AVALON, Calif. -- Conservationist Carlos de la Rosa still likes to see buffalo roaming Southern California's famed Santa Catalina Island.
Just not so many of them.
His employer, the Catalina Island Conservancy, has taken hardcore positions with all kinds of other nonnative animals, including goats and pigs.
But earlier efforts to rid island canyons of goats and pigs sometimes involved hiring sharpshooters to hang from helicopters and pick them off. They turned out to be public-relations disasters.
This time, conservancy officials are turning to a more high-tech solution: bison birth control. For weeks, conservancy staff members have been laying trails of alfalfa to lure bison into pens in the island's Cape Canyon. Starting Friday, they plan to inject females with porcine zona pellucida, or PZP, a vaccine that works by creating antibodies that glom onto eggs, blocking fertilization.
Read the entire article here: A Discouraging Word Isn't Enough to Control Catalina's Fertile Buffalo
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