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Oh hey, it's the guy who didn't even look at your receipt before dragging a highlighter over it. Ali word here, it is here. It is the Fox episode. Waited years for this and it was absolutely totally different than I expected. Join me. So we're going to address the etymology of
the ology in a bit. But I do want you to know that in researching this, Google helpfully redirected me to the search results for urology, and then proctology, and then once again euro gynecology and I scoffed, but honestly eurosinology. It kind of involves a bit of each of those. Stick around. But this expert is just one of my favorite kinds. His study species is just woven into his every day life and his dreams and his identity. I
love all of it. And he's a retired English teacher this Fox guy, who's known as the Fox Guy and is very gifted with narrative abilities like your favorite fireside storyteller. He's even written a book, twenty twenty two's The Road to Fox Hollow, which is beautifully written, and he's contributed to Canan's of the World, published by Princeton University Press.
He's been an associate director of the North Santa Clara Resource Conservation District, and he co founded the Urban Wildlife Research Project, which has accomplished rigorous field research, has this archive of data. Beth Pratt of our p twenty two episode, has called him the Jane Goodall of the Gray Fox, and by the end of the episode, You're never going to look at Fox as the same. This is like showing you a new color you never knew existed, or a flavor of cake. They've been hiding in the back
and we're going to get to it. But first quick thank you to all the patrons who submitted questions for this episode. Thank you to everyone wearing ologies merch from all Gesmarch dot com. Also side note, we have smologies which are g rated shorter kid friendly episodes and those you can find anywhere you get your podcasts. It's called smologies. We linked them in the show notes too, And thank you to everyone who leaves reviews, which helped the show
so much. I read them all, and I prove it with my mouth by reading one such as this recent one from right Away, who wrote, I find myself completely lost in episodes that I thought i'd want to skip. I mean, how can a show about trees or basket weaving be fascinating? But they are? Right away. We just have really good guests. Y'all are gonna love this one.
Curl up, open your huge ears for facts about fuzzy foxes, baby names, parental strategies, where they live, what they inherit, how to observe foxes, How tiny foxes wound up on islands, which ones need conservation, how to help the foxes tech foxes, why a fox on the couch is worth thousands in the bush, if foxes eat leftovers? And how your dog can help save their lives? Plus what do they smell like? And at long last, what do they say with gray fox?
Behavioral expert, researcher, conservationist, author, and euroscinologist Bill like them?
Okay, Bill like them?
Cool?
Yeah? And I just wanted to make a point that my specialty is the gray fox. Yes, and it's the most unique fox of all of them.
Is it the best fox?
Oh? I wouldn't say it is exactly the best fox, but it's the most unique fox. I'll put it that way. It is the base what we call the basal canid. It's the root of all other canids that exist in the world. So it's older, genetically older than a wolf, a jackal. You name the canid on the planet, gray fox? Is it?
Really? I did not know that, and that is very exciting. Now, first off, a fox, are they more like dogs or cats?
They're more like cats. I sometimes call them the canine that acts like a feline. Okay, because they do. They have a lot of characteristics. They are feline, and so.
What about them is cat like? Is it how they stalk their prey?
It's part of that, but it's also the manner in which they sip. They also climb trees just like a cat would. Oh, the way they use their ears is cat like.
And then what about them is very doglike.
Only probably appearance, really, yeah, because they just reflect that cat like behavior.
You know, we have domesticated dogs and cats, but very few people on earth have pet foxes. Why do you think that is? They're so cute?
Yeah, well, in England more people have foxes for pets as far as I can tell, than we do over here. My attitude is this that they are in fact meant to be in the wild, not to be captive in your home.
So a pet fox, no, First off, they tend to be a bit destructive indoors, and they need raw meat and mental stimulation and a lot of physical activity, and it's illegal in most states in the US. Hey are you a certified wildlife rehabber? And the fox can't be released? Maybe, but they can never fully be potty trained. And if pet foxes have like a favorite activity, it's peeing on stuff so much. P What do foxes smell like? I've heard that they're musky, very musky. This is true.
Yeah, yeah, they are. They reflect their scat. Oh, and their scat is really there's a whole story behind what they do and how they use their scat and so forth. It's pretty remarkable how they use it.
It might be like a little too early in the episode to dive right into what foxes do with their business, And I mean, maybe we should skip that or what do they do? I'm all yours.
Oh well, what they do is they take their feces and they mark territory, so they will defecate in areas where they want to make it known to other animals that they own this territory. So if it's another fox that comes into the area trespasser, let's say, the pair of foxes that claims the territory will fight off another any other fox that comes into the area, the trespasses onto their territory, and eventually they will chase that trespasser
out of their territory. And that happens over and over again. But fairly recently, like a year and a half ago, I had gray foxes occupying a territory in my study area and a red fox came rolling into the area, and the red fox and the gray foxes were in conflict, and the end result of that was what I call the scat wars because what happened. What happened was that by the way I name the foxes, I give them
personal names. I don't do this scientific bit because like Jane Goodall said, you don't want you get to know them. You can't dub them with a GF, you know, forty two, whatever it might be, you know, so I give him names. And this one gray fox I call Limos, and that means long neck in Greek, because he had kind of an extended neck. You know, that's kind of the way I identify them. Anyway, he was marking, marking, marking, and telling with his scat this red fox to get out.
And what the red fox would do would come over to where he had defecated and defecate on top of it. And it was pile on pile on, pile.
On file, like a Jenga tower.
And finally, finally the red fox is left. And it was about a year later that both of the gray foxes died. We have a problem out here with canine distemper and it's deadly, deadly, deadly to foxes and raccoons and a couple of other mammals that live nearby. And anyway, after they died, then the red foxes came back in. And that's now what I'm monitoring. I'm monitoring the red foxes instead of the gray foxes.
And just briefly, according to the twenty twenty three study, canine distemper virus infection in the free living wild canines. This potentially fatal malady is related to the human measles virus, and it can affect domesticated dogs, of course, but also wildlife like foxes, coyotes, wolves, skunks, raccoons, river otters, weasels, badgers,
even ferrets. And at room temperature the virus can't last that long, like less than a day, but at colder temperatures it can live quite a bit longer, and infected animals can shed it for months through p and other things coming out of their bodies. And of course, when there is habitat loss and a lot of animals cramped densely, it spreads much more quickly. As someone who studies gray foxes, does that bum you out that it's now a red fox territory? Are you like, that's not my species?
That's a great question. I'm really interested in seeing how different these red foxes might be from the gray foxes, and we've just started that part of the documentation of the red foxes. I'm an ethologist, okay, And as an ethologist you have to have a great deal of patience.
Ethology is a study of behavior, just a side notoe.
And you also need to have the ability to observe in detail. So if you observe in detail and document directly, then you can build up a backlog of behavior.
How long have you been a vulpanologist? How long have you been hanging out in the field? And look at it? Foxes?
Uh, fox Foxology, that's what we'll call it.
Foxology. It's not vulpanology.
Oh, because well vulte volte is the mainline of the fox classification. Okay, but gray fox doesn't fit in there. No, gray fox is You're a siam No not what?
Yeah, I didn't realize that. Well, then let's go back. Let's talk a little bit about these different not only species, but actual genus of foxes. Because foxology pulled up mostly websites selling nail polish or fishnet body suits, we're kind of jerry rigging a new ology here, eurosinology, just for gray foxes. I don't want to hear a word of objection to that just because it's never been used, Because by the end of the episode, you're going to be like, yes,
gray foxes deserve anology. I love them and they are special. So the gray fox predates all of these other canids. How many types of foxes are there though, I mean, I've heard of arctic foxes, red foxes.
How many we got, well, it depends on who you're talking to. There are occtentsively twenty four, okay, and some of those twenty four are very rare and live in other parts of the world. And then there are overlaps. The Asian raccoon dog oh is considered in sort of in the fox lane, and the bat aired fox of Africa is also a part of that, and those two are the only two other canids that can climb trees.
So yes, this checks out. Red foxes in the genus full paste are the most common, and other Vulpecee species include the Arctic fox and the kit fox, the huge eared, sandy colored fenick fox, the cape fox, and of course the red fox, which is fulpace full pase now. Not in the vulpace bucket is that bat eared fox of the African savannahs, which looks like a jackal and it eats termites, but it's in its own genus autocion now. Also not a Volpasee is our newly beloved gray fox.
It's one of just two species in that genus, and its full name Eurocion scenario. Argentis means silver dogtail. It's got a nice long tail. And the gray fox, it used to be the most prevalent fox in precolonized North America, but like so many things being disrupted, it's been edged out by the larger red fox. Just in case you want to root for an underdog, gray fox is an underfox and the gray fox. How big about is the gray fox?
Oh, it's like a small dog. Weighs about anywhere from probably eight nine pounds on the slim side up to about fifteen When you see them, see the small ones out in the field out there next to some of the bigger ones. There's a whale of a difference in there in size wise. But the gray fox tends to stay in the brush a lot. They're what I call bush dogs. And the red fox, on the other hand, is a field dog. Oh and so the gray fox has short, stubby legs and the red fox has long legs for the field.
I've seen that.
Movement, you know, through grasses and things like that.
Is that why people think of the red fox more when they think of a fox, because we just aren't seeing these bush dogs.
That's exactly right, exactly.
I've only seen gray fox I think once. They live on Catalina as well. Right, just a quick side note, So Catalina is one of the Channel islands off the coast of southern California, and I went to college in Santa Barbara. I lived there for months before I realized like, oh, those are islands out in the ocean. Those are islands right there. And the only other fox, by the way, in the gray foxes, genus Heurocion, is the little island fox and it's tiny. It weighs in it just like
four or five pounds. Ourchaeologists think it's only been on those islands for about six thousand years, and the National Park Service notes that the indigenous Tchumash revered those foxes as sacred and thought that they helped usher in dreams. And I personally would follow an island fox into the beyond. I couldn't help myself. Now, what about bill?
Oh yeah, yeah, those are the small one, the little ones. And there's still a debate on how they ever got there.
I was wondering that because it's a I had to take a ferry for like an hour and a half, so I don't know how they got on that's a lot of swimming.
Can they swim well? Some people say that the native people living on the mainland exported them out to the islands in their travels way before the white man ever got here.
Yeah.
Some others say no, it was when the two land masses, when the islands were part of the mainland and broke off millions of years ago, that it took them along with it.
How did you get down the path of foxes or up the tree of foxes?
Whoa you want to hear a story?
Yes, of course, that's why I'm here.
Well, like around two thousand and seven or so, my doctor said to me, he said, you know, Bill, if you would get out and walk for a let's say, half an hour to an hour every day, it'll help you a lot physically. So I took him up on
that offer. And I had always been interested in birds, okay, So as a fledgling burger, I got myself a DSLR camera and I went out into Bixby Park here near in Palo Alto, and I started taking photos of birds and I got to be fairly good, and one of my favorite favorite ones was the bullocks oriol Okay, and it's a it's a pretty bird. And I knew a tree down this old dirt road where they were hanging out. So one morning I'm walking down that road and I
come around to bend and whoa ahead of me? Up there it is this fox sitting next to the road. And I knew it was a fox, but I had no idea what kind of a fox it was. I was zero, okay when it comes to knowing anything about them. And this was in two thousand and nine. So I started taking photos, walking closer and closer and closer, and there was a steel gate across the road, and so that little fox was sitting right on the other side
of that gate. So when I went around the corner of that gate, that little fox just stood up and casually, I mean casually walked back into the brush.
I said, whoa, So Bill had this brush with the cat sized bush dogs.
And so the next day I come back taking a look to see if I could find a fox, you know, in the bushes and wherever. Yeah, nothing really, the second day, nothing. The third day, I'm coming along that same road in that same area and I'm looking back in the brush and everything, and what did I see? I saw three young foxes under the edge of the brush watching me come up the road.
Oh my god.
Okay, so I'm saying to myself, oh oh, I discovered a family. Not just one fox, there's a whole family here.
Just a side note. This was in two thousand and nine and at the time Bill was nearly seventy years old. Let me math this out for you. Bill is eighty five people. I didn't find out until after the interview, and I thought he was like maybe sixty. He's eighty five and he's still out doing field work. So take his doctor's advice. Walk thirty minutes a day if you can, maybe slide a post a notepad in your pocket. You
see some frolicking animals. But yeah, So on this day in two thousand and nine, Bill saw this gaggle of foxes who kind of looked at him quizzically.
I sat down on the other side of the road, and I had a posted pad in my pocket, and I just started jotting down little things about what they were doing over there in that brush, you know, And they were curious about me, And you know, what's this human doing over there on the other side of the road. You know, may have been what they were thinking, And then I came back day after day after day, and on one of those days the adults were out. One of the adults was on up the roadways, and I
was between her and her little family back in the bush. Oh, and she comes up to the gate and she gets down on her belly and she's looking at me, and then she barks. I'd never heard a fox bark in all my life.
Me neither.
And she barks several times in order. And that's the only time in all of the years that I've been doing this study that I was afraid of a fox.
What did it sound like?
Like somebody with laryngitis. I can imitate a little bit, a little bit of it, but not with the velocity that they do it. I'll show you. Okay, it goes something like this, right, that's sort of the sound of a gray.
Fox, really but rasppier.
Yeah, you have more laryngitis.
Wow.
I didn't know that they did that. Yeah, So the call of the gray foxox is apparently like if a cocker spaniel smoked a packa day of Marlboro Reds and has never slept with a TV off. I picture a dog stumbling out of a casino and coughing while a gray fox is hiding in nearby shrubbery and looks up from a Sunday Crossword because they thought someone called their name.
But gray foxes can also sound kind of like a squeaky toy or a whistle, and according to one regional field guide in the Northeast, gray foxes communicate through this variety of vocalizations, including growls and barks and wines and whimpers and squeals and yips and yaps, and the babies are on the yip yappier side. I guess before their voices developed their signature gravelly patina. I had no idea. Is that mostly just a gray fox or is that kind of just that is what the fox says.
The red foxes have a different tone to their bark, but it it's very similar.
Oh, I had no idea. I didn't even know that they did much vocalizing. So she's she's on her belly barking at you.
Yeah, she's barking at me, and I'm worried. I'm worried she's going to come charging over and bite my leg. And I wanted to find a stick or something like that to defend myself, you know, but there wasn't anything around, and so what happened was that she stood up and decided to run past me. Okay, and that's what she did. She just fast, as you can believe, just a flash boom,
and she's into the brush with her kids. And as I observed these foxes over time, it just so happened that they began to not only take on their own personalities, but I began to see that they had an emotional life and a cognitive life, which I didn't know before.
Yeah. So Bill began to go out and watch them every day, shotting notes on his post it pat in his pocket and taking pictures and video and working with local ecologists to gather data. And then one day, about four years into it, he's.
A partner of mine, Greg and I had bought a couple of trail cameras and I was going to check the SD cards and the trail cameras. But I had to go a long way around to get to where it was back in the woods. This little fox knew where I was going and beat me there. You met me there at the trail camera. And when I saw that, I thought that little fox anticipated where I was going.
That means that they have some sense of future oh okay, and they have some sense of being able to think m And that changed the whole picture of my relationship with the foxes.
Just a side note. This ability is called extended consciousness, and in twenty twenty four a group of biologists and philosophers highly regarded acknowledged via something called the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness that first, there's a strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and
to birds. And second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates, including reptiles, amphibians, fish, and many invertebrates, including, at a minimum, they write, cephalopod mollusks, decopod crustaceans, and insects. They also said that when there's a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it's irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting the animal,
and that we should consider welfare risks of animals. So that little gray fox may have thought, I'm going to see what this ape in pants is up to. The sucker can't even climb a tree, or eat a row chet punk sad wow. And so they anticipated that they met you there. Did do you think they wanted to keep tabs on you as a threat or do you think it was curiosity and they just knew, Oh this guy's fine, but what's he doing back to his camera he always goes to.
It was the curiosity quotient I sometimes called it is a high ten way up there. Really compared with other raccoons are about seven on such a scale as that, but the curiosity level. And so when they got comfortable with me being around and sitting across the road taking those notes, I was no longer a threat and they got that they weren't afraid of me. You know. I was one of the landscapes, so to speak. So that's
where that little fox came in. He was comfort with me already and anticipated where I was going.
And how big of a social structure do they have? Do they live usually with solitary lives plus their family or do they couple off or do they live in kind of like a pack?
They are not a pack, okay. First, they are a family unit okay, And they have mom and dad Fox raised the young together and they're in a monogamous pair monogamy to an extent. Oh well, do tell the female is polyandrous?
Oh good for her.
And it's been suggested that they are polyandrous. That adds to their viability, survivability, and so forth, because they aren't just in one genetic line. A female fox, out of five pups that are born by her, two three maybe maybe from another male, not her mate.
Do you think the mates know that? And they're just like, hey, man, it's part of a biodiversity. What are you gonna do?
Yeah? I think it's just a pattern of life that they live. It's like you and I live a pattern of life that we don't think too much about, you know, because it's just the way things are in our lives.
So I snooped gander at the two thousand and nine paper Multiple Paternity and Kinship in the gray Fox from the Journal Mammalian Biology, which concluded that up to fifty seven percent of all litters had more than one father, with the highest rates seen in the denser populations. And I'm sorry, how is how is that possible? Okay, you
got to get yourself a second uterus. Essentially, a female gray fox has a womb for each ovary and thus can kind of stagger litters or pause development on an embryo and one uterus while she weans the litter from the first tank. So one uterus might have Ronald's babies and the other might have craigs, and she has to grow them and nurse them. So it's her choice, which in twenty twenty five shouldn't seem evolved to us. But
here we are. Do you feel like foxes were waiting for someone, particularly gray foxes to come along and study them, but they had to make sure that you were cool first.
I'm not sure about that scenario. I bet I do know that shortly after I started this study, a friend of mine, Rick Lamman, said to me. He said, Bill, you've got to find a fox expert and run some of your ideas off on this fox expert. And I
found doctor Ben sachs at u see Davis. So when I went to meet with Ben and talk to him about what I doing and everything like that, one of the things he said to me, he said, Bill, he said, it's about time somebody began to study in depth that gray fox, because everybody been't studying the red fox and all the rest of them. But not the gray fox. I got in on the ground floor.
And so Bill went on to be the director of the independent Urban Gray Fox Research Project and then later a co founder of the Urban Wildlife Research Project. Did you ever tell your doctor that his prescription for walking ended up being very good for you and the gray fox?
He retired shortly thereafter and I lost track of him.
The foxes are like, hey, thanks for that. We needed that. Someone's got to study us. What are foxes out there eating? Are they omnivorous? Are they generalists like coyotes or do they just go after mammals or bugs?
They're omnivorous, Oh yeah, but one of the things they do in the process is that they feed on a lot of rodents. And it's by way of feeding on rodents that they are the well predators, period, are the ones that balance out the ecosystem and create a healthy ecosystem. So the gray fox will eat anything. Oh wow, Except they don't like feathered small birds, although they will on occasion capture one and eat them, but mostly it's rodents, squirrels, that kind of thing.
Are they lying in weight to ambush something? Are they climbing trees to get birds and squirrels, Like, what does it look like when a fox is hungry?
Oh, let's see. Okay, here's a story.
Okay.
I was checking my trail cameras and I was going back way back into the woods of this one area. Behind me, three foxes were following me.
This man is the snow white foxes, and I love him.
So I just I didn't pay much attention to them. I was leading the way over to my trail camera over there, and when I got to the trail camera, I noticed that one of the foxes was missing, and I had no idea where she had gone. And I was leaning over and I looked up and there in the tree, about maybe twenty feet away from me, up in the tree, there she was. And there was a young female that I called Cute. Okay, oh, Qute is
up in that tree and she is hunting. And what she had done is she spotted a squirrel up in that tree. She climbed the tree and she gets to a location on a branch, and the squirrel is just down below her a little ways and oh, she goes for it, and she slips and she falls, misses the squirrel and falls into a very fine thicket. Oh, no, Yeah, she fell right straight down. Anyway, that squirrel gets up on that branch where she was and is chittering away,
you know how they do. Sometimes it was almost as he was saying, well, God helped me.
Yeah, it was just laughing at her. Yeah, Like that's what you get, was cute? Cute? Is that how she got her name?
Yeah? The first time I saw her, she was coming up out of a tunnel trail and I looked at her and I said, that's the cutest little fox I've ever seen, And so I named her Cute. And her mate was the alpha male of the area, and he was They didn't like being parents, let me put it that way.
Really.
Yeah.
Yeah. Over on the other side, the pair of foxes Gray and Mama Bold, those two were exquisite parents when it came to raising their young, but Cute and Dark they didn't like being parents.
Really, what did they do or what did they not do?
They tended to ignore their young ones. My Sheila, They do enough to feed them and so forth like that, and get them up to the point where they could hunt for themselves. But a lot of times would and would be that Cute would want some attention from Dark or her fate, you know, and she'd go over and nuzzle him and he would just walk away.
Oh what a dick.
Yeah, I mean it was like, what come on, guy.
Yeah, alpha males, you know.
Yeah, And it was like he was fixated on his own job. Well, certain times the year, he would chase all of the males out of the region because he knew that cute was going to have some pups. Oh, so he didn't want to have any of the other males around, and he chased them to the other side of the creek and that was far enough away.
So gray foxes, they're pretty tiny, they're about the size of a house cat. But they do like their territories. And I've read that one square mile is enough for a family of gray foxes, but of course in urban interfaces that's not going to happen, and fox families are much more squeezed in. How long is our foxes just stating.
About fifty three days and in nine months they're ready to have their own family.
That's so quick. So pregnant less than two months and in less than a year. Your baby's ready to have babies of its own to feed rats too.
I know. I've watched from little balls of gray fur all the way to ready to disperse. I've watched that whole process.
Go wow, how many in a litter?
Typically usually it is about three, but Mama Bold she always had four or five. And one of the other things too, is that she kept nursing her pups longer than most female gray foxes do, and so they were pretty hefty when they get under there. She only had six nipples.
Yeah, and the.
Number of little foxes under their nursing sometimes one of them have to wait.
Out, like you're trying to get brunch on a Sunday. Just on the waiting list. We'll call you when there's a nipple ready.
Yeah.
Well, with having a few pups or kits, I always thought they were called kits, but you can call them pups.
Well, they're can irons.
Oh that makes sense. Why do we hear fox kits all the time.
We've just messed it up. Yeah, So when I hear kit, I think of kitten. Yeah, you know cats? Yeah yeah.
Linguists assert that a baby fox can be called a cub, a kit, or a pup. All are correct. But Bill is the fox guy. His license plate says fox Guy, So I'm never calling them kits. Again, if they are able to reproduce it nine months and they have a few pups, is their population doing okay? Or are they able to reproduce quickly? Or are gray foxes, you know, partly because of human development? Are the Are they really in decline?
They're doing it okay?
Okay.
There are a few places where there has been recorded decline in the number of gray foxes that nobody really has an answers to. Why one of the areas is in the city of Chicago. It may be because of the number of coyotes in Chicago speculation.
I understand that up in Palo Alto, the Meta campus is so large and lush that they have gray foxes just hanging out under the windows. Is that true?
I was the first guy to be called in to take a look at the gray foxes at Facebook.
Really, how did someone find you? I mean, you are the fox guy.
But what happened there was that they were getting quite a few gray foxes on the campus. And this was the old campus. They've since built a brand new campus and I'll get there in a minute. They wanted me to come over and assess what to do with these because some of the employees were afraid of the foxes, and some of the people fed the foxes, and they didn't They had no guidelines as to what to do. And so I went over there and I took a look at the situation, and I discovered that they had
pups underneath a ramp on the campus. And I turned to the people that were there and I said, you're not going to be able to move these foxes off campus. The best thing we can do is instead of trying to get rid of them, let's make them an asset. And Mark Zuckerberg said, oh, my god, that's what we
should do. Really, yeah, And so it was fox It became that people were filming the foxeses that were coming through the campus and move around and sleeping on their cars and all kinds of stuff was going on, and people got comfortable with them.
So this first Facebook fox campus news story broke in the spring of twenty thirteen. But about five years later.
And then they built the new campus over across the highway, and that's a big, big, big complex in there. So one day the gardener discovered that up on the roof of the building there were great foxes up there.
What how I guess they can climb trees.
But yeah, but you don't climb a building.
Yeah, was was there anything up there? Was there just like an HVAC system? Or did they have the landscape the roof?
Well again, I go over to Facebook, you know, and I'm assessing the situation and so forth, and that question came up, Well, how did they get up here?
You know?
And they had pops up there too, what babies? Anyway, one of the guys that was with us on this tour on the roof, he said, you know, he said, when we were building this section, we had gigantic ladders that were set up on the side of the buildings, and they may have climbed up the ladder. No, And I said, that's probably it, because I said, I have seen firsthand foxes climbing ladders.
When did you see it?
I saw it one time when there was a ladder up against a dumpster. Oh my god, and the old fox just went right right up the ladder, just like it was second nature.
Yeah, as one would. Well, were they stuck on the roof?
Oh no, No, okay, because in part of the construction and everything, they had to have fire escapes. The fire escapes are the way down and nowadays the way up.
So not only were foxes living on this new eco friendly landscaped roof, but they also had pops up there fully rooftop terrace meno park real estate. Are they usually in dens? I always thought that foxes burrowed and lived in a cozy little hole that had like a little comforter and a bed and a chimney pipe and all that stuff. But are they living under brush or do different foxes like does a red fox live in a totally different type of housing situation.
Yeah, well, the red fox is the one that digs burrow, okay, digs down in and makes rooms underground and everything like that for the family. Great foxes don't. Gray foxes will find dense, dense tickets areas that are really impossible for most to get into. That's where they have their dens. Oh and sometimes, like when I first came upon Mama Bold and Gray, at first they had den that was back under a huge number of trees that were down on the ground that had come down. There were eucalyptus trees,
and they built this den underneath there. And one of the guys that worked at the water treatment plant, he had been kind of eyeballing the foxes for about twenty years, he told me. He said that den has been used for at least twenty five years.
Oh wow, So Bill spent years observing this one fox mother he called Mama Bold, who was born in that inherited multi generational den nestled under a fallen tree.
The story behind Mama Bold is really quite an interesting one.
Yeah, what's her deal?
When she was a pa she was born in that Nato den that I just mentioned, okay, under that pile of trees. And when she was really small, her dad, the gray fox I called Squat, He had overcome any skittishness about me, and he would come out to the edge of the road and I'd be across the road and I'd chatter at him, you know. And one time he looked behind himself into the bushes, and I knew right away. I said to myself, there's another fox that
back there in the brush. And after a while, this little pup comes out on the road and gives Squat her father a what I call the fox kiss.
Oh.
And the fox kiss is a greeting that they give the pups give to their adults, and it's a touching of the nose or on the cheek sometimes, but it's a little kiss. It's a little recognition that hey, you're cool.
Oh just a side note. Gray foxes have white markings on their chin and black around their eyes. But it's not all fashion because they also have scent glands on their face, and they have scent glands on all four feet and have scent glands in their butt, And no, you can't have them removed. If you wanted a pet fox, you simply would live in a stinky house which was also scented with pa It's a bold smell, indeed. But
back to the baby foxes. So the one bill called Mama Bold was a little two month old pop who started very skittish and then she grew into this big, confident personality, eventually becoming that doting mother with the big litters of chubby, strong foxes that we talked about earlier, very busy nipples.
But when she was younger, and after a while, she would sit in the middle of the road and I could do almost anything, and she wouldn't go she wouldn't zoom out, you know. So that was the start of Mama Bold. But when it came time for her to disperse. She tried, but there wasn't anywhere to go. That's one of the downsides of the Palo Alto Baylands. There's patches of habitat, but there's nothing really good and connected and so forth.
Well, Palo Alto real estate is really tough, Yeah.
It is. So what happens is that one morning I'm walking on one of the trails and Bold is behind me, and there's a chain link fence. On the other side of that fence comes Squat Enter Squat.
A short little fox dude, and Mama Bold's.
Dad, and he's coming in a determined sort of way.
Huh.
She knew what was coming. She ran and I thought, oh my god, but I didn't quit. I for some reason. I ran after them. And down on the road is Squat and Bold facing off with one another, and she's got her mouth wide open and she's ready to rip into her father. Oh wow, And this brief, really brief, two three second fight begins and it stops. It freezes, and everything seemed to be freezing right there on the spot.
Who was watching the fight another male fox, And when Mama Bolds saw him, she ran off with him. So take that, dad, I'm in love.
I turned back to look to see where Squat was. I never saw him again. He vanished, really and she took over his territory.
And that was her father.
Yeah, drama, Squat's daughter took over all of the territory that he once had as her own.
That's like succession or something. That's like an age bo drama. That's like Game of Thrones kind of stuff. Those dynamics are so intense, you know, which is must be such a joy to watch, And I know I wanted to ask just like two questions from listeners. So many questions were about red foxes and folks. This is exciting because now we get to have a second Fox episode called Wolpanology. But in a second we're going to answer more than
two questions submitted by patrons. At patreon dot com slash Ologies, you can join for as little as a dollar a month. But first, let's donate to a cause, and of course it'll be going to the Urban Wildlife Research Project, which is dedicated to protecting the gray fox and other urban wildlife in the San Francisco Bay area and they do
groundbreaking research, advocacy, and public education. They document wildlife behavior to safeguard the biodiverse habitats that they rely on too, and their mission is not just about conservation, they say, it's about fostering a world where people and wildlife can
thrive together. And right now, the Urban Wildlife Research Project is taking on a really exciting project looking to fund the removal of concrete from a place called Mattador Creek, which also has Beaver's side note, and they want to open up those waterways so wildlife from the Palo Alto Baylands areas can move up into the Santa Cruz Mountains and thereby interface with a healthy genetic pool. Bill told
me so. To support their work, and also to get Bill's excellent newsletter, which I love, go to Urban Wildlife Research Project dot org, which we're going to link in the show notes. And thank you to sponsors of ologies for making these donations possible.
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It's cottage cheese, honey. And I'm not sure did the.
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Yeah?
I think so.
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Okay, let's scramble up a tree to the Patreon mailbag and get your questions. Emil wanted to know.
Why are fox has seen a sneaky sly Like they're so cute and they're so expressive with their pretty eyes and their eyelashes, and I just don't understand why they're scene is like sneaky and sly.
They're smart, ah sli and small of that attributed to foxes goes all the way back to Aesop Oh Asop's fables, and if you read any of Aesop's fables there it's always sly, cunning fox. Their teaching stories is what they are. He dubbed them that, and we've never changed it. It's just the pattern of and belief has come down for over two thousand years.
I went to fact check this and hold up Asop's fables are over two thousand years old. I thought that had to be a misspeak, but no, it's right on the money news to me. ASoP lived around six hundred BCE as an enslaved person in Greece, and his Wikipedia notes that he was a gifted storyteller but quote strikingly ugly, which seems an unnecessary detail, but to people who have
dated comedians it may be relevant. And a twenty twenty one paper titled Asop's Fables Analysis of Major Characters notes that the fox appears the most frequently of all the animals in his fables, and although usually representing cunning, deceit, or treachery, the fox also occasionally serves as a more general figure, like a basic representative of humanity. But yeah, usually in these stories the fox is too clever for it, so I'm good and it's a victim of hubris and folly.
There must be depictions that Bill loves, though there's so many to choose from. Well, speaking of pop culture, Mel from New Zealand wants to know.
Hi.
It's Mel here from New Zealand. I'm curious how close are foxes and what they do and how they live to the movie fantastic, mister Fox.
Thanks, I've never watched that movie.
Really?
Yeah?
Is there a movie that is good about foxes that you say they got it right?
A little?
No?
No, Fox and the Hound Robin hood.
I. I haven't paid any attention to those those stories.
I respect that now. Some of you had for questions, such as Connie DeFazio, Lynette Davila Kylisi, some question asker Rosamunda, Jada Lin and in the Tangle System's words, are they soft? Do they like pettons? Can I smush my face on their fur and hug them and give them food and play with them? The Tangle System No, but with enough data we can at least imagine the experience. Do you
ever get to observe them very very closely? Some people wanted to know about their hair, if it's very coarse, if it's very fuzzy, if it's the guard hairs over and the soft underneath. Our foxes as fuzzy and cute as they look.
Short to Answery, Yes, okay, yeah. First of all, even though they tolerate me within their environment, they have their limits, and their limits are It's about five six seven feet the closest they'll come after that, it's really nervous kiddish time. So I have never had the urge and I've never petted one. They don't come that close.
Yeah, And if you're wondering how soft are these critters, keep in mind that the gray fox is also called the mained fox because of its bristly ridge of hairs along the top of its tail. Once again, dogs, cats excellent pets. There's less p They have softer fur. They are available at a shelter near you for not a lot of money. But of course, in a dream sequence, if you got to pet the belly of a tiny gray fox.
Well, their fur is soft. I have a mounted fox that I take out when I give public lectures and presentations on it. It's a little mounted fox named Rusty. Oh, and he's really cool. Kids love him.
Do you know Rusty's backstory.
The way he came about was that San Jose State University had in their science apartment they had a gray fox, a mounted gray fox in their study. So when I started going out to give presentations, I would borrow this gray fox from San Jose State. And it was an ugly looking gray fox. It wasn't mounted very well and it wasn't. It was so old that it had lost
a lot of its color. So I got online and I decided, I'm going to find a gray fox that really is representative of what I'm seeing out in the field. And I contacted a guy over in Massachusetts and he had some online for sale mounted gray foxes, and I looked at them all and I didn't I wasn't attracted to any of them. But he had his phone number up there too, so I gave him a call and I said, Hey, do you have any other mounted foxes? And he said I do, well. He put Rusty up
there and they that was it. That was it. Oh, that was the fox that I needed. I bought it, gave it to San Use State and they held on to it for some about five years. But then they shut down the department that this was housed in, and the curator contacted me and she said, you better get over here right away because they're taking all of the materials that we have here. She said, I don't know what they're going to do with it, but Rusty as
part of that. I went booming down there to State and picked up Rusty and I have him now here.
Oh, I can't imagine him being in better hands. Obviously.
Yeah, he's cool.
And just a side note, don't cry because usually taxidermists who deal with museums are using specimens that were killed naturally and then found and donated, or they were ambassador species that were then donated. And for more on this and why I had a dead quail in my freezer for like over a year, please see the Nasology episode with expert and award winning taxidermist Alice Markham, which is linked in the show notes. So it's not all dark.
Speaking of darkness, a few people wanted to know Amanavegan and Sarah wanted to know if they are nocturnal. Sarah asked, if a fox is out during the day, is that bad? Does it mean it has rabies or mange? And is that true across a lot of foxes or does it really depend on the species?
They are not strictly nocturnal, okay. Foxes when they sleep, they don't sleep like you and I do. Oh really, there's another characteristic like catlike they nap. They'll nap for about maybe twenty thirty minutes, and then they wake up and they go to another location where they have another sleeping bed. Really, and they can do this numerous times during the course of the day. So you might see a gray fox in the middle of the day going from one sleeping location to another location.
They've evolved to just function sleeping in these kind of naps. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I wish my brain did that. I would get a lot more done. Bill also sent me an email after we chatted, regretting that he didn't define crepuscular, but I got you Bill. Bill wrote, crepuscular means that an animal like the gray fox has daytime hours. On each end of the day. They are up and about hunting and going about fox things a couple hours after sunrise and a few hours before nightfall. And he also
added that quote. Another story I missed was when the male gray fox, Brownie, and his mate little One got a divorce. That was kind of sad the way she handled it, he wrote, And that breaks me speaking of
sadness and worry. Some of you Alia Meyers, Lisa Gorman, Ali's Tie, Andy Pepper, Clara Noon Gosser, Chris Carrius, Alicia Harris, Lauren Robinson, her Ladyship Chen and first time question asked Chris Lydia Trump and Tim Farth wanted to know a lot of people were worried about conservation and Courtney Peterson, they live in Utah and wanted to know.
How can I save the foxes? Or better ask, how can I help conserve them? I live in a rural area that's becoming quickly developed, and a lot of people around here don't like the foxes because they kill their chickens and everything. But how could I help conserve the foxes in my area?
Thank you?
And Bria says it's kind of a bummer to think about what might happen to foxes, and so, yeah, where are we at and what can we do?
Well, first of all, we got to overcome the notion that they're chicken killers. We're living at a time when we are interfacing with more and more wildlife out there, and in so doing, one of the things we have to learn to do is if we have chicken coop, we keep the chickens completely isolated from the outside world. By that, I mean you have a chicken pen, but you also put a top on the chicken pen, oh god, a roof so to speak, and it can just be wire up in there. But any way that they can
get into the chicken pen, they will. Yeah, so you have to isolate your chickens off to the side and make sure that they are inaccessible.
I know you want chicken tips, And luckily we have a two part episode on chickens with expert and author of the book Under the Henfluence, Tova Kate Danovich. Peck it at the link in the show notes. But yeah, as we also discussed in the Indigenous Fire Ecology episode with doctor Amy Christensen, we who or wildlife human interface is getting pretty razor thin, and the more humans move in to the forests and the wilds, the more of
a bummer it can be for the critters. So you have to be careful when you invade wildlife territory, and you got to keep your side of the street clean and don't complain about foxes acting like.
Foxes, and then we can live side by side. So with development coming in, I think I don't like that word of development. When I think of development, I think with uplifting kinds of things. But this kind of development destroys,
and it destroys habitat. So with more and more of that coming in, and more and more the foxes showing up in your backyard at night usually is a good thing because what they're doing will go back to what they're doing is they're keeping the rodent population in check, and so you're not going to have a rat problem. You're going to have a good balanced ecosystem. And as long as we can keep that going, we're okay around here.
I have had one two, I've had four cases over the course of the time that I've been monitoring these foxes, to where whole neighborhoods were quote invaded by gray foxes. I'm envious. And most of the people who lived in those subdivisions and those places usually right along a creek by the way, the people just got so used to them that they do photo ops with them. I mean, you know, taking pictures and put it on the next
door and so forth like that. And a lot of people get a hold of me and they want to know what to do, you know, when they have, let's say, a family of foxes under their deck. This one man, he contacted me and he said, I have a little dog, okay, and this family of foxes has moved in under by deck and I don't want them there. What do I do? My first impulse was to say, leave them alone. Yeah, and so in the end I told him how to block off the deck so that they couldn't get back
in under there, and he was successful. They hung around for about three or four days. He said. They were just crying, he said. Then they left. They disappeared.
Oh poor sweeties. Do they ever eat cats or little dogs?
I've never heard of any. No, I've never doing that. Coyotes yep, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just a side note, Grey foxes are more capable of meal planning than I am, and I have thumbs. But they cash their food hiding carcasses among piles of leaf litter or buried in loose soil, and they go back and eat it later. And kind of like your coworker marking leftover pad tie with a sharpie. Foxes poop on top of their cash site to say, don't dare, but no poop. Fair game. Now, on the subject of microbes et cetera, let's talk about a bummer disease and wild populations.
Bill opened up about a very difficult aspect of being the fox guy.
But canine distemper is a major major problem in this area that I'm monitoring. By twenty sixteen, I had twenty five foxes that I was monitoring, and that tells you something right there. There wasn't enough room for them to spread out like they should have, so they were crowded like neighbors side by side, having their pups and so forth.
And this was in twenty sixteen, a very dark time for Bill and his foxes.
So in November I noticed some of the foxes missing, and Mama Bold was one of those. And at that time I didn't know what the oversigns of canine distemper were, but one of them is a pus like oozing from the eyes, and when you see that, you know they've got canine distemper. Well. So in November December of twenty sixteen, all twenty five foxes were wiped out. No, yeah, they
were hit by canine distemper. And we had the net crop seed at UC Davis at the vet lab there, and the lead state veterinarian told us that they had analyzed the two foxes. I said, well, where did it come from, you know? And she said, you know, in the state of California. Here, she said, I get die out from all of the state every year and it's CA. Nine distemper and we don't know where it comes from. She said, it's like it's like it lives in the earth itself. So with that die out, then I lost
all of my foxes. And I waited. I waited two years and one month with cameras on for that whole period of time, waiting, waiting, waiting for the gray fox to show up. And who shows up? Limos and big eyes. Oh, the last two gray foxes that I monitored out there at the Daylands before they died of CA nine distemper.
No.
Yeah, she died in February of last year, and he died November the year before.
His last two foxes. This is gutting, and I was trying to control my face from just crumbling on the video call. Is there anything that can be done to prevent it? Does it mean if there was kind of a pandemic in that area that more foxes will catch it from environmental Yeah?
Yeah, it's still out there and it's still a danger to them all, and there's nothing, nothing that is effective. There's been attempts to make an edible that has a vaccine a drug, yeah, yeah, and it would kill off K nine distemper, but that hasn't worked too well.
What do they do for dogs, Well, there's no treatment, just prevention by way of vaccination, So vaccinate your dogs. Research has shown that dogs can carry and spread distemper to wildlife, and wildlife are difficult, if not impossible, to vaccinate. So what else can you do for these foxes or not to do?
Not put that direct poison out there, put an owl up there instead. Yeah, that's what we need to do. And I've been trying to push one of the complexes, one of the high tech complexes, to try it. On the border of the area that I'm monitoring. I've been trying to get them to get rid of those boxes and put in owl boxes instead.
Yeah, we have gophers, and we put up a barn owl box, and we were so sad that it's been unoccupied, and then we realized it was unoccupied because we have a pair of owls that moved in of great horned owls, which don't necessarily like to play well with barn owls. But that's great. We hear the owls hooting every night, and we have fewer gophers than we did in the past.
So and we've had to ask all our neighbors like, please don't put out any strict nine or any rat poison, because these beautiful horn owls are like, you know, there's such a treat to have in the neighborhood and are helping so much. Just a side note, a barn owl or a great horn owl can eat thousands of mice a year, sometimes up to two hefty rats a night, just in case you don't have local foxes and you want to outsource your rodent control to like a hit
man with a beak and a family. But back to foxes, I gather that these losses, a whole multi generational gray fox community wiped out suddenly, is just beyond the worst part of his work. What do you think is your favorite thing about studying animals in the wild and your favorite thing about maybe gray foxes.
Overall. I've always said this, Okay, I'm not doing really anything of very much importance. I have always said that the gray foxes, and I can expand it out into a lot of other wildlife are my professors, and I'm a grad student in their course, and I'm being taught by them what they are all about. And all I'm doing is just documenting, putting down notes, moving it over into my log, and that log now is well over two million words.
Oh my gosh, how do you keep track of that? Do you write it in a Google doc or do you have it in notepads?
Or well? I first, I have a notepad like this, and this is what I take my notes on. When I'm out in the field. I take it here, and then when I come back here to the computer, I have an ongoing daily log, and I put it in a narrative form into the log, and the log tells a story, a long, long story of daily documenting the behavior that I saw out there in the field.
There's even a short documentary about our new favorite fox guy, and it's called The Foxes My Professors, and we'll link it in the show notes because it's beautiful and Bill's great, and you and the Foxes deserve to see it. This has been so amazing. I'm so glad I finally got to talk to you. You've been on my list of people to talk to you for literally years.
How come? I mean, what what initiated that I always want to know this kind of thing?
I think, looking for fox experts, looking for people who mention other people, other animal behaviorists, so you just end up hearing little chatter and then when someone has the Fox guys their middle name, you can't not talk to that guy. You got to talk to the Fox guy.
Well, if you ever come up this way, just get in touch with me and we'll go out and I'll show you the landscape.
I would love that. I need to make a trip up there. Yeah, okay, So ask fox people facts because honestly, their favorite topic is my favorite topic. I think you will find the same. And in the future we will do a vulpanology episode. But dang, these little gray ones, they have my hearts. It's going to be hard to top. Now. In the show notes, we've linked Bill's fantastic fox book, The Road to Foxhallow, and we've also linked the nonprofit
Urban Wildlife Research Project. I highly recommend signing up for Bill's newsletter if you like beautiful pros and ecology and pictures of egregiously cute foxes.
Now.
We are at ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward with one L on both. You can sign up for our Patreon at Patreon dot com, slash ologies Ologies merch is at ologiesmerch dot com. We also have shorter kid friendly episodes that are g rated. Those are called Smologies and available at the link in the show notes or wherever you get podcasts. Aaron Talbert admit Ziologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Mallick makes our professional transcripts.
Kelly R.
Dwyer does the website. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale managing directs A Whole Shabang, and our amazing editors are Jake Chafe and Mercee. He's Matland of Matland Audio. Nick Thorburn means the theme music and if you stick around until the very episode, I tell you a secret this week is that Jarrett your pod mother. My spouse has had me simply the fox emoji in his phone for years and it is a vulpus fox and now
I'm like, well, okay, but I'll take it. Also, I want to leave you this week with Bill's email signature, which reads, have a good day, keep moving on, keep doing our best. Bill freaking love this guy.
Okay from a Hacadermistology, homeology, rycdo zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology, pathology, anthology, seriology, selenology.
Hey you're cool when it comes to a great deal.
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You can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Have the perfect night in with their finest frozen pizza meal deal. Get a finest frozen pizza, chips and ice cream all for six euro like our delicious spicy Salami, Hot Honey and do Ya or Margarito wood fired pizzas, served up with their crispy chunkie chips and ice cream like Sea Salt de Caramel or Pistachio for dessert.
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