Channel Islands

I am not scheduled to fly back to Boston until Sunday leaving me the day to enjoy California. My original plans to kayak the Scorpion Anchorage of Santa Cruz Island, a part of the Channel Islands National Park, fell through because the outfitter did not have enough people signed up. Instead I opted to hike the island. During the one hour catamaran transit we were fortunate to spot a pod of five grey whales swimming south to their breeding grounds in Mexico.

The park encompasses five of the eight California Channel Islands (Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Santa Barbara) and their ocean environment including nearly 2,500 miles of coast line. The Channel Islands are home to over 2,000 plant and animal species, of which 145 are found nowhere else in the world. Like the Galapagos Islands of South America, isolation has allowed evolution to proceed independently on the islands.

I was extremely fortunate to come across a pair of island foxes which are the smallest North American canids and occur only on the Channel Islands. The average weight for an adult male is 5-6 pounds, about the size of a house cat. Its small size is a result of insular dwarfism, an adaptation to the limited resources available in the island environment. The foxes are believed to have “rafted” to the northern islands between 10,400 and 16,000 years ago. Because the island fox is geographically isolated, it has no immunity to parasites and diseases brought in from the mainland. In addition, predation by the golden eagle and human activities devastated fox numbers on several of the Channel Islands in the 1990s. Four island fox subspecies were federally protected as an endangered species in 2004, and efforts to rebuild fox populations and restore the ecosystems of the Channel Islands are underway.

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In total I spent about 6 hours hiking on Santa Cruz enjoying the perfect weather and the beautiful scenery. I am determined to return with Jeanine and explore the other islands in the park.