$3 million, 6 agencies, 18 months and a retired bob cat hunter to round up about 60 feral cats
Complex effort to rid San Nicolas Island of cats declared a success
The six-agency project cost more than $3 million and entailed 18 months of trapping on the Navy-owned island off Southern California. The cats killed cormorants, gulls and a threatened lizard.
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Reporting from San Nicolas Island, Calif.— The problem was daunting: Round up every last one of the who-knows-how-many cats living in the wild on wind-blasted San Nicolas Island, a 33-square-mile chunk of chaparral and jagged canyons off the Southern California coast.
And don't get in the way of the missiles that are launched from, and sometimes aimed at, the arid, Navy-owned island. And don't hurt the cats, the seabirds they feast on, the threatened island foxes, the native deer mice or, for that matter, anything else.
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The effort involved six agencies, cost more than $3 million and entailed 18 months of trapping, though planning for it took much longer. Biologists brought in dogs, but soon shipped them out: Fido couldn't find Fluffy because he was too distracted by the island's hundreds of foxes. And the cats weren't falling for the scientists' "felid-attracting phonics" — digitally recorded meows that didn't work as well as they might in cartoons.
Ultimately, the job required the skills of a retired bobcat hunter as well as some 250 custom-built traps that flashed computer alerts to researchers miles away. Much of the funding came from the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program, a group formed in 2001 to aid the recovery of coastal areas hurt by decades of DDT dumping.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-adv-san-nicolas-20120227,0,5323367.story
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