Thursday, 26 Jul 2001
MINERAL, Calif.
Sometimes I wonder why I ever answer the phone.
As a field biologist and graduate student, I am rarely in the office to answer phone calls. But this summer, I'm lucky to have three great field assistants to help me out. When Samantha, Whitney, and Kristin are in the field, checking our camera stations and conducting radio telemetry, I get a chance to catch up on office logistics.
Then the phone rings, and against my better judgment, I answer it. One of our radio-collared red foxes is begging at a parking lot. The fox is going right up to visitors like she owns the place, sneaking sandwiches from backpacks when no one is looking, and generally being a nuisance. Can't we do something about it?
The red fox begging at a campsite.
Photo: John Perrine.
Photo: John Perrine.
This is an awkward situation. The Sierra Nevada red fox is one of California's rarest and most elusive carnivores. Most people who live in the mountains of Northern California will never see one. The state has classified them as a threatened species. Furthermore, our study animals in Lassen Volcanic National Park, like all wildlife in all national parks, are fully protected from hunting or harassment by federal law. And yet there's our fox, trotting from car to car like a prostitute working her block of the red-light district.
Wildlife viewing is one of the main reasons why people come to the national parks. Unlike a zoo, a national park really gives visitors a chance to see animals behaving naturally in their natural environment. Yet even in the park an invisible line between humans and wildlife remains. Once that line is crossed and an interaction occurs, the result is almost always negative, especially for the animal.
Red foxes are opportunistic, meaning they will learn to take food any way they can get it. In the course of a single, evening a fox may stalk and capture a field mouse, scavenge a road-killed bird, nibble berries from a bush, or root through a garbage can for chicken bones. Their adaptability has been one of the keys to their success and is one of the main reasons why they are one of the world's most widely distributed terrestrial carnivores. Yet this adaptability can also be an Achilles heel.
Our beggar fox probably learned her errant ways in the wintertime, when deep snow blankets the landscape and food is scarce. Under these harsh conditions, the lure of food scraps in trash cans overwhelm her natural fear of human scent. Eventually, she learns that scrounging food from parking lots and campsites carries a rich reward with very little risk. Sloppy and thoughtless campers encourage this behavior by leaving their food unattended or, even worse, feeding her so they can get a photograph.
The result is trouble for both the visitors and the fox. The visitors risk an expensive ticket from the park rangers or a nip by the fox if they get too close. The stakes are higher for the fox, of course. Some human foods, such as chocolate, can kill a fox, and by hanging around the roads and parking lots she greatly increases her risk of being hit by a car. And if she nips a visitor, even someone who is foolhardy enough to try to feed her by hand, she will have to be shot.
A fox napping beneath a red fir.
Photo: John Perrine.
No one wants this to happen and the key is education. We are putting up signs and distributing handouts telling park visitors not to feed the fox. The park rangers are keeping a close eye on the parking lot and are ready to write tickets to anyone who still hasn't gotten the message. Educating the fox is a tougher proposition. Now that she has learned to associate parking lots and humans with food, unlearning this behavior will be much more difficult. Problem bears can be sprayed with pepper spray or shot with paint balls as a deterrent, but the threatened status of the foxes requires more delicacy. The park rangers have bought some Super Soaker water guns so they can give a begging fox a wet surprise, much like you'd spray a cat for jumping onto your kitchen table.
Luckily, the vast majority of the park visitors don't feed the foxes. Likewise, most of the foxes don't beg at parking lots. But it only takes one or two bad apples on both sides for the trouble to begin. When that happens, my phone starts ringing. Thank God for voice mail.
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