The one constant in managing a five-island national park is change.

The trick is finding a way to listen to the tells and learn from the data, said Superintendent Ethan McKinley, superintendent of the Channel Islands National Park off Ventura.

The park is celebrating its 40th anniversary this week, which also marks nearly four decades of resource monitoring programs underwater and on land that have helped lead to the recovery of tiny foxes and seabirds.

“The life on the islands is constantly adapting and changing,” McKinley said.

“We’re able to figure out if a species is spiking and falling off on a regular basis or perhaps there’s something being introduced that’s new and we need to be worried about it,” he said.

The park, sometimes called the Galapagos of North America, is home to more than 2,000 plants and animal species, from rare seabirds to elephant seals. Some, like island foxes, are found there and nowhere else in the world.

It includes five islands off the coast: Santa Barbara, Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel, which has one of the biggest pinniped rookeries in the world.

After it was established on March 5, 1980, systems were established to track life in the park, half of which is underwater. A kelp forest monitoring program started in 1982 now is one of the longest of its kind.

From warmer temperatures to sea-level rise, the hits keep coming. Teams are assessing archeological sites along the coastline that could erode, are rebuilding docks and looking at potential impacts on nesting seabirds and tide pools.

"There are new challenges it seems every year in terms of managing restoration and stability of our ecosystems," he said.

But, he added, “We now have 38 years of reliable data to give us some context around what those changes mean."

Channel Islands Wildlife:These jobs on the Channel Islands protect wildlife found nowhere else in the world

Foxes brought back from the brink

The park once faced a nightmare scenario – nearly losing one of its endemic species, the largest mammal on the islands.

Golden eagles had decimated the island fox population on three of the northern Channel Islands by the late 1990s. Just 15 of the small, cinnamon-colored foxes were left on Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands, down from 1,780 and 450.

Santa Cruz Island had 55 foxes, down from 1,400.

In 2004, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed foxes as endangered. Efforts to save them were already underway, from pulling foxes into captive breeding centers to removing golden eagles and their nonnative prey, including pigs on Santa Cruz Island.

The foxes made a comeback, marking the fastest recovery of any mammal on the endangered species list. But a lesson also had been learned.

“Things can decline quickly if there’s a threat,” said Laura Shaskey, a wildlife biologist who leads the long-term monitoring program for endemic island wildlife.

More:Mammoth bones found on Channel Islands promise something 'really exciting'

Radio collars for skunks

The program had been in place before the fox decline, helping researchers to spot it before the isolated populations were wiped out.

Now, it continues across all five islands. Researchers monitor foxes and skunks but also native bats and deer mice, lizards and salamanders.

“They’re naturally very small populations just given the size of the islands. So over time, they may be at risk to threats,” Shaskey said.

Foxes continue to be outfitted with radio collars. Recently, the park started to put the tracking devices on the even smaller island spotted skunks when they noticed numbers declining.

While fox populations had rebounded, the team started noticed something else happening on San Miguel several years ago. Mortality rates were increasing on the small, remote island.

Helped by the radio-collar program, researchers discovered through necropsies that a parasite called a giant, spiny-headed worm had infested the foxes' small intestines.

The park is working with U.S. Geological Survey and UC Santa Barbara to figure out the lifecycle of the parasite and how the foxes get it. They also are trying to determine whether it is an invasive species.

More:A plant forced seabirds off a Channel Islands islet, then agencies, volunteers got to work

Reaching beyond the park

Over the past 40 years, islands have shifted from privately held to publicly owned as the park increased public access. But it also had to find ways to bridge the miles of ocean that separates it from the mainland. The same remoteness that led to the park's rare wildlife and allure also creates a barrier to many.

Underwater dives and webcasts broadcast live from the islands and webcams showed the happenings in a bald eagle nest or the underwater kelp forest.

Plans call for expanding those programs, McKinley said, but also for broadening access in specific spots on the islands themselves.

A 75-person campground on Santa Rosa Island is in its final planning phases. The park also is getting ready to reach out to the private sector about ways to potentially establish food and lodging on Santa Rosa, about 40 miles off the coast.

Without it, relatively few people have the ability and the volition to get out there and experience the island known for its Torrey Pine forest and wind-swept beaches, McKinley said.

"We want to change that," he said. "We’ll always have a ceiling where we will hit and never exceed that visitation. However, we want it to be accessible to a wider variety of people."

More:Bringing Channel Islands National Park to the people

Cheri Carlson covers the environment for the Ventura County Star. Reach her at cheri.carlson@vcstar.com or 805-437-0260.

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