Narrator: 55 nautical miles off the coast of Long Beach lies one of the ecological gems of the Channel Islands-- San Clemente Island.

Its rugged terrain harbors a rich and unique biodiversity, including species found nowhere else on the planet, but for much of the 20th century, overgrazing by introduced livestock and the impact of military activity severely damaged the island's ecosystems.

♪ Announcer: This presentation is made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy, and the Orange County Community Foundation.

Woman: Do you want to walk down a little bit and cut in, and I'll start it up here, and we kind of weave through?

Different woman: Yeah.

That sounds like a good plan.

Woman: OK. Narrator: By the 1990s, species like the San Clemente loggerhead shrike, bushmallow, larkspur, and Bell's sparrow faced extinction.

However, in recent decades, a coordinated effort by the U.S. Navy, conservationists, and public agencies have transformed the island's future, restoring habitats and reviving hope for the survival of its rare plants and animals.

Woman: San Clemente Island is a magical place.

It looks like what I imagine the California coast used to look like before it was developed.

Narrator: San Clemente Island is largely composed of volcanic rocks formed during the Miocene era.

Interbedded with the volcanics are sedimentary rocks in which fossils of sharks, whales, fishes, and seaweeds have been found.

Woman: We're driving through the lowest marine terrace on the west side of San Clemente Island, and this has, for a number of years, been the heart of the Bell's sparrow habitat.

They are closely associated with a low-growing shrub called boxthorn, and it provides great protection for them, nesting habitat, as well as food when it produces small berries in the spring.

I'm going to be doing a little surveying for birds.

Woman: I see a few birds already.

Different woman: When you're looking at recovering an island, you're going to look at the plants.

You're going to look at the wildlife.

You're going to look at what the wildlife needs and try to work those together, and they really do work in harmony because we're trying to restore a fully functional ecosystem, so we're trying to bring in as close as we can what was here before.

♪ Woman: Channel Island foxes are a subspecies of the mainland gray fox, and they're about 20% smaller than the gray fox.

♪ Man: Looks like we did get a fox.

Gonzalez: Hello.

Woman: This is a recap?

Gonzalez: Yes.

Nice job.

Narrator: An executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 transferred control of San Clemente to the Secretary of the Navy.

The island's terrain, isolation, and strategic location for Pacific naval operations made it ideal for training and testing exercises by the U.S. Navy.

However, wild goat and pig populations introduced to the island in the 19th century caused severe ecological impact that affected both Navy missions and the island's wildlife.

Woman: Prior to contact, all the islands--there's 4 southern Channel Islands that the Gabrielino-Tongva occupied, and we know that from linguistic records a lot of them were rounded up and taken to either the Santa Barbara mission or the San Gabriel Mission.

What we know of the island that still exists to today are a number of caves and a number of burial sites.

There was food.

There was small game.

There were plants and animals, but the island was really decimated, first by the missions and then later pothunters.

What has been documented is that all the islands are very similar to Catalina, so since Catalina is the one that we have had access to, we know that there are some plants and some animals that are specific to the islands that are not found on the mainland.

All Native American people are very place-centered and location-centered-driven, and so we know that Creator placed us in certain spots, certain areas with our language and the plants and animals we needed to sustain life.

We know that the animals that were there provided some type of life or what a person today would consider a resource.

It could have been turned into a wrap to keep you warm because the islands get cold.

The teeth could have been used for tools.

It could have been used for the plank canoes because we know that there was a lot of maritime travel between the 4 islands, and so it could have been used for a lot of things, but I know that it was highly regarded because he's still there.

♪ Man: The Navy's mission on San Clemente Island is to support Pacific Fleet training and exercises, and that includes joint exercises, as well, for the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and the Army.

Man: About to make pack fire.

Martin: San Clemente Island provides a live fire range that is very unique to the Southern California area.

The inhabited portion of San Clemente Island is actually very small, and most of it is designated as protected areas, with small areas where target practice and training is conducted.

Booker: We need to train in Arctic environments, on coastlines.

We need to train in rivers, mountains.

We need to train in deserts, so we pick up all these unique habitats, and what we're managing is what's left over from public development.

Simonsen: Any biodiverse ecosystem is a series of interactions and linkages between multiple species at numerous trophic levels.

We don't want species to go extinct.

You know, we've seen historical photos of just really dense sheep populations, and as a result, just really the island was denuded.

I mean, sheep and goats are kind of known for grazing all the way down to the ground.

Narrator: Decades of pummeling by war exercises and overgrazing from invasive livestock have damaged the island and put its plants and animals on the endangered species list.

Island fox populations dropped to approximately 300 individuals at their lowest point.

By 1984, there were only 38 known Bell's sparrows on the island.

Between 1982 and 1998, as few as 14 shrikes could be counted.

The island larkspur could only be found in two small areas, and in 1990, only a single bushmallow was known to exist.

Simonsen: So the first one here is about probably 1980s, 1990s, when they were first starting the removal of the goats from the island.

It took nearly 20 years to remove all the goats, first starting with an estimate of almost 29,000 goats, and you can see, if you look along the coast all the way around this feature here, that everything was chewed down by the goats.

In this next photo, this is a picture of the eastern escarpment and really just shows how rugged the vegetation is.

You can see these really steep slopes and incised canyons, and in those incised canyons were basically refugia for a lot of the plant species that were either too steep or too rugged for the goats to get to.

Man: So we didn't have any noteworthy injuries?

Woman: Nope.

No noteworthy injuries.

Man: Injuries.

Woman: I didn't feel any ticks, either.

Gonzalez: No ticks?

Woman: I looked at the stomach, as well.

Man: Perfect.

That is everything we need here.

Gonzalez: OK. Ready for release?

Woman: Mm-hmm.

♪ Woman: The San Clemente loggerhead shrike is critically endangered.

In the early nineties, the San Diego Zoo and the Navy stepped in to intervene and help bolster the population again, which initially began with artificial incubation and hand-rearing efforts, but as, you know, time went on and we got enough individuals, we switched over to parental rearing, where we have the shrikes actually breeding and incubating their own eggs, raising their own chicks for release.

Narrator: The Navy and Fish and Wildlife Service removed invasive pig and goat populations by the mid nineties, allowing native species to repopulate.

With current conservation efforts, island fox populations have returned to stable numbers.

Bell's sparrow bounced back to more than 4,000 adults in 2023.

Bushmallow and larkspur can now be found across the island.

Booker: With any human use comes some level of influence in the natural environments.

Simonsen: You know, ideally for us to feel confident that the species has enough habitat that the populations are going to be sustainable into the future, we really want to see that there's populations, you know, dispersed across a broad area, that they have high population numbers, and those population trends are stable or increasing over time.

We also want to make sure that there's enough genetic variability in the population so that they have enough adaptive capacity to be able to respond to stochastic events or even potentially catastrophic events or be able to adapt to changes in their environment over time.

Booker: It slopes 2,000 feet into the Pacific Ocean, but it's covered in cactus and steep slopes.

Martin: The facilitation of the human aspect is actually the north side of the island near the airfield exclusively, and what that does is, it allows natural resources, wildlife, and vegetation that's native to this area to flourish in an area that would otherwise potentially be developed like much of Southern California.

O'Conner: The Natural Resources Program supports the mission early in the planning phases.

For training to happen on the island, we have to go through an environmental impact review process.

We look at how the proposed training might impact species, and then we work to minimize and avoid where possible.

Woman: They get used to being outside and out of the greenhouse, and then we'll plant them probably in the late December, so-- Booker: You can go first... Woman: Yeah.

I'll show you where.

Booker: Our program has expanded dramatically from just trying to shepherd a few species toward recovery to increasing the number of species we were managing for to increasing managing for entire ecosystems.

We partner with a number of nonprofits to execute our program.

I work directly for the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, but most of the people who are on the ground doing the work for my program work for nonprofits.

Narrator: The U.S. Navy partnered with conservation organizations, biologists, and the Fish and Wildlife Service to help restore San Clemente Island's native animal and plant populations.

The goal of the project is to manage and recover the island's ecosystems in a way that supports both the wildlife and the Navy's continued presence.

Lee: So these plants are going to be out here for about two weeks, and we'll take them in at night, but since they'll be out without any protection of the actual greenhouse, we need to put them in a cage, so we can get one from inside and protect them from the rats and the ravens that would want to eat, like, the little exposed acorns on them.

Booker: Sure.

OK. We can help with that.

The botany program found out we had a plant we thought was extirpated, didn't exist on the island anymore, came back up because one of the wildlife biologists found it.

There we go, nice and protected.

There.

Great.

Amazing.

There's no way you're going to restore an entire island by planting everything everywhere, so at our greenhouse here, seeds are collected.

They're propagated.

They're grown out to plants, and then they're placed strategically at spot restoration areas.

Woman: The plants are--the site's doing really well.

♪ Woman: Dr. Matt said that we will continue the end row but just do the... Booker: The San Clemente loggerhead shrike, a subspecies that occurs only on this island, these birds are housed and fed everything on San Clemente Island, so they're exposed to all the natural influences that a wild bird would be.

Narrator: The shrike recovery program has had great success, bringing back approximately 70 breeding pairs in the wild by 2013.

Over the years, droughts along with El Nino and La Nina have reduced populations to as low as 22 breeding pairs.

However, with a wet winter in 2023, conservationists were able to raise 55 birds to full independence.

Morrison: The birds that actually enjoy their cat food and eat it all the time consistently, they get more.

OK. Did you do tens as you went?

Woman: I did tens over there.

Morrison: OK. Booker: They have behavioral training to help them better survive in the wild.

They get supplemental feeding, so we are literally flying crickets and mice out here not only to feed our captive birds, but to supplement food for the wild birds once released.

Then we have a monitoring team from the Institute for Wildlife Studies.

That monitoring team goes out and is literally trying to count every single bird.

We're trying to put color bands on their legs so we can individually identify them.

When they do that, they pluck a feather, so we get genetics on all these birds.

This species has not rebounded the way the Bell's sparrow has.

The Navy stepped in and began to specifically manage for this subspecies in about 1991 after surveys showed their populations were very low.

We are the only place in the world that the San Clemente loggerhead shrike exists.

We would be very happy and we think the population would be sustainable at about 70 pairs.

The lowest number we had was only 14 birds in the wild, and that was as recent as 1998.

We have a captive flock of birds that are bred and produce young for release into the wild.

♪ Gonzalez: The foxes out here are the charismatic species of the island, and that's not saying that the other species are not, but it's because they're the most seen by the military... Let's take the water so that he doesn't splash it.

He's so sleepy.

so our hopes are that if everybody cares so much about foxes, we can get them to care about everything else, and our work can be distributed to the other projects.

Henke: His initial assessment, he was reported by the Navy guys.

It looks like they found him limping over by the commons.

Gonzalez: "Back left foot bloody and limping.

Left front foot has swelling.

Tail cut but healed over."

OK. We'll check that.

That temperature was fine.

Pulse was fine.

Capillary response time, ears were OK. ♪ OK, so the bottom teeth are pretty much holding up.

Yeah.

That's an age class 4, so what do you have, old man?

Our population out here has varied for decades, and right now, we're on a little bit of a decline.

We are trying to figure out why.

We don't really know what is our carrying capacity.

Our maximum fox population was about 1,100 averaged, and right now after this season, our population is around 540, but it is not the lowest it's been, and, in a way, it's still a bit stable, and so our goal this year is to figure out why that's happening.

Yeah.

That isn't-- Henke: Yeah.

I don't like-- Gonzalez: Yeah.

It definitely looks very hemolyzed, so-- Henke: Especially if we're having issues with [indistinct].

[Indistinct] Gonzalez: Zach, can you tell me what the PIT tag number is, please, or the last 6?

Woman: We had a flock of about 4 birds that flushed off that way, so we could go down the road and try to refind them.

O'Conner: Sure.

That sounds great.

Just checking out the vegetation in here, too.

Woman: Yeah.

Some of the boxthorn actually has leaves right now.

It's really interesting.

Booker: A little bit of green-up.

Woman: Yeah.

All it needs is just a little bit of moisture.

O'Conner: Right.

Booker: We had a delisting of the island night lizard in 2014, and we had a delisting of the Bell's Sparrow and 4 plants just last year.

They are back.

O'Conner: The wildlife depends on the plants, and the plants are the basis, really, of the ecosystem here.

They provide nesting substrate for the shrike and for the Bell's sparrow.

They're really sort of the backbone of the habitat for wildlife.

Booker: An interesting thing is, because we've done so much breeding and releasing, every bird in the wild is now related to the captive flock, so they all have some sort of captive origin.

Woman: There's one up on the lycium that's just past that long line of snake cactus.

There's, like, one lycium that kind of rises up.

Ooh, very good.

You can see the black spot on the breast.

♪ O'Conner: As environmental awareness has increased in this country, I definitely feel like the military is very supportive of what we do, and they try to find ways to make this all work so we can support the needs of the species.

Booker: I feel like we've come so far, obviously, from the days of the goats, where the island was almost completely denuded, to the outplanting efforts that have, you know, spawned expansion of the vegetative growth out here and then the natural recovery of the island.

The sage scrub has come back so nicely as habitat for both shrike and Bell's sparrow.

♪ O'Connor: You know, we've done this outplanting so we can increase the diversity, get some plants out here that should be here but are not that did not recover very naturally.

Woman: The species we choose to outplant come from what we see shrikes using naturally in other habitats but maybe species that just aren't as common, and so getting the populations of those to be a little bit larger in the area shrikes are using is hugely important.

Booker: Once you get that thatch out, the shrikes will have a better chance of doing what they naturally do, which is to perch and then forage on the ground for the mice and the lizards.

Woman: We chose this site for the outplanting because it is in close proximity to a shrike territory, so enhancing the habitat here was hugely benefit for the shrikes that breed in this territory.

When these plants are bigger, they will provide nesting substrate for those shrikes.

Booker: The growth here is fantastic for just having been planted in 2023.

I think is a great choice to enhance shrike habitat.

Desnoyers: This outplanting is a little under half an acre in size, and so this is kind of like a stronghold of a very strong native plant community without any nonnative species encroaching into it.

Booker: It's almost a seamless extension of the ecosystem recovery but with that increased diversity and greater percentages of natives versus nonnatives.

O'Conner: We're seeing a dramatic recovery, and if you look at historic photos of the island, you really see it.

Sometimes it's hard for us, you know, because we've been out here so long and the change is incremental.

Narrator: By 2023, conservation efforts across San Clemente successfully pulled back 5 native species from endangered status for the first time all at once.

It's one of the largest removals from the endangered species list in its 50-year history.

The San Clemente Island bushmallow, paintbrush, lotus, larkspur, and Bell's sparrow populations are now stable and thriving, bringing hope to the remaining island species on their way to recovery.

Simonsen: This just gives you an idea of just how lush the vegetation is now.

You can clearly see much greater biodiversity.

There is vegetation, understory, canopy, and shrubs.

There still is a number of ongoing threats that we're working with the Navy to ameliorate.

In this picture, it highlights the issue with erosion we'll be working with the Navy to ameliorate in the future.

Martin: What we learned from our ability to live out here and coexist, execute training, and protect the habitat is that it's a deliberate effort, and it's a deliberate effort by many experts, and it takes dedication and foresight and years of planning to ensure that habitats are rehabilitated.

Johnson: I believe that we can learn a lot from the other island landscapes, and I believe that we can learn a lot from Indigenous science.

If we think about Catalina, they know where the plants are back in the wild where they have had very little human contact.

I think rolling back some of our academic assumptions, I think sometimes academics--and I am an academic--I think that they do assume, "Oh, well, this must have happened because that happened," without including the Native American perspective.

Bringing back that voice to the table, I believe, is very important.

O'Conner: Recovery isn't over on San Clemente Island.

We're still actually on an upswing.

We're seeing species come in that we haven't seen in a long time, or we're trying to keep ahead of the threats and recognizing the island is not a static system, that it's changing, and we need to be on top of those changes, and we need to anticipate what future threats are and protect against those and manage those to the best of our abilities.

Johnson: My hope is that those relationships with botanists and with biologists, with ethnographers, with anthropologists can be expanded.

I believe it would take a lot of relationship building between the Native people and the U.S. military.

♪ Booker: Whatever your stance is, however you see the world, we all know that this is a worthwhile world.

It's what we've got, and so everything you can do to allow it to persist, to thrive, to maintain the diversity around us, we don't know what the future holds.

Narrator: On San Clemente Island, nature has staged a remarkable comeback.

Once on the brink, native plants and animals now thrive.

Over 40 years of dedicated efforts between the U.S. Navy, conservationists, and federal wildlife officials demonstrated that it's possible to bring back a delicate ecosystem through determination and partnership.

♪ [Indistinct conversation]