"But before we do anything drastic, we are going to know that we tried everything else," she said. It would take permits and public hearings before the eagle killing could start so Fahey said, "it is not something that will happen soon."

Fahey said that removing the pigs is the key to "breaking the chain of what is attracting golden eagles to the islands."

Once the pigs are gone, she said, there won't be enough food for breeding pairs of eagles to stay at the channel islands. That would restore the foxes as the top predator on the islands.

Right now, Fahey said, all of the wild foxes on the channel islands are at risk because most of them don't know enough to be afraid of the eagles.

"They haven't had this type of predation in their history, so they don't know that that looming shadow overhead means they are about to be preyed on," she said.

The federal officials have pen-raised colonies of the foxes that can be released once the eagles are gone. There is a different subspecies of fox on each of the islands and some are now extinct. But the for the surviving subspecies, Fahey said the population can be restored from the foxes raised in captivity.

Once those foxes are released, she said, officials intend to continue protecting them from the eagles.

"We're going to keep pressure on the eagles so they don't regard the islands as a friendly place," she said.

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