Urocyonology (LITTLE GRAY FOXES) with Bill Leikam

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Oh, hey, it's the guy who didn't even look at your receipt before dragging a highlighter over it.

Allie Ward, 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, urogynecology.

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 everyday 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, 2022's The Road to Fox Hollow, which is beautifully written.

And he's contributed to Canids 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 P22 episode has called him the Jane Goodall of the gray fox.

And by the end of the episode, you're never never going to look at foxes 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 ologiesmerch.com.

Also, side note, we have smologies, which are G-rated, shorter, kid-friendly episodes, and those you can find anywhere you get your podcast.

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 Riderway, 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.

Riderway,

we just have really good guests.

Y'all are going to 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 neurosinologist Bill Lycum.

Okay, Bill Lycum.

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 was exactly the best fox, but it's uh 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're feline.

And so what about them is cat-like?

Is it how they stalk their prey?

It's part part of that, but it's also the manner in which they sit.

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 dog-like?

Only

probably appearance.

Really?

Yeah, because they 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 U.S.

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 pee.

What do foxes smell like?

I've heard that they're musky, very musky.

Is this 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 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 this or What do they do?

I'm all ears.

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, a trespasser, let's say,

the pair of foxes that claims the territory.

will fight off

any other fox that comes into the area that 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.

Oh, dear.

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 it, like Jane Goodall said, you know, once you get to know them, you can't dub them with a GF, you know, 42,

whatever it might be, you know.

So I give them names.

And this one gray fox, I called Laimos, and that means long neck in Greek,

because he had kind of an extended neck.

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 pile

like a jenga tower and finally finally the red foxes 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 2023 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 pea and other things coming out of their bodies.

And of course, when there is habitat loss and a lot of animals crammed 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, well, 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 note.

And you also need to have the ability to observe in detail.

So if you observe in detail and document correctly, 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 looking at foxes?

Fox, foxology.

That's what we'll call it.

Foxology?

It's not vulpinology?

Oh, because, well,

vulpe vulpe

is the mainline of the fox classification.

Okay, but gray fox doesn't fit in there.

No.

Gray fox is your a sion.

No.

Not vulpe.

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 bodysuits, 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 an olie.

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 ostensibly 24.

Okay.

And some of those 24 are very rare and live in other parts of the world.

And then there are overlaps.

The Asian raccoon dog

is considered in sort of in the fox lane, and the bat-eared 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 Vulpes are the most common, and other vulpes species include the Arctic fox and the kit fox, the huge-eared sandy-colored fennec fox, the cape fox, and of course the red fox, which is vulpes vulpace.

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, Otocyan.

Now, also, not a vulpace, is our newly beloved gray fox.

It's one of just two species in that genus, and its full name, Eurocyon.

Cinereoargentis means silver dog tail.

It's got a nice long tail.

And the gray fox, it used to be the most prevalent fox in pre-colonized 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.

Oh.

Weighs about anywhere from probably eight, nine pounds on the slim side up to about 15.

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 a 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, Eurocyon, is the little island fox.

And it's tiny.

It weighs in at just like four or five pounds.

Archaeologists think it's only been on those islands for about 6,000 years.

And the National Park Service notes that the indigenous Chumash 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 ones 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.

Some others say, no, it was when the two landmasses, 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 2007 or so,

my doctor said to me, he said, you know, Bill, if you would get out and walk for, let's say, a 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 it got to be

fairly good.

And one of my favorite, favorite ones was the Bullock's Oriole.

Okay.

It's a very, 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 a bend.

And whoa, ahead of me up there

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 2009.

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 or 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, how cute.

So I'm saying to myself, uh-oh, I discovered a family, not just one fox.

There's a whole family here.

Just a side note, this was in 2009.

And at the time, Bill was nearly 70 years old.

Let me math this out for you.

Bill is 85, people.

I didn't find out until after the interview, and I thought he was like maybe 60.

He's 85 and he's still out doing field work.

So take his doctor's advice.

Walk 30 minutes a day if you can.

Maybe slide a post-it note notepad in your pocket in case you see some frolicking animals.

But yeah, so on this day in 2009, 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 post-it 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 road a ways, 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, you know, 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.

That's sort of the sound of a gray fox.

Really?

But raspier.

Yeah, yeah, more laryngitis.

Wow, I didn't know that they did that.

Yeah.

So the call of the gray fox is apparently like if a cocker spaniel smoked a pack a day of Marlborough 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 hiding in nearby shrubbery and looks up from its 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 whines and whimpers and squeals and yips and yaps.

And the babies are on the yip-yappier side, I guess before their voices develop their signature gravelly patina.

I had no idea.

Is that mostly just the 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's very similar.

Oh, I had no idea.

Yeah.

I didn't even know that they did much vocalizing.

So

she's on her belly barking at you?

Yeah, she's barking at me.

And I'm worried she's going to come charging over and bite my leg.

And I want 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, bye-bye.

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, jotting field notes on his post-it pad 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, this 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.

He 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.

And that changed the whole picture of

my relationship with the foxes.

Just a side note, this ability is called extended consciousness.

And in 2024, a group of biologists and philosophers, highly regarded, acknowledged via something called 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, decapod 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 raw chipmunk.

Sad.

Wow.

And so they anticipated that.

They met you there.

Did 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 at his camera?

He always goes to it.

The curiosity quotient, I sometimes called it, is a high 10, way up there.

Really?

Compared with other raccoons, they 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 comfortable 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're 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 biodiversity.

What are you going to do?

Yeah.

I think it's just the 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 2009 paper, Multiple Praternity and Kinship in the Gray Fox from the journal Mammalian Biology, which concluded that up to 57%

of all litters had more than one father, with the highest rates seen in the denser populations.

And I'm sorry,

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 in one uterus while she weans the litter from the first tank.

So one uterus might have Ronald's babies and the other might have Craig's, and she has to grow them and nurse them.

So it's her choice, which in 2025 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 Landman,

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 Dr.

Ben Sachs over at UC Davis.

So when I went to meet with Ben and talk to him about what I was 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 had been studying the 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.

And 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 wait to ambush something?

Are they climbing trees to get birds and squirrels?

Like, what does it look like when a fox is hungry?

Ooh,

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 of 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 20 feet away from me up in the tree there she was

and it was a young female that I called cute okay oh

cute 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

boom, she goes for it, and she slips and she falls,

misses the squirrel, and falls into a berry vine 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 it was almost as if saying well god help me yeah

maybe 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 uh trail 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 uh the alpha male of the area

and he was um

they didn't like being parents let me put it that way really

yeah

yeah over on the other side the pair uh 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 do they not do?

They tended to ignore their young ones.

My Shayla.

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, what would happen would be that cute would want some attention from Dark or her mate, 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 of 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.

And so he didn't want to have any of the other males around.

And he'd chase 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 gestating?

Oh, about 53 days.

Oh.

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 to.

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 was 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'd get under the, she only had six nipples.

And the number of little foxes under their nursing, sometimes one of them would 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 canines.

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 at 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 they really in decline?

They're doing okay.

Okay.

There are a few places where there has been a recorded decline in the number of gray foxes, but nobody really has an answer as to why.

One of the areas is in the city of Chicago.

It may be because of the number of coyotes that are in Chicago.

It's 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 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 Foxbook.

It became that people were filming the foxes as they were coming through the campus and moving 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 2013, 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 gray foxes up there.

What?

How?

I guess they can climb trees, but.

Yeah, but you don't climb a building.

Yeah.

Was there anything up there?

Was there just like an HVAC system or did they have they landscaped the roof?

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 pups 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.

What?

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

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 pups up there, fully rooftop terrace Menlo 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, the red fox is the one that digs a burrow and digs down in and makes rooms underground and everything like that for the family.

Gray foxes don't.

Gray foxes will find dense, dense thickets, 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 a 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 20 years.

He told me, he said, that den has been used for at least 25 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 pu

she was born in that natal 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 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 in that back there in the brush.

And after a while, this little pup comes out on the road and gives Squat, her father,

what I call a fox kiss.

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 it's a little kiss it's a little recognition that hey you're cool.

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 they 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 pea.

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 pup 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 most anything, and she wouldn't go, she wouldn't zoom out, you know.

So, that was the start of Mama Bull.

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.

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 Mamabold 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 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 hbo drama that's like game of thrones kind of stuff

those dynamics are so intense you know which is Yeah, 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 Volpinology.

But in a second, we're going to answer more than two questions submitted by patrons at patreon.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 Matador Creek, which also has beavers.

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 urbanwildlife researchproject.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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Okay, let's scramble up a tree to the Patreon mailbag and get your questions.

Emile wanted to know.

Why are foxes seen as 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 seen as like sneaky and sly.

They're smart.

Aha.

Slyness and all of that attributed to foxes goes all the way back to Aesop.

Oh.

Aesop's fables.

And if you read any of Aesop's fables, it's always sly, cunning fox.

They're 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 2,000 years.

I went to fact check this and hold up.

Aesop's fables are over 2,000 years old.

I thought that had to be a misspeak, but no, it's right on the money.

News to me, Aesop lived around 600 BCE as an enslaved person in Greece.

And his Wikipedia notes that he was a gifted storyteller, but quote, strikingly strikingly ugly, which seems an unnecessary detail, but to people who have dated comedians, it may be relevant.

And a 2021 paper titled Aesop'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 its own 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 Mr.

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 haven't paid any attention to those stories.

I respect that.

Now, some of you had fur questions, such as Connie DeFazio, Lynette Davila, Kyla C, first-time question asker Rosa Munda, Jada Lynn, 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.

Are foxes as fuzzy and cute as they look?

Short answer, yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

First of all, even though they tolerate me within their environment, they have their limits.

And their limits are

about

five, six, seven feet the closest they'll come.

After that, it's really nervous, skittish time.

So I have never had the urge, and I've 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 maned fox because of its bristly ridge of hairs along the top of its tail.

Once again, dogs, cats, excellent pets.

There's less pee, 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.

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 department, they had a gray fox, a mounted gray fox in their studies.

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 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 I, bingo, that was it.

That was all there is to it.

That was the fox that I needed.

needed i bought it gave it to san jose state

and they held on to it for uh

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 is 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 Nassology 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, Amanda Regan 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 cat-like.

They nap.

They'll nap for about maybe 20, 30 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 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 Myers, Lisa Gorman, Ali is Tired, Annie Pepper, Claire Noon Gasser, Chris Curious, Alicia Harris, Lauren Robinson, Her Ladyship Jen, and first-time question askers Lydia Trom and Tim Barth 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 asked, 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've 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 a 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, got it.

A roof, so to speak.

And it can just be a 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 K.

Danovich.

Peck it at the link in the show notes.

But yeah, as we also discussed in the Indigenous Fire Ecology episode with Dr.

Amy Christensen, the Weehoo or wildlife-human interface is getting...

pretty razor thin and the more humans move into 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 don't like that word development.

When I think of development, I think of uplifting kinds of things, but this kind of development destroys and it destroys habitat.

So

with more and more of 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, we'll 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, three,

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 really rather envious.

And most of the people who lived in those subdivisions and those places, usually right along a creek, by the way.

Oh.

The people just got so used to them that they'd do photo ops with them.

I mean, you know, taking pictures and putting on 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 my 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.

And

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 heard of anything that.

Coyotes?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And just a side note: gray foxes are more capable of meal planning than I am.

And I have thumbs, but they cache 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, etc., 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 2016, I had 25 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 2016, 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 I didn't know what the overt signs 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 2016, all 25 foxes were wiped out.

No.

Yeah.

They were hit by canine distemper,

And we had the necroxied 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 dieouts from all over the state every year.

And it's canine 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 dieout, then I lost all of my foxes

and

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 Baylands before they died of canine December.

No.

Yeah.

She died in February of last year and he died November the year before.

His last two foxes.

This was 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 causes?

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

in it that would kill off canine 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 do?

Do not put that direct poison out there.

Put an owl out there instead.

You know, 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 that's right 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 strychnine or any rat poison because these beautiful horned owls are like, you know, they're such a treat to have in the neighborhood and are helping so much.

Just a side note: a barn owl or a great horned 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 hitman 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 2 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 have, 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 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 have been on my list of people to talk to for literally years.

How come?

I mean,

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, you know, animal behaviorists.

So you just end up hearing a little chatter.

And then when someone has the fox guy as 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, 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 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 Fox Hollow and we've also linked the non-profit Urban Wildlife Research Project.

I highly recommend signing up for Bill's newsletter if you like beautiful prose and ecology and pictures of egregiously cute foxes.

Now we are at Ology's on Blue Sky and Instagram.

I'm Allie Ward with one L on both.

You can sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com slash ologies.

Ology's merch is at ologiesmerch.com.

We also have shorter kid-friendly episodes that are G-rated.

Those are called Smallogies and available at the link in the show notes or wherever you get podcasts.

Aaron Talbert admins the Ology's podcast Facebook group.

Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

Kelly R.

Dwyer does the website.

Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer.

Susan Hale managing directs a whole shebang.

And our amazing editors are Jake Chaffee and Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.

Nick Thorburn made 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 Vulpis 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, bye-bye.

Hachidermatology, Homiology.

Cryptozoology.

Letology.

Nanotechnology.

Meteorology.

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