It had been captured the night before, lured into a metal cage by the scent of cat food and the promise of an easy meal. After weighing the creature, Boser ran a flea comb through its reddish-gray fur, massaged and petted its lean body, and probed its mouth to gauge its condition.

"All his claws look nice and pretty ... but he has a broken canine," said Boser, a scientist with the Nature Conservancy and the restoration manager on Santa Cruz Island, the largest in the chain of eight Channel Islands off the coast of California.

After a brief exam, Boser released the yearling fox, which scampered off and vanished into some nearby shrubs.

It wasn't too long ago that such a