The Last of the Channel Island Turkeys

What happens when conservationists declare open season on an invasive species?PHOTOGRAPH BY ENVER HIRSCH / LAIF / REDUX

The sheep on Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of Southern California, were the first to go. They had been imported by schooner in the mid-nineteenth century, and, beginning in the early nineteen-eighties, tens of thousands of their feral descendants were eradicated. Later it was the hogs’ turn to face the gun. Between 2005 and 2006, more than five thousand were killed. By the following year, Santa Cruz was certified pig-free—a boon, perhaps, for the island’s oak trees, whose acorns the animals particularly loved. The next round of exterminations targeted several hundred turkeys. This undertaking was prophylactic. It appeared that the profusion of pigs had lured golden eagles to Santa Cruz; once there, the birds had also preyed on the island’s small native foxes, reducing their population to fewer than a hundred. Thirty-two adult and juvenile eagles were relocated (some were netted from a helicopter), but not all could be kept away. If the eagles stuck around Santa Cruz to feed on the turkeys, more foxes might die. The turkeys had to be dispatched, with no risk of a revenant.

We often think of conservation in terms of wildlife sanctuaries and breeding programs, but its Janus face is eradication. The survival of one population of animals, like the fox, sometimes necessitates the destruction of another, like the turkey. This is especially the case on islands, which are arks for vulnerable flora and fauna. In the past century and a half, Santa Cruz and the rest of the Channel Islands have been transformed by humans and the invasive species that we brought with us. On rocky Anacapa, for instance, rats—possibly stowaways aboard a wrecked ship—consumed both native deer mice and the eggs and chicks of a precious seabird called the Scripps’s murrelet. The Santa Cruz pig problem took on a Malthusian flavor, becoming so severe that the animals threatened their own existence. According to Kate Faulkner, the former head biologist of Channel Islands National Park, they would multiply until, every few years, thousands of them starved. “I can remember walking down a road once, and this pig was walking in front of me,” Faulkner said. It appeared that the pig’s hind-leg muscles had wasted owing to a lack of food. “The pigs would run from people. And this pig took about four steps and then just fell over on her side, and then she was trying to drag herself.”

Although eradication begins with a rousing vision of nature restored, it can be devilishly difficult to achieve. First, there is the problem of its image. Over the years, the opponents of the Channel Islands eradications made a number of legal challenges. They argued that the conservationists had their calculus wrong. “To me the idea of species is just an abstract concept,” Rob Puddicombe, a prominent animal-rights activist, told a reporter for the Washington Post, in 2003. “These animals are here and alive now. Their lives have value.” It was alleged that Puddicombe and a conspirator had boated to Anacapa and laid out kibble for the rats there. The food was rich in Vitamin K, which was meant to counteract the anticoagulant that the eradicators planned to distribute. Nevertheless, the rodenticide succeeded: the rats died from internal hemorrhaging, and seabirds have since rebounded.

Another difficulty facing eradicators is logistical. If invasive creatures are small in number and live in inaccessible places—thick undergrowth, treetops, steep slopes—how are hunters to discern when their task is complete? More to the point, what happens when the animals realize that they are under threat and so become more elusive? One of the Galápagos Islands was twice mistakenly declared to be goat-free, even after more than forty-one thousand goats had been destroyed. Some individual animals are relentless. In 2004, researchers in New Zealand deposited a single male Norway rat on a small, uninhabited island off their country’s northeast coast. (New Zealand is a world-beater when it comes to killing invasive mammals, as Elizabeth Kolbert discussed in the magazine in 2014.) It took them more than four months to recapture the rat, even with the help of dogs and numerous traps. The rodent had swum thirteen hundred feet across open water to another island, possibly in search of fellows. An eradication can be undone, so the thinking goes, by the survival of a single pregnant female. This phenomenon, which is known as the Lazarus effect, has inspired a dictum in the conservation community: at the beginning of a project, there must be a plan for killing the last animal.

In the case of the Santa Cruz turkeys, the plan involved a good deal of subterfuge. The birds had been on the island since 1975, when seven of them were introduced by the California Department of Fish and Game, for the purposes of recreational hunting. According to Scott Morrison, a biologist with the Nature Conservancy, who co-authored a paper on the eradication effort in the January issue of Oryx, the turkey population remained low until the two-thousands, when it ballooned to around three hundred. This occurred after the sheep were out of the picture; one explanation is that the resulting increase in vegetation may have provided the turkeys with more food and better protection from predators. (Perhaps it would have been preferable to remove the sheep last.) In 2006, the Nature Conservancy commissioned an eradication.

First came the nets and the leaf blowers. “Every element of what we’re doing has to be erased,” Anthony DeNicola, a wildlife ecologist who participated in the kill, told me. “We can’t have birds come in and see things different than they’ve been the day before.” The eradicators would suspend a large net on a pole and scatter feed beneath it, then retreat and hide. When the turkeys meandered into position, they dropped the net, emerged, and shot them in the head. Afterward, they used a leaf blower to disperse any feathers—anything that the remaining turkeys of Santa Cruz might interpret as a sign of something amiss. The birds were not to become “what we call ‘educated’ about the eradication effort,” Scott Morrison said. “You don’t let them learn that they’re being hunted.” For the same reason, eradicators in the field spied on smaller turkey groups to see which individuals were dominant. They then killed them “in their pecking order, from top to bottom,” according to the Oryx study, reasoning that lower-ranked turkeys would be disoriented by the loss of their leaders and so would hesitate fatally in making their escape.

The project aimed to meet euthanasia standards for wildlife, inflicting the minimum amount of pain and stress. As Norman Macdonald, now a senior ranger with New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, put it, “there’s not much left of the head” after a bird is shot. To avoid waste, the team butchered the dead turkeys, stored the meat in freezers, and consumed it. (It so happened that they were working just after Thanksgiving.) “For whatever it’s worth, it wasn’t very good,” Morrison said. “You had to really grind that stuff in order to make it even chewable.” As the turkey population decreased, the extermination became more personalized. The eradicators captured some birds, sterilized them, and fitted them with radio transmitters. These were called Judas turkeys, because they unwittingly led their pursuers to other fowl. It was a particularly clear-eyed technique, harnessing as it did the birds’ innate gregariousness.

As for the last turkey, there is perhaps a hint of wistfulness in the Oryx paper on this account. By early 2008, there may have been no more than six birds left. The five Judas males and a limping female were kept alive to see whether they would link up with others. “That year the birds were wide-ranging,” the authors wrote. Turkeys were spotted at an airstrip and in a canyon, and they continued to spend time at the island’s main ranch, near where some of the netting had taken place—proof that the eradicators had been successful at maintaining the birds’ naïveté. In December, 2012, the last one vanished. No bird has yet reappeared as if from the dead. One can’t help but wonder what it might have been like for the solitary final turkey, but sentimentality must be put aside in the eradication business. “You can’t sit there and think about individually killing all those animals,” DeNicola told me. “You’d go insane.”