Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 7 December 2023

♫ Twenty-six miles across the sea

Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for m

Santa Catalina, the island of romance ♫

— The Four Preps   Credit: Bruce Belland, Glenn Larson

Santa Catalina Island sits about 26 miles (~40 km) off the coast of Southern California.  It has been inhabited by humans, off and on, for at least several thousand years – first by Native American tribes, then Spanish, Mexican and North Americans of European descent.  Ownership has change hands several times:  first entirely owned by James Lick in the 1860s, who sold it to the Banning Brothers “began developing the island into a resort destination, building hotels, attractions, and roads into the island’s rugged interior.”  But after a devastating fire in Avalon, the island’s main city, the Bannings, facing financial hardships, had to sell the island to chewing gum entrepreneur William Wrigley Jr. in 1919.  [ wiki ]

“Wrigley played an instrumental role in the development of Santa Catalina Island, California, off the shore of Long Beach, California. He bought a controlling interest in the Santa Catalina Island Company in 1919 and with the company received the island. Wrigley improved the island with public utilities, new steamships, a hotel, the Casino building, and extensive plantings of trees, shrubs, and flowers. He also sought to create an enterprise that would help employ local residents. By making use of clay and minerals found on the island at a beach near Avalon, in 1927 William Wrigley Jr. created the Pebbly Beach quarry and tile plant. Along with creating jobs for Avalon residents, the plant also supplied material for Wrigley’s numerous building projects on the island.^[4] After building the Avalon Casino in 1929, the Catalina Clay Products Tile and Pottery Plant began producing glazed tiles, dinnerware and other household items such as bookends.” [ wiki ]

In 1972, William Wrigley’s son, Phillip, created the Catalina Island Conservancy and donated all the family ownership to it.  Today, the conservancy owns 88% of the land on the island. 

Oh, and what does Catalina Island need saving from?  Invasive species, or so they say. 

“The Plan to Save a California Island? Shoot All of the Deer.”

“For decades, nonnative animals have ravaged the rare habitat on Catalina. The proposed solution has infuriated local residents and animal lovers.” “But the habitat is suffering because much of the native flora has been ravaged by animals shipped here over the past century for ranching, hunting and filming movies.” [ NY Times ]

You see, the people that owned the island thought that they had a better plan for the island than the way they found it.  This goes back all the way to the first Native American hunters and fishermen that occupied the island, right up through the ownership of the Wrigleys.   

So, the Catalina Island Conservancy, in order to conserve the habitat has decreed that all the island’s non-native mule deer are to be shot and killed, from aircraft if necessary.  The Conservancy has been shipping excess bison off the island for decades (originally a tiny herd that was brought in for a Western film) but has now confined the herd of about 90 bison to a restricted part of the island and is using contraception injections to reduce reproduction. 

Ah, but all those deer?   Catalina Island is has a Mediterranean climate – dry,  hot, dusty and thin soil over rock.  There are simply too many deer for the environment to cope with – they eat everything that will fit in their mouths, one bite at a time.  Being deer, they cannot tell the difference between rare and endangered species and all the rest.

The Conservancy has “…Previously, …killed some 8,000 goats (originally brought by Spanish missionaries in the 1820s) and 12,000 pigs (brought for sport hunting a century later). Those animals, too, devoured precious plants and caused erosion. “

In this photo we can see a few of the 90 or so bison on the island – they are unfortunately inbred – but who would support killing bison?  You can see that they are eating everything right down to the nub.  The view is one of over-grazed land.  The estimated 1,000 non-native mule deer do the same and worse, consuming shrub, trees and everything.

The satellite photo below shows the rugged steep slopes of Catalina Island.  Avalon is the tiny little crescent shaped bay on the upper side (east side) of the lower end of the island, that looks like a mouse took a bite out of it.

Can you guess what the response of the residents of Avalon and other smaller communities on the island has been?  ”Stop the Slaughter of Mule Deer on Catalina Island”.  

Of course, we must remember, “Though islanders are OK with locals hunting the deer, many find massacring all of them out of step with peaceful Catalina. Avalon is by any definition quaint, just one square mile stretching along a cove bobbing with boats, run by locals who grew up together. It is served by a single grocery store and filled with golf carts because of a tight restriction on new cars.” [ NY Times ]

To be honest, I do not remember reading of massive protests on Catalina (well, as massive as a protest can be with a total population of about 4,000, spread around the island)  when it was feral goats and wild pigs being eliminated. 

But the deer are “so cute”  —  they show no fear of people.  Ask the residents of Ashland, Oregon what it means to let the deer acclimate to their suburban setting.  In Ashland, people have to put deer fencing (8 feet high) around their yards if they wish to save their landscape plantings and accompany their dogs into their own backyards to protect them from overly aggressive deer.

The people of Catalina should not be surprised, eliminating invasive species from California’s Channel Islands (of which, Catalina is one) has been a long and is a still-ongoing process.  After a suitable number had been relocated to animal refuges around the country, the last of the of San Clemente goats (descended from Catalina’s goats) were eliminated  (shot) finally in 1991 after a court battle between the U.S. Navy (which owns the island) and the Fund for Animals. 

All these island environments share the commonality of being isolated from larger, more diverse environments, like mainlands, and that isolation leads to specialization and semi-speciation (ref:  Darwin and the Galapagos) .  The San Clemente goat and even the Catalina bison (even after only <100 years) show evidence of this.  Vegetation likewise becomes more distinct.  Insects and rodents fill specific niches.

Certainly, the Conservancy is correct, unrestricted grazing by an increasing large population of deer has and will damage the fragile soils and limited vegetation of the island.   

Bottom Line:

It is unlikely that the island residents and animal rights crowd will prevail in this fight.  The Catalina Island Conservancy will go ahead with their decree to eliminate the deer from Santa Catalina. 

The fight is bound to go on for some time, as many of the deer live inside the city limits of Avalon where have found better grazing on the lawns and landscapes of the homes there.  The Conservancy does not control that area. 

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Author’s Comment:

Neither science-writ-large, nor the Catalina Island Conservancy, really has much of an idea what the overall ecology/environment of Santa Catalina Island looked like before the arrival of man.  Even the primitive Native Americans will have altered the native ecology to suit themselves and brought mainland species to the islands which will then have become “native” by the time the Conservancy or even early biologists show up  in the late 1800s.  This is true of many conservation efforts that attempt to restore various historical habitats.   The best they can do is to eliminate what they think are the worst of the invasive species and then hope for the best – hope that over time, the island will magically revert to some approximation of its original state. 

I wish them “Good Luck with that.”

Disclosure:  Santa Catalina Island means something personal to me. I spent the first 21 years of my life within sight of California’s Channel Islands.  While surfing up and down the Los Angeles shoreline from the Ventura County line, down through Malibu all the way south to San Clemente and later “watching the submarine races” from the bluffs above the beach while attending University of California Santa Barbara.  My family spent a week in a lovely little cottage on Santa Catalina, in Avalon, when I was maybe 10 or so.  My mother’s ashes were, by her request, consigned to the sea between LA and Santa Catalina from a small airplane piloted by my father.  Ancient history really, but more than nothing.

Thanks for reading.

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