Over the past two decades, California’s Channel Islands—windswept, rocky, and eerily quiet—have emerged as a success story in the battle to restore and protect threatened ecosystems. Wildlife officials credit the recovery of these islands—five of the eight make up Channel Islands National Park—to the systematic removal of invasive species and human-made threats, which has helped preserve the habitats and populations of native species, 145 of which are found no place else.
Surprisingly, despite this progress, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities have approached the national park about the possibility of translocating a new breeding colony of black-footed albatross to its shores, even though the species has never nested there.
Purposefully introducing a foreign population after decades of exotic-inhabitant removal would be a drastic act. But with their habitat at risk—rising tides and temperatures brought on by climate change threaten the black-foot’s natural nesting grounds northwest of Hawaii—translocating the albatross to a suitable, though novel, environment 3,000 miles away, on these Southern California islands, might be their best bet to escape
