Red fox’s range widens south
Endangered animals detected more than 100 miles beyond past known boundary.
The sleek and tenacious Sierra Nevada red fox — once thought to have disappeared from the mountain range that bears its name — has been detected near the eastern boundary of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.
The discovery by scientists from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife gives hope that the population of the small carnivore could be expanding, or at least occupying a broader range than previously believed, increasing the fox’s chance of survival.
“It’s really exciting to find not only that they’re still here, but that they’re in many more places than we initially thought they were,” said Julia Lawson, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The agency detected the foxes on four occasions with three survey cameras near Taboose Pass, east of the John Muir Trail, at elevations between 11,400 and 12,000 feet. The sightings, made between April and June 2022, extended the known range of the animals by more than 100 miles to the south.
At 8 pounds, the fox is not much larger than a house cat. Its extraordinary hearing enables it to find small rodents, even when the prey is covered by a layer of snow. The fox’s coat ranges in color from red to granite, with f luffy fur once prized by trappers, who would sell the pelts to be made into coats and stoles.
Hunting and trapping of the animals decimated the population to the point that scientists and conservationists for much of the 20th century believed that the species had been eliminated from the Sierra.
Trapping was banned in 1974, and the fox was listed as threatened in California in 1980. In 2021, the federal government listed the Sierra Nevada population as endangered. (A distinct population of foxes in the Cascades continued.)
The 2010 discovery of a
small population of the foxes at Sonora Pass alerted conservationists that they still had a foothold in the Sierra, toward the northern end of Yosemite National Park.
Researchers have been working since then to better understand where the foxes live in hopes of designing a conservation plan to boost their chance of survival.
In 2018, remote cameras detected foxes at six sites in the Mono Creek watershed, southeast of the town of Mammoth Lakes.
Researchers collected scat samples that indicated the presence of two females and one male. The samples helped determine that the male had traveled more than 70 miles south from Sonora Pass to the Mono Creek area.
The California wildlife agency collaborated on the study with the UC Davis Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit, the California Department of Water Resources, Southern California Edison and officials in national parks and national forests.
“These new detections are very personally gratifying and are a real payoff for all the hard work our staff has put in,” said Fish and Wildlife biologist Brian Hatfield, lead author on the research. “From a conservation standpoint, this shows that the Sierra Nevada red fox is more widely distributed than previously believed.”
Lawson noted that wider distribution “means that they’re more resilient to a catastrophe or disease — something that could wipe out a population in one place. With populations scattered throughout the mountain range, you have a better chance of the species surviving.”