The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

In which Reynard and Mr. Tod pass the Buffalo wings to Br'er Fox

My schedule is so cruel that I was able to go to only a few talks at the Wildlife Society's excellent 2009 conference, and to look at the posters. (This did however protect me from buying a coatimundi skull, a book on gibbons, and a radiocollar big enough for a bear.)

Even so, it was rewarding because so informative. Let me just say: you will log more fisher visits to your camera traps if you use actual bait. If you are translocating endangered birds from one side of Mauna Kea to the other, they may lose less weight in transit if you provide a wider variety of snacks during travel. Also, if you bought the conventional wisdom about imported red foxes occupying previously foxless lands, you might rethink in light of recent DNA evidence.

                                           

Fisher (Martes pennanti)

                        Palila (Loxioides bailleui) J. Jeffrey Photography

The traditional view has been that Europeans arrived on the east coast of the US, wailed that there were no red foxes, imported red foxes from Europe (suitable for hunting), and created an exuberant population of alien red foxes who spread out over the land. There were already clades of red foxes in the north and in the Rockies, but the invaders filled in the blanks on the map, occupying previously lightly-foxed lands .

A newer view hypothesized at the conference (goaded by a plea from an audience member, apparently a random crotchety blogger who had infiltrated the event) suggests that Europeans arrived on the east coast and saw no red foxes, yet foxes were probably there in modest numbers. The European immigrants imported red foxes, which vanished, leaving no traces in the DNA of the modern foxes sampled. But at the same time the Europeans altered the landscape in ways hospitable to the native red foxes (“Say, looks like they cut down that heavy forest and put in... a... can it be? It is, by cracky, it is! A chicken coop!”) Also they killed off fox-hostile species like wolves. It was by these acts, rather than by imports, that they created the exuberant population of red foxes.

“Tally-ho!” they cried, with completely misplaced self-esteem.

 Jim Thiele

The Fox and the Bear

For many years my friend Mary Lynn Fischer lived with QuickView, an Arctic Fox (Alopex lagopus). Quickie's immediate family had been raised for the exotic pet trade; her ancestors just before that were bred for fur farms; and before that they had been wild.

Quickie herself was both tame and wild. When you came over to the house, Quickie was liable to give you a horrified look and vanish for the rest of your visit. But you might also be eating dinner and feel little forepaws on your back when Quickie hopped up on the back of furniture to peer over your shoulder and see what you were eating.

Mary built a cage with zoo-level security in order to get a Fish & Game permit to possess a wild animal, and she lived in fear that the government would one day decide that people shouldn't be able to keep wildlife in suburbia and confiscate Quickie. At any given moment Quickie might be in the cage, or she might be playing with the dog, curled up on the bed, or requesting admission to her favorite cranny, the freezer compartment of the refrigerator.

Mary has an intellectual as well as an emotional interest in animals (and a great deal of first-hand knowledge). Here's part of an email she recently sent me about her relationship with Quickie:

For years I had wondered about the well known propensity of Alopex to taming. People have  come up with all sorts of theories about it, but the truth is more interesting than one might think.

Arctic Foxes tend to find and attach themselves to Polar Bears, who tend to hate Arctic Foxes. The fox follows the bear and scavenges from the bear's kills. From the fox's perspective, I guess, it's a symbiosis. From the bear's, it's a nuisance.

I examined pictures of the lives of these two coexistent creatures doing whatever it is that they do, over the years, and then it struck me: The fox shadows the bear, wakes the bear up when it sleeps in. ("Wake up! Wake up y'ol' bear! It's time to rise and shine and fetch me breakfast!") The bears grit their teeth at these ministrations. They seem not to particularly dote on their foxes, but the foxes adore their bears. They understand perfectly how useful a large predator can be. There are even pictures of Arctic Foxes fighting over "custody" of a particular bear ("Hey! This is MY bear. Go get your own bear!") When they find an unattached bear they shadow him or her, just out of paw range—actually a rather large distance. They wait until the bear makes a kill. Then they stand about thinking how hungry they are until the bear has had a surfeit and goes to sleep, whereat they take their tithe.

The bear surely does not miss the amount that an Alopex extracts on a good year. It's the principle of the thing. Some bears are relatively tolerant and good humored. Still others look darkly at the fox hovering nearby, and attempt to sleep on top of the carcass, to prevent the fox from even thinking of taking a bit. This does not work. Every now and then, a bear---goaded beyond everything that is holy by the cheek of the little foxes, has been observed to try to take a swipe at them.

My entire life with Quickie was marked by occasional explosions when Whit forgot yet again, and put his slippers beside the bed.  And then there would be the sight of a very happy fox, rushing off importantly with slippers dangling from her mouth, with Whit in hot pursuit.  He never learned. After a while, he took to buying the particular cheap slippers he fancied by the case. It's amazing how quickly a small animal with jaws like a machine vise can get through a case of rubber huaraches. And of course, he had trained her. Because Quickie thought it was wonderful. She didn't quite understand why this was true, but all she had to do was to steal his slippers, and no matter how tired Whit was, he'd rise like Lazarus from the grave, uttering terrible threats ("you'd make up into a great pair of mittens!") and chase her. And chase games are the one thing that little foxes worldwide love. 

This symbiotic relationship with foxes is not limited to the high arctic. The foxes in the Israeli desert loved to shadow hyenas in troops, and the hyenas felt about them the same way that the Polar Bears felt about Alopex. Yet Macdonald relates that few hyenas could be seen without a retinue of foxes at their heels. Occasionally, one of them got much too cheeky, and ended up inside the hyena. But that was rare. I don't think anyone has witnessed a Polar Bear actually getting its fox, but it wasn't for want of trying.

Reflecting on this one day, and weighing all the scientific speculation about the ease with which Alopex can be tamed, I had a sudden realization. Quickie took to captivity the way a duck takes to water. She loved it. She used to look nervously over her shoulder at the spectre of freedom, it seemed to me. She loved standing in front of me in the kitchen, and describing by her glances and little cries, just what it was that she wanted from me. That was when I got it:

I was the fox's bear.

Brother Wolf, You're Not Eating. Aren't You Hungry?

The Italian wolf, Canis lupus italicus, is doing better than it was before. In the 1970s there were guessed to be only about 100 wolves surviving in the mountainous parts of Italy. Now there are more like 500 or 600 and they're fanning out into France and Switzerland.

An Italian wolf likes to hunt medium-sized prey like deer, boar, and chamois. If those aren't available, sure, rabbit is fine. And Wikipedia says of the Italian wolf that it has “adapted well in some urbanised areas and as such, will usually not ignore refuse or domestic animals.”

This is clearly accurate, not only because St. Francis of Assisi made a deal with the sheep-killing, man-eating Wolf of Gubbio that it would stop its destructive ways if the townspeople of Gubbio would give it food instead, but in light of an observation I found in a paper about Italian wolves and foxes in the Abruzzo. The authors were remarking that the foxes seemed to be nervous around wolves. “Uneasy.”

They gave as an example an account of a wolf, a fox, and a cat all eating at a garbage dump outside the village of Caramanico one November day. The cat carefully stayed out of the way of the fox and the wolf. The fox carefully stayed out of the way of the wolf. The wolf, one gathers, strolled calmly wherever it chose, despot of the dump. The fox was jumpy, constantly looking up to see what the wolf was doing. Whenever the wolf moved, the fox rushed over to the place where the wolf had been, to see what it had been eating.

Eventually the wolf, the fox, and presumably even the cat went away, and the researchers inspected the dump, seeking dietary data. They found that all three predators had been eating from a giant heap of discarded spaghetti.

 

Okay, I like spaghetti, but that is sad. I figure those Italian wolves invading France and Switzerland are young wolves looking for better territories, asking themselves where the vast ancient forests are (the ones full of deer), and grumbling that pasta is good, pasta is great, but you know what? After a while you don't want to eat pasta for every. Single. Meal.