Restoring Native Habitat for Island Foxes

Last Saturday, Friends of the Island Fox and Channel Islands Restoration (a native plant restoration group) partnered up to remove invasive plants on Santa Cruz Island. 

Island foxes depend on a healthy native plant community for food and shelter. To survive, they have evolved to be highly omnivorous–eating a range of native fruit, insects, and other small prey. 

The island deer mouse may be food for the island fox, but in turn it depends on seeds from buckwheat, giant coreopsis, and other native island plants. Island foxes are directly and indirectly impacted when the native plant community is compromised.

Introduced species like this oyster plant (Tragopogon) can quickly invade hillsides pushing out native plants. Though the dandelion-like globe of seeds may look beautiful in the sunlight, it does not provide food or shelter for island wildlife and it is about to spread seed far and wide with the next good breeze.

On a mission to help restore the island's natural habitat and with grant support from LUSH Cosmetics, volunteers headed out to make a positive difference.

We learned about native plants on a hike to Cavern Point, then snipped our way through a quarter-mile section of Scorpion Canyon. 

We filled trash bags with the seed heads, to decrease the invasive plant's reproduction this spring/summer. It was amazing how heavy just the seed heads were as we filled our bags.

And of course, we were thanked by visits from several island foxes during the course of the day.

Smiling faces and black bags filled with invasive-plant seed heads being removed from the Channel Island ecosystem. It feels good to make a positive difference. If you're interested in participating in a plant restoration trip send us an e-mail at islandfoxnews@gmail.com. We hope to go out on a second trip sometime this year.

Thanks to a great day of team work! More bags behind us!