Wisconsin's City-Dwelling Red Foxes Face Endless Challenges

   If a red fox tunnels under your toolshed or burrows beneath putting greens on nearby golf courses, you won’t guarantee it a long, healthy life by hiring a trapper to move it to a suburban woodlot or even a rural wetland.

   That’s what researcher David Drake concluded in a talk Feb. 12 at the annual winter meeting of Wisconsin’s Wildlife Society in Stevens Point. Drake, a professor at UW-Madison, put it bluntly in the conference’s three-day seminar schedule: “Urban red fox translocation leads to dispersal and low survival.”

  As UW-Madison researchers have found repeatedly the past 20 years, red foxes wreck stuff when living among humans. Yes, they’re cute when young, and pretty when mature, but mitigating their damage isn’t easy and moving them elsewhere isn’t necessarily humane.

And despite everyone's best intentions, they’ll probably soon die.

Drake reviewed what happened to eight young Madison-area red foxes that researchers fitted with GPS-transmitting collars before releasing them within a few miles of their former homes. Some were turned loose in Warner Park on Madison’s east side, and the others at the Yahara Hills Golf Course and Edna Taylor Conservation Park on the southeast side.

Red foxes face never-ending challenges to survival, whether they live in Wisconsin’s forests, rural woodlands, roadside culverts or suburban backyards.

— Photo courtesy of Snapshot Wisconsin, Department of Natural Resources

   Once released, the young foxes – six males and two females – fled quickly north and east toward less developed habitats, even though they’d been born in fairly urban settings. The distances they moved ranged from 2 miles to 53 miles.

   Three were road-killed fairly quickly. The first one got Goodyeared two days after its release, while another got Firestoned 22 days later, and the third got Michelined 130 days later.

   A fourth fox wandered into a hangar at the Dane County Regional Airport, and had to be shot to ensure it didn’t cross a runway and endanger aircraft. A fifth fox died but the researchers couldn’t verify what killed it.

   Researchers couldn’t monitor two of the foxes because their tracking collars quit functioning upon their release, despite the units being tested and verified shortly before. In the months that followed, only one of the eight “translocated” foxes was verified alive.

   If nothing else, the study provided more data for the law of unintended consequences. Most folks don’t want to kill or harm wildlife, even when the prettiest among them eat flowers, devour gardens, foul lawns or collapse walkways. Likewise, everyone wants to rescue “abandoned” cubs, fawns and fledglings. And we’re all concerned by drooling deer and mangy coyotes.

   But more folks probably should accept the word and experience of biologists or ornithologists when told that quick death is often the most merciful way to mitigate damage. Academicians even have a name for what happens when good intentions cause unintended harm: pathological altruism. You’ll even find books about it, with subtitles like “The Hidden Agendas of Needy Helpers” and “Why Being Too Nice Can Hurt You and Everyone Around You.”

   Meanwhile, professors like Drake, his colleague Tim Van Deelen, and their many UW-Madison graduate and Ph.D. researchers keep studying and critiquing their findings. They anticipate questions like, “Why not release troublesome foxes back into the urban or suburban neighborhood they came from?”

   Well, because the homeowners or business owners who complained didn’t want them back in the ’hood. No university or agency has reform schools for wildlife. We can’t teach them how to live among us and leave our stuff alone. Besides, even though most folks don’t want to euthanize furry or feathery nuisances themselves, they’ll stay quiet if someone does the deed for them.

   But even when foxes settle in quiet city parks, green spaces and backyard woodlots, they still face long odds; even adult foxes that look both ways before crossing roads. Drake and his students have observed that behavior in urban foxes. Maybe those foxes grew up in densely developed neighborhoods with narrow roads, speed bumps and low speed limits. They survived their youth despite behaving like easily distracted 16-year-old drivers who look too quickly and brake too slowly.

   Meanwhile, foxes living on a city’s outskirts with more space between homes often die at higher rates beneath bumpers and Bridgestones. Those areas typically have wider streets and boulevards with higher speed limits, as well as more drivers operating at highly varying speeds.

   Still other folks ask why we can’t just drive problem foxes far outside town and release them into a big woods or wetland. Well, because Wisconsin’s rural areas are flush with coyotes and, as Van Deelen and his research students verified, coyotes kill or persecute foxes infringing on their turf.

   “Coyotes push foxes up into culverts and farmsteads and other things associated with roads, so they still have high road-mortality,” Van Deelen said.

   Plus, no matter where your typical 10- to 12-pound red fox lives in town, it will eventually encounter 50- or 100-pound pet dogs that break leashes or cheap chains. Likewise, urban foxes are more likely to contract mange and highly pathogenic avian influenza than their rural counterparts.

   And you think our nation’s biggest cities have mean streets?

   Studies like Drake’s also help wildlife rehabilitators decide how best to spend their time, expertise and limited resources. Most wildlife-rehab facilities struggle to stay in business, given that birds and wildlife don't carry cash, insurance or credit cards.

   Therefore, rehabilitators can’t treat every bird, mammal, reptile or amphibian that kind-hearted people bring in. Should they spend time and money on one critter with little hope of long-term survival when research and experience suggest they spend their resources elsewhere? Most people are just fine letting others make those calls, too.

   After all, the longer we study Mother Nature, the more we confirm her indifference to life, suffering and altruism.