Elusive red fox gains crucial status
One of the rarest animals in California, thought to be long gone from its namesake home until recently, the Sierra Nevada red fox will be listed by the federal government as an endangered species, earning it new protections and a chance to rebound.
The fox, whose numbers today are estimated to be below 100 statewide, was rediscovered in the Sierra in 2010. A motion sensor camera taking pictures of wildlife caught an unexpected image of a red fox near Sonora Pass, upending the belief that the animal had been wiped out of the range decades earlier.
A second cluster of red foxes lives north of the Sierra near Mount Lassen, though the endangered status applies only to the southern population. Most of this population is in and around Yosemite National Park.
“Listing is not something that we’re ever happy to see,” Josh Hull, supervisor of the listing and recovery division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service in Sacramento, told The Chronicle. “But in this case, I think this is a species that will get some good conservation attention.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service said the decision to list the Sierra Nevada red fox as endangered would be published Tuesday in the Federal Register. It will go into effect 30 days later.
The animal is already protected under the California Endangered Species Act, but the additional designation is expected to add new safeguards, such as requiring federal agencies to further consider the fox’s wellbeing in their planning, as well as bring more funding for protection programs.
“It will help us accelerate the conservation of this species,” Hull said.
Red foxes are common in the United States, but the Sierra Nevada red fox is genetically distinct. It’s generally a hardier animal able to weather the higher, colder mountain areas that it lives in, generally 8,000 to 11,000 feet above sea level. It’s smaller, for example, and its feet are furrier.
While the fox once thrived across the snowy Sierra and southern Cascades, it’s faced several threats over the past century and a half, starting with trappers, then losing habitat to livestock, logging and coyotes, and most recently struggling with wildfires and drought. The native fox also has begun to breed with nonnative foxes, further undermining its genetics and numbers.
Federal officials say the animal’s decline is sharpest in the Sierra population, raising questions about its longterm ability to reproduce here. Just 18 to 39 individuals are estimated to exist across Alpine, Fresno, Inyo, Madera, Mono and Tuolumne counties.
The Cascade population of the Sierra Nevada red fox, which includes California’s northern group, has not experienced such a slide, officials say. As a result, it was not included in the listing decision.
The decision also did not include designation of critical habitat, a move that often accompanies an endangered species determination in order to protect the land that the struggling species lives on. In this case, though, at least some of the fox’s range is already parkland and wilderness with safeguards.
The Center for Biological Diversity, which has been pushing for the listing of the fox for a decade, praised the federal action as a positive first step.
“This is probably one of the rarest animals in North America,” said Jeff Miller, a senior conservation advocate at the environmental nonprofit. “It’s got a really small range. Without some assistance, the Sierra Nevada population could blink out; we could lose it.”
Miller’s group, which has filed two lawsuits to expedite the federal listing decision, said it’s still reviewing the action to see if it went far enough. Specifically, the organization is looking to see if critical habitat should have been designated for the red fox and whether the Cascade population of foxes deserves similar endangered status.