In the early 20th century, nonnative arctic foxes were introduced on most of the Aleutian Islands as a fur resource for harvest by Aleut natives. When that market subsequently collapsed with changes in women's fashion, the foxes were left to breed unchecked and had soon eaten the Aleutian Canada Goose and other bird species almost to extinction. In the 1970's, the Fish and Wildlife Service found one particularly inaccessible island where foxes had never been introduced, and on it a surviving population of geese. Under the Endangered Species Act, an intensive program of fox elimination on other islands was followed by goose reintroduction. Today the descendants of those geese are so abundant that they are a major problem for farmers on their wintering grounds on the northern California coast. There is now a late hunting season on those farms to encourage the geese to move on.
I am familiar with this story because my introduction to hunting was shooting foxes in the far western Aleutians in 1975.
