California's rare island fox returns from brink of extinction

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Three groups of California's rare island fox were removed from the U.S. endangered species list on Thursday, and a fourth was downgraded to threatened, marking the fastest recovery yet for an American mammal once deemed to be on the brink of extinction. The population of the four subspecies in question on California's Channel Islands, which had plunged to fewer than 200 animals during the late 1990s, has bounced back to nearly 6,000 as of 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported. The agency said the island fox rebound was hastened by an intense recovery program that included captive breeding of the animals, removal of feral pigs from the islands and reducing an influx of golden eagles from the mainland that had become an invasive predator. The National Park Service, which administers the Channel Islands as a national park, also began vaccinating the foxes against canine distemper. At the time they were formally listed as endangered in 2004, the population of the four island fox groups had plunged by 90 percent from historic levels, and the subspecies were given a 50 percent chance of going extinct within a decade. As of last year, the population for three of the groups had been restored to, or exceeded, historic levels, the Fish and Wildlife Service said. The fourth is still recovering. The island fox, one of America's rarest mammals, are diminutive cousins to the mainland gray fox. Roughly the size of a house cat, they weigh 3 to 5 pounds (1.4 to 2.3 kg) and stand about a foot (30.5 cm) tall. They exist nowhere on Earth but on the six main Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. The subspecies on two of those islands were never listed. (Reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Sandra Maler)