California Struggles with Smart Fox

The San Franicisco Chronicle of August 16, 2004 notes that California is still stuggling with wildlife management problems exacerbated by the fact that the State has made it difficult to use traps and human population densities have made it difficult to use a gun safely:

"Among the scores of species that permanently reside or migrate through the marshes is the California clapper rail, a reclusive wading bird that is listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The rail has staged a resurgence in recent years, primarily because of a variety of marsh rehabilitation projects, such as those underway at the Hayward Shoreline.

But the rail has a dire enemy at the shoreline -- something DiDonato has been combatting with only mixed success.

"Eastern red foxes showed up in the Bay Area in the 1980s," DiDonato said. "We don't really know how they got here, but they've given us tremendous grief from the beginning."

That's because eastern red foxes are devastatingly good at what they do: predation. They are larger and more aggressive than the rather demure indigenous gray foxes and have been supplanting them whenever the two species come in contact.

Worse, they're implacable when it comes to gobbling clapper rails.

"Gray foxes generally won't venture out onto the tidal flats where the clapper rails breed and forage," DiDonato said, "but the eastern reds aren't at all afraid of getting wet. So wherever they get established, the rails just disappear."

Red foxes can be controlled fairly easily with leg-hold traps -- but California outlawed the use of these devices in the 1990s.

"That really narrowed our options," DiDonato said. "We can use box traps, and we can shoot them. But they're extremely wary of box traps, and we can only shoot them in certain situations -- early in the morning or at dusk, when the risk to the public is nil. Plus, they're very smart, so we don't get many opportunities for a shot."