31. Foxtrot, Foxhole, Foxfire

In late December I received an email from Sean Kenady of the Native Grasslands Association informing me that on February 17 & 18 and March 3 & 4, there would be Alkali Sacaton (bunchgrass) restoration at the Lone Tree Unit of the Merced National Wildlife Refuge. The goal was to restore critical habitat for the San Joaquin Kit Fox (Vulpes macrotis mutica), an endangered species numbering fewer than 7,000 in a 1975 survey and surviving in a precarious 7% of its original habitat. The San Joaquin Kit fox is one of two subspecies that still exist in California; the long-eared kit fox (Vulpes macrotis macrotis) became extinct around 1910.

The invitation reminded me of an afternoon spent searching for an Indian site near Orestimba Creek. We had given up and were heading back to the car at dusk when a fox blurted out of a hollow sycamore and ran diagonally across the field in front of us toward a rock outcropping. As the fox ran, it looked over its shoulder at us, and the following day, we went to the outcropping which turned out to be the site we had been seeking.

The experience yielded a poem, “Vision at Orestimba,” and people always ask me what the fox stands for, testimony that the image of the fox is somehow disquieting. Like the wolf, the fox carries the burden of old-world symbolism — diabolical craftiness, deception, trickery, or, in the case of the female fox or vixen, eroticism, sensuality, seduction (that fox fur). New world associations seem to hold fewer tensions, perhaps because of less exclusive land use patterns and the lack of domesticated animals before European colonization, and thus can conceive of the fox as strategic intelligence, divine emanation and even a helper in creation. These cultural perceptions would be purely academic considerations if they did not affect behavior.

In Paul Shepard’s words, foxes are animals of “the edges,” not just moving from wild to urban, from fields to roads to orchards and gardens, but also straddling the feline and canine (“as though cat and dog were magically blended”) and challenging “the taxonomic boundary” between canids and felids. Even though the kit fox is the smallest North American member of the dog family, for example, it has many cat-like adaptations. Only foxes possess feline features such as catlike teeth, semi retractile claws, vertical slit pupils and the same layer of glittering tissue behind the retina to enhance vision in the dark. They crouch, stalk, slink-run, and pounce, just like you-know-who.

According to the Sacramento Fish & Wildlife Office website, “…the range of the San Joaquin kit fox [before 1930] is believed to have extended from southern Kern County north to Contra Costa county on the west side and near La Grange, Stanislaus County, on the east side.” Elusive and difficult to study because of its (mostly) subterranean habits in daytime, this small fox (weighing about five pounds and measuring twenty inches) is declining in numbers due to habitat conversion and loss, traffic, predation electrocution, hunting, trapping and poisoning. Federal, state, and private agencies are working hard to reverse habit loss on public lands.

In response to their arid habitat, San Joaquin kit foxes have large ears to dissipate heat and hairy soles for better traction in sandy soil. Their ears can pick up low sound frequencies for unerring detection of insect/rodent rustling/gnawing under dense undergrowth. Even though kit foxes like to forage near freshwater marshes and alkali sinks subject to seasonal flooding, they can survive on a very “stingy water budget” by extracting the water they need from their prey—kangaroo rats, gophers, voles, ground squirrels, cottontails, reptiles, mice, antelope squirrels, ground nesting birds, carrion and insects. True omnivores, they have also been known to eat berries, rose hips, nut shells, fruits and fruit rinds, grasses and other vegetation.

When kit foxes shared their native habitat with wolves and coyotes, each canid occupied its own niche, and foxes became the most efficient predators of small prey. With the introduction of the Eastern Red Fox for fur farming and the elimination of the coyote’s rival, the wolf, the kit fox began to lose ground to the larger (but also supremely adaptable) canids. Coyotes now kill the small fox not to eat it but to eliminate competition for the same food source. Domestic dogs, bobcats, and large raptors, such as the golden eagle, also prey on the endangered fox.

Crucial to kit fox survival and reproduction are dens—dug, reused, or enlarged from ground squirrel or badger burrows. Natal or pupping dens are groomed by the females (vixens) to look abandoned. If she registers danger to her young, she will move them. Before the birth of her litter, she preheats the den, and then becomes a “thermal blanket” to keep the kits warm. As in the great prairies of the Mid-West, the extensive network of dens and burrows also provides shelter for burrowing owls, antelope squirrels, lizards and various other invertebrates incapable of digging. Ever resourceful, kit foxes have even occupied pipes if they are small enough to exclude coyotes.

The vixen relies on the male for food (and for a little relief from the young) after the kits are born, and he is usually so reliable that one researcher wrote he could set his watch by the father’s return to the den. Researchers have observed adoption of orphaned kits by other parents and a high degree of survival in these cases. Seasoned observers are charmed by the alertness and rough play of the kits as they emerge from the natal den and begin establishing social hierarchy. One watched two dominant kits fighting for food while a third (smarter?) kit ran off with the prize.

Cute as they are as kits, foxes do not seem to inspire the same passionate advocacy that other animals, such as bears or cranes, do and I have wondered if this indifference has something to do with their ambiguity in our imaginations. Cranes became angels and bears the primordial travelers, but foxes? If, as Shepard writes, “the lively world of our emotions, fears, and responses is like a great forest with its fauna,” what aspect of our “abyssal self” does the vanishing kit fox represent? Loss of the edge and its fluid, crepuscular forms? The answer is important because we are edge animals par excellence, who have constructed our identities by observing, nouning, and verbing other animals. How else would we know how to foxtrot, take cover in foxholes, and write poems (free of categorical thinking) illumined by foxfire?

Sources: Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism; J. David Henry, Living on the Edge: Foxes; Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human; Peter Steinhart, California’s Wild Heritage: Threatened and Endangered Animals in the Golden State.

ACTION: Keep the Edge Alive! Restore kit fox habitat on February 17, 18 & March 3, 4 at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge. Meet at 9:00 a.m. at the observation tower. Bring rubber boots, warm clothes, and rain gear (if needed).

Additional Volunteer Restoration Workdays are February 3 (San Joaquin NWR), 10 (San Luis NWR), 24 (Merced NWR) and March 10 & 17 (West Bear Creek). For more information call Senior Biologist Dennis Woolington, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Office, Los Banos (209) 826-3508, dennis_woolington@fws.gov