cautious, perhaps. And patient. A lot more unflappable than a coyote would be in a situation like this. But how does one measure a fox’s insight, let alone its brilliance?

The personality of these animals seems more feline than canine in many regards. They will certainly approach humans at times, and will often tolerate our presence, but they distinctly don’t want to be approached by humans. Everything has to be on the fox’s terms. The other morning I was sitting out in front of the station house, munching on my granola, when a fox jumped up on the barbecue grate to investigate whether any good flavors had been left behind. The fox was less than two meters from my knees at one point, and it completely ignored my presence. I was just another granola-eating environ-mentalist, as far as it seemed to be concerned, nothing to worry about.

Of course, I didn’t have my camera at that moment.

I get off a few dozen shots before the fox ducks into thick underbrush, abruptly ending our session. I retreat to the apple tree to set up shop and await portrait customers, but there’s already a fox there, chomping on a fallen apple the size of its head. While I shoot, I notice that the mouth of an island fox doesn’t really open wide enough to accommodate fruit much larger than a golf ball. It takes about five minutes for the fox to gnaw the top half of the apple. During this time a raven lands nearby, and I wait patiently for the raven to come close enough to the fox that I can include them both in the same frame. This never happens, of course, but it would have been a great shot nonetheless, because of the scale it would have provided, with the raven standing taller than the fox.

The fox wanders off a few minutes later, apparently having had its fill. I wait to see whether the raven is interested in the apple, but it seems that the raven is there merely to observe. After another minute, it flies off, no doubt bored with wildlife photography.

Clearly, I should have followed the fox.

It’s midmorning now, the time of day when I seldom see foxes out and about. I should see them again once it cools off, this evening. I grab a chair from the library, an ice tea from the kitchen, and park myself outdoors, near the apple tree, to catch up on my notes, keeping the camera at hand just in case. Sure enough, after I’ve scribbled for perhaps half an hour, a fox drops by. I’m able to switch my notebook for the camera without being observed as the fox searches the grounds for a fallen apple. The only one on the ground is the half apple left behind a while back, which this fox sniffs at but doesn’t eat, making me think that I’m seeing a different fox than the one before. Just as I’m wishing I’d pulled an apple down, the fox leaps up into the tree, catlike, and begins climbing, hugging the tree with its front legs while using the rear legs for propulsion, almost a shimmying motion.

I’m out of the chair now, hardly believing what I’m seeing, shooting away although I haven’t really got a clear shot. The tiny fox climbs higher into the branches, obscuring itself from my lens on the far side of the trunk, in search of the perfect apple. I keep shooting and keep inching closer to the tree, realizing even without checking that all I’m getting here are shots of apple leaves with maybe a bit of fur in the gaps.

The fox climbs higher and higher until it’s out on branches no thicker than my thumb. It snatches an apple, climbs down tailfirst for a couple of meters, and then switches to a head-down descent seemingly without any hesitancy, picking up speed as it descends and then leaping to the ground once it reaches the thick part of the trunk, an apple firmly in its mouth. It scampers away, no doubt aware of my presence.

This, of course, is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. I head back to Room 4, hook into the Internet, and search on foxes climbing trees. Sure enough, I discover that gray foxes can climb trees in ways that red foxes cannot. I discover that gray foxes have curved claws that are semiretractable, and rotatable front legs that contribute to their climbing ability. And I learn that they not only climb trees to get fruit, but also to escape from coyotes, which cannot follow them up a tree.

Of course, climbing a tree would not be much of a defense mechanism for an animal being preyed on by a golden eagle. I suddenly understand how the population of foxes on this island diminished to a hundred animals as recently as 2004—they must have been easy prey for golden eagles if their best defense was to climb trees. After all, they are not particularly swift, nor are they wary, and they wouldn’t appear to be menacing even if they hunted in packs, which they don’t.

We should be happy that they bounced back so quickly, and that the captive breeding program only needed three years until the population stabilized, once the golden eagles were removed from this island. But despite the enormous success of this conservation story, it’s not yet time to breathe a sigh of relief. This drought has me concerned; it’s gotten beyond the point where relief is a few good rainy seasons away. If the ecology shifts to something a bit more arid, a bit more desertlike, the carrying capacity for island foxes will diminish considerably.

If there’s enough will—demonstrated in terms of sufficient funding—a great deal can continue to be done to put this island’s ecosystem back together. Just as honeybees were eradicated and just as golden eagles were replaced with bald eagles, a lot of cool stuff is in the works. We can probably eradicate the Argentine ants, restore endangered plants like Hoffmann’s rock cress, and restore endangered birds like the island loggerhead shrike. And there are people working on the kelp beds as well. While we’re at it, I’d love to see someone get rid of all this damned fennel. Let’s hope that solutions to such pernicious invasive plants are just around the corner for restoration ecologists.

Even though I know better than to fixate on charismatic fauna, I ultimately came to this island to write about the foxes. I ended up getting sucked into concerns about plants, insects, and geology. This is as it should be today; ecological concerns consider the interactions between organisms and their environments. And this is why field stations such as this one have such enormous value. Convergence happens here, and the research is based in curiosity rather than specialty. As one becomes enamored with the island ecosystem, one gets drawn beyond specialized concerns and begins to synthesize different ways of understanding the system. First, you share a refrigerator with a botanist, and the next thing you know …

July 14

I begin my last full day on the island in the field station library. There is apparently some controversy as to whether sycamore trees are native here, or whether they should ultimately be taken out. Lyndal is aware of a historical source, Charles Frederick Holder’s 1910 edition of The Channel Islands of California: A Book for the Angler, Sportsman, and Tourist, which indicates that Holder observed mature sycamores when first coming to the main ranch from Prisoner’s Harbor. I e-mail Lyndal a preliminary opinion that, using the tools of historical ecology, we can make a strong case that sycamores are native to the island. I’m guessing that whomever wants these trees removed has confused Platanas racemosa, which is native to California, with P. occidentalis, which is not.

The field station’s recent silence—I’ve been alone here the past two nights—is shattered by the arrival of three rambunctious volunteers who are here to install metal siding to the dorm and lab buildings, which have suffered greatly the abuse of woodpeckers. In anticipation of the noise that is sure to come, for which the workers have already apologized, I have dragged the laptop computer outside, setting up shop at the picnic table from which I’d watched a woodpecker take its dust bath last evening. I’m never as productive transcribing field notes outdoors—too many creatures create too many distractions.

Sure enough, there’s a splash of yellow overhead. A huge butterfly—a swallowtail!—is heading down toward the field where I’ve been investigating the fennel. Without pausing to save my prose on the computer, I grab the camera and begin running after it. It has a significant head start, and disappears over the dorm. By the time I circle around the buildings, it’s nowhere in sight.

I’m determined not to give up despite the absurdity of looking for a yellow swallowtail in a field of yellow fennel. I push ahead, scanning from side to side, and I finally see the swallowtail at the far edge of the field in a small patch of narrow-leaf milkweeds, Asclepias fascicularis, that I’ve been watching in the hope that monarch butterflies might be attracted. I come as close to a sprint as a sixty-two-year-old man can while wearing full leather hiking boots and carrying a superzoom lens. The swallowtail moves to a neighboring milkweed, and I slow down, careful not to scare it away. Stop. Zoom. Focus. Frame. Snap!

Even as I click the shutter release, I can see that this is not an anise swallowtail. It’s the pale swallowtail, the other resident swallowtail of this island. Still, it’s the first member of its genus I’ve seen during my stay, and I interpret it as a harbinger of hope. Its beauty is undiminished by the fact that it’s a different species than the one I sought.

I move back to the picnic table and get in not quite a good hour of writing, but when Lyndal offers to take me and the new fellows down to the ranch museum for a tour, I stash my field notes.

Our tour of the ranch buildings is lubricated by Mexican cervezas that have been smuggled along and that go down all too quickly. When we return to the station, I’m informed that a fourth is required for horseshoes, and that if I can handle a bit of competition I’m welcome to partake of a steak-and-potatoes barbecue they are planning afterward. I donate tomatoes and celery for the salad, and dig out a bottle of cabernet that I’ve been saving for emergencies. It is the only bottle of wine I’d brought along, and it’s a miracle it lasted until now.

We draw straws to form teams, and I’m linked up with a pleasant, soft-spoken building contractor. An environmental contractor from New Zealand and a commercial boat captain make up the opposition. I suggest naming our team “the Good Guys,” and suddenly we have a classic confrontation between the forces of light and darkness. The Bad Guys take the practice game thanks to the boat captain’s late-in-the-game run of ringers, but my consistency ends up carrying the day once we get down to championship play. The Good Guys emerge as island champions just as dusk descends. I light the charcoal while others argue the feasibility of a tiebreaker played in the dark, but the discussion ends when I open the wine. The steaks are all the better served by firelight.

July 15

The Internet news is grim in the morning as I mop out the showers and sweep Room 4. Someone has driven a refrigerated lorry into Bastille Day revelers in Nice, France, and the death toll is expected to be high. Two tragedies thus bookend my stay here on the island; five Dallas police officers were murdered by a sniper on my first full day here. Now this. Whatever enthusiasm I felt about returning to the mainland suddenly diminishes, and I pack up my laptop computer without reading through the rest of the news.

Lyndal is occupied this morning, so I drive myself back to Prisoner’s Harbor in the white jeep, having plenty of time to survey the sycamores that Holder wrote about. I’m given instructions on how to take the old route rather than the new one that follows the valley floor. My route will follow a stream whose name I cannot locate on my map, and I know from the drive out last week that I will cross through this stream numerous times on my way to Prisoner’s Harbor.

I drive along slowly, content with second gear at idle speed. I’m amazed at how much more thoroughly I’m seeing this riparian stretch of the island than I was on my drive out. All I seemed to notice on my first day here was the pervasive fennel, but now I’m noticing the mountain mahogany with its fruit feathers, the monkey flowers and paintbrush blooming everywhere, the Catalina cherry …

The sycamores, whose leaves, to my eyes, transform from green to yellow when the sun strikes them, and whose bark, again to my eyes, moves from white to a pinkish gray to something of a sun-bleached tan, stand out among the oaks and cottonwood. Did I notice these trees on the drive in? How could I not have? They seem to call out to me.

How could anyone believe they don’t belong here?

Epilogue: August 11

Today, less than a month after I returned from Santa Cruz Island, the United States Department of the Interior announced the delisting of the San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz Island subspecies of island fox. This represented the fastest successful recovery for any mammal listed as endangered under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act, bringing the total of delistings due to recovery up to thirty-seven over the course of the act’s forty-three-year history. During that same time, there have been ten delistings due to extinction.

Santa Cruz Island bird list, July

• California quail
• Mourning dove
• White-throated swift
• Allen’s hummingbird
• Black oystercatcher
• Pigeon guillemot
• Cassin’s auklet
• Brant’s cormorant
• Pelagic cormorant
• Bald eagle
• Red-tailed hawk
• Acorn woodpecker
• Northern flicker
• American kestrel
• Pacific-slope flycatcher
• Ash-throated flycatcher
• Black phoebe
• Island loggerhead shrike
• Hutton’s vireo
• Island scrub-jay
• Common raven
• Horned lark
• Barn swallow
• Bushtit
• Pacific wren
• Bewick’s wren
• Varied thrush
• Spotted towhee
• Chipping sparrow
• Channel Islands song sparrow
• Dark-eyed junco
• Western meadowlark
• Black-headed grosbeak
• Hooded oriole
• Northern mockingbird

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1. Sincere apologies here for jumping back and forth between the metric and imperial systems, but this seems to be the story of my life. In the original field notes I went with sixty pounds, which is a bit more than twenty-seven kilos, because the weight limit was thus imposed, imperially.

2. While I’ve been able to corroborate this estimate of the worldwide population of sooty shear-waters, 20 million would not qualify as the greatest number of birds of any species worldwide. For example, the North American population of dark-eyed juncos is estimated at 630 million birds.

3. My previous cat, Scupper, may he rest in peace, tipped the scales at twelve pounds.

4. We have mixed semidiurnal tides along the Pacific coast of California, with two highs and two lows of different heights every lunar day.

5. In 2005, it was estimated that there were only 244 individual plants worldwide.

6. Naughton et al., 2014.

7. I learn later that the island bush poppy, Dendromecon rigida harfordii, blooms most of the year.

8. In essence, the “island rule” says that when mainland species colonize islands, large species tend to become smaller—this would be the dwarfism of which the island fox is a prime example—and smaller species, such as the bush poppy, tend to become larger (gigantism).

9. I’m having a bowl of granola with a handful of raisins thrown in, a bit of yogurt on the side, topped generously with Kathryn’s 2% milk. Adam is frying up a massive skillet of bacon. Thick bacon. It’s hard to ignore.

10. The eucalyptus is the world’s tallest angiosperm, which is to say that it’s our tallest flowering plant.

11. This later turns out to have been a dead end. Both entomologists got back to me via e-mail, but neither had sighted the species recently here on the island.

12. And grass spears, of course. Magnanimous readers will note that I’ve learned something from my Hastings experience.

13. This includes Estación Juanito, mentioned in the second interlude of my previous book, Coves of Departure: Field Notes from the Sea of Cortez. Until now, I’d considered Estación Juanito to be the finest observation post in this galaxy.

14. A bulletin board back at the field station contains photographs of at least a dozen jeeps and pickups that have rolled off roads or into crevices here on the island. Many bear the same caption: “Driver wasn’t paying attention.”

15. The Pacific mole crab, Emerita analoga, more commonly called a “sand crab,” lives in the swash zone of West Coast beaches.

16. This appellation comes from the practice of male shrikes of caching their kills on either cactus spines or some other thorny plant or even barbed wire, a way of showing off to prospective mates how well they can provide. Down in Baja, I’ve come across mesquites that are ornamented with lizards, looking almost as if a satanic cult has been decorating the tree for the holidays.

17. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has petitioned for the island loggerhead shrike to be listed as an endangered species, and some conservation efforts have already been undertaken on this island.

18. Please note that this is the final time in this volume that I was unable to keep my pledge to describe events contemporaneously, writing them up in their entirety the day they happened. I’m tempted to blame this on Lyndal.

19. In a subhead of the Wired magazine article published a month later, the bait beads are referenced as a “Sugar Ball of Death.”

20. I look this up when I return to the field station, and sure enough, caterpillars are a main staple of the yellow jacket diet. I add this to my store of knowledge about Vespula natural history.