Urban Wildlife: The Gray Fox

 As an enthusiastic nature-obsessed kid of eleven or twelve, I was utterly over the moon excited to discover what I knew just had to be a Gray Fox den, hidden in an overgrown, out-of-the-way spot on the park-like campus of our local university.*  There were tracks.  There was scat.  All the signs were there.  It just had to be.

Field guide in hand, I read, studied and learned all I could about Gray Foxes (Urocyon cineteoargenteus).  I learned that they are North America's only canid with the ability to climb trees.  I learned that they have a varied diet, omnivorous and rather opportunistic, eating whatever is available, from fruits, nuts and insects, to birds and small mammals.  This, I learned, enables them to adapt well to living alongside humans in urban habitats.  More and more clues indicated that the tracks and sign I had discovered must indeed belong to foxes.  

Furthermore, I learned that Gray Foxes are most likely to be seen around dawn and dusk.  Mornings are, I read, the best bet.  If I ever wanted to see a real, live fox in the wild - and as a kid, I simply had to see one - I knew what must be done.

So, as any good father would do, my dad got up with me at the dark hour of 4:30 one summer morning, leaving beds behind to ride our bikes to the campus in search of my foxes.  (Did he believe, at this point, that these foxes even existed?  I'm not so sure.  Did he think for a minute that we would actually succeed in seeing one of these elusive little canines?  I am sure that he did not!)  

After pedaling a mile through the gray pre-dawn, we neared our destination.  I couldn't tell you what our plan was, if we even had one.  Were we going to wait around outside the den site?  Ride around hoping to stumble upon a fox?  I don't know.  But a plan isn't necessary when Providence is at work, and as it would happen, a small group of foxes loped across the grass right in front of us, before we even reached the den area!  One obliging individual even exhibited its tree-climbing abilities, proving I had been right on all accounts.  These were none other than the Gray Foxes of my field guide, and they were in fact living right there on campus.

It was a monumental day in the life of this young naturalist!

Since that day, I've seen foxes on campus and elsewhere around our town a number of times.  When we bought our house (in the same town) two years ago, a bit of that childhood excitement returned when I discovered that our backyard, which abuts an overgrown alley, is regularly visited by Gray Foxes.  Fresh piles of scat are left frequently - almost daily, at times - in curiously prominent places: on top of rocks, logs, stumps and bricks, even on top of the compost bin!  Like a good naturalist (trained well from childhood) I've noted a wide variety of food remnants in that scat: small berry and fig seeds, grape skins, and sometimes, after a successful hunt, bits of fur.  

Any hunter of rats and gophers is certainly welcome in my garden, and I wish our local band of foxes very well!  (Please, please don't use poison to control rodents around your home and property; death by secondary poisoning - ingesting a poisoned rodent - is a leading cause of death among urban foxes.  A healthy population of foxes, hawks and owls is a much superior form of rodent control!)

We finally saw one of these beautiful creatures in our yard just after dark a few evenings ago.  The following evening at dusk, we encountered the fox pictured below while out for a walk on the university campus, not fifty yards from the very spot where I saw my first Gray Fox all those years ago.

A Gray Fox, only slightly larger than a house cat, pauses at dusk on campus at CSU Stanislaus. 

* I have said before that our town, happily situated as it is in California's Great Central Valley, is utterly devoid of natural habitat.  I call it the donut hole effect: riparian corridors pass five miles or more to our north, south and west; remnants of grasslands are found fifteen or twenty miles to our east and west; small wetlands lie in scattered pockets, the nearest I know of at least ten miles away.  And here we sit, in the middle of the donut hole, surrounded by a patchwork of intensively farmed agricultural fields, with hardly a speck of natural habitat to be found.  No marsh, no creek, no stand of woods, nothing!  The best we have is the university campus, liberally landscaped with trees, lawns and a myriad of ponds, conveniently located a mile away from the house where I grew up.  And so that is how I came to be conducting my amateur studies in natural history on a university campus.  That same campus served as nature's playground when I was a kid, outdoor laboratory when I became a college student there, and still today remains my favorite place in town to take a morning or evening walk.  

Read about urban birds on campus at CSU Stanislaus here.