Typically quiet Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, erupted in tumult last fall over a bold proposal to kill all the deer on the island using sharpshooters in helicopters.
The Catalina Island Conservancy, the nonprofit group that owns 88 percent of the island, said that the 2,000 deer on the island were ravaging native plants, hurting the ecology of the island and making it highly susceptible to fires. But many Catalina residents found the proposal shocking and inhumane, and began signing petitions and staging protests.
Now, conservancy leaders have stepped back from their plan.
Sort of.
In response to concerns from residents and from elected leaders in Los Angeles County, the conservancy said this week that it had dropped its proposal to kill the deer by aerial hunting. But its scientists are considering other ways to get rid of them.
“We’re still dedicated to doing this — we have to remove these deer in order to restore Catalina Island,” Lauren Dennhardt, the lead conservationist on the island, told me on Thursday. “We know that, out of any conservation action that should happen in California, this is the one that’s going to have the greatest biodiversity impact. So we’re dedicated to getting it done, even if the path bends and weaves a little bit.”
(Eradication projects to remove invasive species from fragile island ecosystems are not unusual: There have been more than 1,000 around the world, including some on Catalina.)
Mule deer are not native to Catalina; they were introduced nearly a century ago for sport hunting. And there is no natural predator on the island to control their numbers. According to Dennhardt, the deer are messing with the rare animal and plant life on Catalina, which is part of an archipelago so biodiverse that it is often called North America’s Galápagos.