Recently in Catalina Island Category

Our Daily Breeze colleague Kristin Agostoni has written a front-page story today about an effort by the Catalina Island Conservancy to control the bison population on the island off our coast.

She reports that the original 14 bison were brought to the island in 1924 by a film crew working on a silent movie. The footage with the animals wound up on the cutting room floor, but decades later the bison's offspring still roam on Catalina. They once reached about 600 in number.

The conservancy is trying to reduce the annual growth of the herd from nearly 10 percent to 4 percent -- about equal to the mortality rate -- and has embarked on a birth control program that uses a vaccine for the females. That could avert having to ship excess animals off the island by stabilizing the numbers.

Read more about it in today's story headlined "Reining in the herd".

(And be sure to check out the accompanying online photo gallery.)

 

Photo above: The Catalina Island Conservancy is introducing a contraception plan for its female bison with a vaccine that will control the buffalo population. A male bison waits in a holding pen before the vets and scientists put it through a series of pens to draw DNA. (Scott Varley/Staff Photographer)