Unalaska, AK – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research vessel Tiglax is on its way to Avatanak Island, where researchers will gauge whether the agency's fox-eradication project there is having its intended effect.

Biologists onboard the Tiglax, which stopped in Dutch Harbor today, will be taking the first bird survey of Avatanak since the fox eradication.

Foxes are not native to most of the Aleutians, and have had a devastating impact on local bird populations since they were first introduced by Russian colonists in the 19th Century. The USFWS and the Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska spent 2003 and 2004 trapping and shooting the foxes on Avatanak.

"It's a tough business," said Vernon Byrd, a biologist with the agency's Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which includes the Aleutians. "But since [the foxes] are introduced, it's part of our mandate to restore natural biodiversity."

The USFWS had a very different view of foxes when it took over management of the Aleutians in 1913. At the time, leasing the islands for fox ranching was one of the agency's priorities in the area. The first three decades of the 20th Century were boom years for fox ranching in the Aleutians, but they also caused a crash in the populations of many birds that nest in the Aleutians.

"The one that was hit the hardest was the Aleutian [Canada] goose," Byrd said. "I doubt the geese lasted more than 10 years after a fox was introduced on an island."

The Aleutian Canada goose is now one of the USFWS's biggest success stories in Alaska, bouncing back from near-extinction after a low point when its habitat was reduced to just two fox-free islands in the chain.

Federal managers in the Aleutians will soon be turning their attention from foxes to another invasive species, Norway rats. A Fish and Wildlife Service rat extermination campaign will begin next year, fittingly, on Rat Island, in the western Aleutians. Rat Island earned the name when the rodents scurried off of a shipwrecked Japanese whaling vessel there in 1780.