Urocyonology (LITTLE GRAY FOXES) with Bill Leikam

Bushy tails! Stinky butts! Faces so cute you weep! Let’s talk foxes – specifically the little gray ones you never knew you loved. Fox behavioral expert, researcher, conservationist, author of “The Road to Fox Hollow” and Urocyonologist Bill Leikam chats about fuzzy foxes, baby names, parental strategies, where they live, what they eat, advice for potential pet owners, how to observe foxes, how tiny foxes wound up on islands, which foxes need conservation, Silicon Valley foxes, and why a fox on the couch is worth 1000 in the bush. Also: what do they smell like? And what do they say?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Picture this: years of guaranteed research support and a vibrant scientific community that has your back. If you are a PhD student, postdoc, or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage with a people, not projects, approach, long-term support, and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. You can find your program at HHMI.org/ologies. Does your closet need a fall reset? Stitch Fix is the secret for refreshing your wardrobe and feeling totally confident in how you dress. Their expert human stylists get to

• 0:45Alie Ward?

  know your life, your style, and budget, so they can pick pieces that actually work for you. Unlike other services, there's no subscription required, so you can order whenever you want without a huge commitment. Plus, you get free shipping and returns. Get started today at StitchFix.com. That's StitchFix.com.

• 1:05Alie Ward?

  This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Your body has a lot going on: sleep, stress, recovery. You would be surprised how connected it all is. Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that information together to help you see patterns across your sleep and stress, activity, and more, so you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at AuraRing.com. Wear your best life with Aura. Oh, hey, it's the guy who didn't even look at your receipt before dragging a highlighter over it, Ali Ward. Here it is. Here it is, the Fox episode. Waited years for this, and

• 1:46Alie Ward?

  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, euro-gynecology. And I scoffed, but honestly, euro-gynecology

• 2:10Alie Ward?

  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,

• 2:55Alie Ward?

  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 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, a 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 podcasts. It's called Smologies. We linked them in the show notes, too. And thank you to everyone who leaves reviews, which help the show so much.

• 3:40Alie Ward?

  I read them all, and I prove it with my mouth by reading one, such as this recent one from Writer Way, 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. Writer Way, 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.

• 4:22Alie Ward?

  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 urologist Bill Lycum.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Okay, Bill Lycum.

• 4:59Alie Ward?

  Cool.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I just wanted to make a point that my specialty is the gray fox.

• 5:05Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  And it's the most unique fox of all of them.

• 5:10Alie Ward?

  Is it the best fox?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I wouldn't say it was exactly the best fox, but it's 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.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So it's older, genetically older than a wolf, a jackal. You name the canid in the, on the planet, gray fox is it.

• 5:43Alie Ward?

  Really? I did not know that, and that is very exciting. Now, first off, a fox, are they more like dogs or cats?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  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 that are feline.

• 6:02Alie Ward?

  And so what about them is cat-like? Is it how they stalk their prey?

• 6:08Speaker 01

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

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Just like a cat would.

• 6:18Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  The way they use their ears is cat like.

• 6:22Alie Ward?

  And then what about them is very dog like?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Only probably appearance.

• 6:30Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, because they they just reflect that cat like behavior.

• 6:36Alie Ward?

  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.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:03Alie Ward?

  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 US. Hey, are you a certified wildlife rehabber and the fox can't be released? Eh, 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?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh huh. Yeah, they are. They reflect their scat.

• 7:41Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:55Alie Ward?

  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.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Oh, well, what they do is they take their feces and they 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, trespasser, let's say, the pair of foxes that claims the territory will fight off another, any other fox that comes into the area, trespasses onto their territory. And eventually they will chase that trespasser out of their territory.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  And the end result of that was what I call the scat wars.

• 9:13Alie Ward?

  Oh, dear.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Because what happened, what happened was that, by the way, I, I named the foxes. I give them personal names. I don't do this scientific bit because like Jane Goodall said, you don't want you get to know them. You can't dub them with a GF, you know, forty two,

• 9:36Speaker 01

  whatever it might be, you know? So I give them names. And this one gray fox, I called Limos, and that means long neck in Greek. Uh, because he had kind of an extended neck. I, I, you know, 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.

• 10:15Alie Ward?

  Like a Jenga tower.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And finally, finally, the red foxes left. And it was about a year later that both of the gray foxes died. Uh, 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.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And that's now what I'm monitoring. I'm monitoring the red foxes instead of the gray foxes.

• 10:53Alie Ward?

  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 pee 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.

• 11:38Alie Ward?

  As someone who studies gray foxes, does that bum you out that it's now a red fox territory? Are you like, that's not my species?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:11Alie Ward?

  Ethology is a study of behavior. Just a side note.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:28Alie Ward?

  How long have you been a vulpenologist? How long have you been hanging out in the field and looking at foxes?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Fox- foxology, that's what we'll call it.

• 12:39Alie Ward?

  Foxology? It's not vulpenology?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Oh, because, well, volpe volpe is the mainline of the fox classification. Okay, but gray fox doesn't fit in there.

• 12:56Alie Ward?

  No.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Gray foxes, Eurosinon.

• 12:59Alie Ward?

  No.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Not Volpe.

• 13:01Alie Ward?

  What?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:02Alie Ward?

  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 newology 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 anology. 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.

• 13:47Alie Ward?

  How many we got?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Well, it, it depends on who you're talking to. There are ostensibly 24.

• 13:55Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:26Alie Ward?

  So yes, this checks out. Red foxes in the genus Volpes are the most common. And other Volpe 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 Volpe's Volpe's. Now, not in the Volpe's bucket is that bat-eared fox of the African savannas, which looks like a jackal and it eats termites, but it's in its own genus, autosion. Now, also not a Volpe's is our newly beloved gray fox. It's one of just two species in that genus. And its full name, Eurosinon cinereo argentis, means silver dog tail. It's got a nice, long tail.

• 15:08Alie Ward?

  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?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Oh, it's like a small dog.

• 15:32Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:59Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  And the red fox, on the other hand, is a field dog.

• 16:05Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  And so the gray fox has short stubby legs and the red fox has long legs for the field.

• 16:14Alie Ward?

  I've seen that.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Movement, you know, through grasses and things like that.

• 16:20Alie Ward?

  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?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Exactly. Mm hmm.

• 16:31Alie Ward?

  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 fox's genus, Erosion, 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.

• 17:13Alie Ward?

  And I personally would follow an island fox into the beyond. I couldn't help myself. Now, what about Bill?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, those are the small ones, the little ones. And there's still a debate on how they ever got there.

• 17:26Alie Ward?

  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?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:49Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Some others say, no, it was when the two land masses, when the islands were part of the mainland and broke off millions of years ago, that it took them along with it.

• 18:03Alie Ward?

  How did you get down the path of foxes or up the tree of foxes?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Whoa, you want to hear a story?

• 18:12Alie Ward?

  Yes, of course. That's why I'm here.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  So I took him up on that offer and I had always been interested in birds, okay? So as a fledgling berber, 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 bullocks oriole, okay? It's a very, it's a pretty bird and I knew a tree down this old dirt road where they

• 19:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And this was in two thousand nine. So I started taking photos, walking closer and closer and closer. And there was a steel gate across the road.

• 19:51Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:11Alie Ward?

  So Bill had this brush with the cat sized bush dogs.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:23Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 20:25Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:47Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God, how cute.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  So I'm saying to myself, oh, I discovered a family, not just one fox. There's a whole family here.

• 20:58Alie Ward?

  Just a side note, this was in two thousand and nine. And at the time, Bill was nearly seventy years old. Let me math this out for you. Bill is eighty five, people. I didn't find out until after the interview. And I thought he was like maybe sixty. He's eighty five and he's still out doing field work. So take his doctor's advice, walk thirty 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 two thousand and nine, Bill saw this gaggle of foxes who kind of looked at him quizzically.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  I sat down on the other side of the road and I had a post-it pad in my pocket.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  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? It 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.

• 22:17Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  And she comes up to the gate and she gets down on her belly and she's looking at me.

• 22:25Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  And then she barks. I'd never heard a fox bark in all my life.

• 22:33Alie Ward?

  Me neither.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  And she barked 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.

• 22:46Alie Ward?

  What did it sound like?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Like somebody with laryngitis. I can, I can imitate a little bit, a little bit of it, but not with the velocity that they do it.

• 22:59Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  I'll show you. Okay. It goes something like this. Rrrr. Rrrr. Rrrr.

• 23:12Speaker 01

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

• 23:15Alie Ward?

  Really? But raspier?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, more laryngitis.

• 23:20Alie Ward?

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

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:23Alie Ward?

  So the call of the gray fox is apparently like if a cocker spaniel smoked a pack a day of Marlboro 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 in nearby shrubbery and looks up from a Sunday crossword because they thought someone called their name.

• 23:47Alie Ward?

  But gray foxes can also sound kind of like a squeaky toy or a whistle.

• 23:53Alie Ward?

  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 a gray fox? Or is that kind of just that is what the fox says?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  The red foxes have a different tone to their bark, but it's very similar.

• 24:26Alie Ward?

  Oh, I had no idea. I didn't even know that they did much vocalizing. So she's on her belly barking at you?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's barking at me and I'm worried she's going to come charging over and bite my leg. And I wanted 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.

• 24:51Alie Ward?

  Okay, bye-bye.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:21Alie Ward?

  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.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  This partner of mine, Greg, and I had bought a couple of trail cameras.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  And I was going to check the S D 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. You met me there at the trail camera. And when I, when I saw that, I thought, that little fox anticipated where I was going. That means that they have some sense of future.

• 26:14Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Okay. And they have some sense of being able to think. And that changed the whole picture of, of my relationship with the foxes.

• 26:27Alie Ward?

  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 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,

• 27:12Alie Ward?

  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?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  It was the, the curiosity quotient, I sometimes call it.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Is a high ten, way up there.

• 27:53Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Okay, compared with other uh raccoons are about uh seven.

• 27:58Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:11Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  And they got that. They weren't afraid of me.

• 28:16Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  You know, I was one of the landscapes, so to speak.

• 28:20Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  So that's, that's where that little fox came in. He was comfortable with me already and anticipated where I was going.

• 28:28Alie Ward?

  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, a pack?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Um, they are not a pack.

• 28:45Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  First, they are a family unit.

• 28:48Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And they have mom and dad, fox, raised the young together. And they're in a monogamous pair, monogamy to an extent.

• 29:03Alie Ward?

  Oh, well, do tell.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  The female is polyandrous.

• 29:08Alie Ward?

  Oh, good for her.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  And it's been suggested that the, they're polyandrous, that adds to their viability, um survivability.

• 29:19Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:34Alie Ward?

  Ah.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Not her mate.

• 29:36Alie Ward?

  Do you think the mates know that? And they're just like, hey, man.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:40Alie Ward?

  It's part of a biodiversity. What are you gonna do?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:56Alie Ward?

  So I snooped gander at the 2009 paper, "Multiple Paternity and Kinship in the Gray Fox", from the journal Mamalian 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, 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.

• 30:40Alie Ward?

  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?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  I'm not sure about that scenario.

• 31:00Alie Ward?

  I bet.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  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."

• 31:15Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  And I found Dr. Ben Sacks 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's been studying the red fox and all the rest of them, but not the gray fox. And so I got in on the ground floor.

• 31:49Alie Ward?

  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?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  He retired shortly thereafter, and I lost track of him.

• 32:10Alie Ward?

  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?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  They're omnivorous.

• 32:28Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:56Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:13Alie Ward?

  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?

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Ooh, let's see. Okay, here's a story.

• 33:32Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:44Alie Ward?

  This man is the Snow White of foxes, and I love him.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  And there in the tree, about maybe twenty feet away from me, up in the tree, there she was.

• 34:15Alie Ward?

  Ah.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  And it was a young female that I called Cute.

• 34:20Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:54Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, she fell right straight down. Anyway, that squirrel gets up on that branch where she was and is chittering away.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  You know how they do sometimes?

• 35:11Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  It was, it was almost as if saying, well, God help me.

• 35:17Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Maybe it's just laughing at her.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:22Alie Ward?

  Like, that's what you get. Was Cute Cute? Is that how she got her name?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first time I saw her, she was coming up out of a tunnel trail. And 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 the alpha male of the area. And he was, um, they didn't like being parents. Let me put it that way.

• 35:51Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Over on the other side, the pair of 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.

• 36:09Alie Ward?

  Really? What did they do or what did they not do?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  They tended to ignore their young ones.

• 36:14Alie Ward?

  My Shayla.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  They'd 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.

• 36:36Alie Ward?

  Oh, what a dick.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it was like, what? Come on, guy.

• 36:43Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Alpha males, you know?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:46Alie Ward?

  Ugh.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  And, and it was like, he was fixated on his own job. Well, at certain times of the year, uh, he would chase all of the males out of the region.

• 36:56Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Because he knew that cute, uh, was going to have some pups.

• 37:02Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:10Alie Ward?

  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, um, are foxes gestating?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Oh, about 53 days.

• 37:33Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  And in nine months, they're ready to have their own family.

• 37:37Alie Ward?

  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.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:59Alie Ward?

  Wow. How many in a litter typically?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Usually it's about three.

• 38:04Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:22Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  And, and the number of little foxes under there nursing, sometimes one of them'd have to wait out.

• 38:32Alie Ward?

  Like you're trying to get brunch on a Sunday, just on a waiting list. We'll call you when there's a nipple ready.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:39Alie Ward?

  Well, with having a few pups or kits, I always thought they were called kits, but you can call them pups?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Well, they're canines.

• 38:48Alie Ward?

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:50Alie Ward?

  Why do we hear fox kits all the time?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  We, we've just messed it up.

• 38:54Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  So when I hear kit, I think of kitten.

• 38:59Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  You know, cats.

• 39:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:03Alie Ward?

  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?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  They're doing okay.

• 39:36Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  There are a few places where there has been recorded decline in the number of gray foxes, but nobody really has an answer to why. One of the areas is in the city of Chicago. It may be because of the number of coyotes in Chicago. It's speculation.

• 39:55Alie Ward?

  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?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I was the first guy to be called in to take a look at the gray foxes at Facebook.

• 40:14Alie Ward?

  Really? How did someone find you? I mean, you are the fox guy, but...

• 40:18Speaker 01

  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 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,

• 40:59Speaker 01

  "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."

• 41:15Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:17Alie Ward?

  Fox book?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:32Alie Ward?

  So this first Facebook Fox campus news story broke in the spring of 2013. But about five years later.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:58Alie Ward?

  What? How? I guess they can climb trees, but...

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you don't climb a building.

• 42:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Was there anything up there? Was there just like an HVAC system? Or did they, had they landscaped the roof?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:21Alie Ward?

  What?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  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."

• 42:44Alie Ward?

  No.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  And I said, "That's probably it." Because I said, "I have seen firsthand foxes climbing ladders."

• 42:55Alie Ward?

  What? When did you see it?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  I saw it one time when there was a ladder up against a dumpster.

• 43:03Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  And the old fox just went right, doop, doop, doop, doop, right up the ladder, just like it was second nature.

• 43:13Alie Ward?

  Yeah, as one would. Well, were they stuck on the roof?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no.

• 43:19Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:31Alie Ward?

  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?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the red fox is the one that digs burrow.

• 44:04Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:26Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  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."

• 45:00Alie Ward?

  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.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  The story behind Mama Bold is really quite an interesting one.

• 45:18Alie Ward?

  Yeah, what's her deal?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  When she was a pup, she was born in that nato den that I just mentioned. Okay, under that pile of trees.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  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 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, a what I call a fox kiss.

• 46:09Speaker 01

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

• 46:28Alie Ward?

  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 pee. 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.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  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 Bold. 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.

• 47:42Alie Ward?

  Well, Palo Alto real estate is really tough.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. So what happens is that one morning I'm walking on one of the trails and Bold is behind me. And then it's a chain link fence. On the other side of that fence comes Squat.

• 48:00Alie Ward?

  Enter Squat, a short little fox dude and Mama Bold's dad.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  And he's coming in a determined sort of way.

• 48:08Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  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, she's ready to rip into her father.

• 48:37Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:52Alie Ward?

  Who was watching the fight? Another male fox. And when Mama Bold saw him, she ran off with him. So take that, dad. I'm in love.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I turned back to look to see where Squat was.

• 49:04Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  I never saw him again. He vanished.

• 49:07Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  And she took over his territory.

• 49:10Alie Ward?

  And that was her father?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:13Alie Ward?

  Drama.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Squat's daughter took over all of the territory that he once had as her own.

• 49:21Alie Ward?

  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

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:33Alie Ward?

  must be such a joy to watch. And, um, 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 Volpanology. 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

• 50:18Alie Ward?

  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 urbanwildliferesearchproject.org, which we're going to link in the show notes. And thank you to sponsors of Ologies for making these donations possible. You know, it's fall, it's back to your routines, but just because you're not half

• 51:03Alie Ward?

  naked next to a swimming pool doesn't mean you don't want to look your best when you leave the house. I also don't like to spend time doing these things. So, I like minimalist beauty products and I like good stuff. And Merit fits the bill. I've been using them recently, love them. So they make a bunch of great stuff. And I like to start with the Great Skin Serum. It feels so good and so soft on your face. Also, I have the Flush Balm that I love. It's this little, easy to use blush. They also have something called the Minimalist, which works as a foundation and concealer, which is great for people who love a BOGO. And I also love that Merit's products are clean, they're vegan, they're cruelty-free, and their skincare ingredients do leave your face looking glowy and lovely.

• 51:44Alie Ward?

  And fall, it's a perfect time for a fresh start. You can make it your back to me season with Merit. And right now, Merit Beauty is offering our listeners their signature makeup bag, which if you've seen it, it's not just a makeup bag, but really like an accessory. Free with your first order at meritbeauty.com. That is Merit Beauty, M-E-R-I-T, beauty.com. Meritbeauty.com. It's on my face right now. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace, For years. It's an all in one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily.

• 52:29Alie Ward?

  I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email, all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. Supplement this, supplement that. Maybe you want to supplement your time

• 53:14Alie Ward?

  by simplifying your supplement, once and for all. IM8 has got that on lock. IM8 has daily ultimate essentials. It has 16 supplements. It replaces 90 different ingredients across nine major organ systems in one bevy. Does this work for people? 95% of people who tried it for 12 weeks felt more energy. And that is from a clinical trial conducted by the San Francisco Research Institute, which you know me, I love a clinical trial. So many athletes and high performers rely on IM8. And I don't know if I'm a high performer or an athlete, but I do too. I'm actually drinking one right now. So if you're like, cool, let's give it a try. Go to IMhealth.com/ologies right now. Use our code OLOGIES for a free welcome kit,

• 53:59Alie Ward?

  five free travel sachets, plus 10% off your order. So that's code OLOGIES at IMhealth.com/ologies. It's code OLOGIES at IMhealth.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. Ologies with Ali Ward is sponsored by Silvania. It's time Time to upgrade your nighttime drive with Sylvania LED Ultra Fog and Powersport Lights. These powerful lights deliver cool white clarity and crisp visibility that's built to last. And thanks to their compact design, Sylvania LED Ultra Fog and Powersport Lights are engineered for a DIY install, no mechanic required.

• 54:41Alie Ward?

  They're also backed by a limited lifetime warranty and 125 years of lighting expertise, bringing you LED Ultra Night Vision to help you see better at night. Switch today and see better tonight with Sylvania LED Ultra Fog and Powersport Lights. Ugh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app.

• 55:25Alie Ward?

  If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Okay, let's scramble up a tree to the Patreon mailbag and get your questions. Emile wanted to know.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  They're smart.

• 55:59Alie Ward?

  Aha.

• 56:01Speaker 01

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

• 56:07Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Aesop's fables. And if you read any of Aesop's fables, there'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 belief has come down for over 2,000 years.

• 56:29Alie Ward?

  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 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

• 57:11Alie Ward?

  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.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  I've never watched that movie.

• 57:49Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:51Alie Ward?

  Is there a movie that is good about foxes that you say they got it right a little?

• 57:56Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 57:59Alie Ward?

  Fox and the Hound, Robin Hood?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  I, I haven't paid any attention to those, those stories.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  I respect that.

• 58:09Alie Ward?

  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 pettins? Can I smoosh my face in 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?

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Short answer, yes.

• 58:55Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  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 never petted one. They don't come that close.

• 59:24Alie Ward?

  Yeah. And if you're wondering how soft are these critters? Keep in mind that the gray fox is also called the maimed 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?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:03Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  And he's really cool. Kids love him.

• 1:00:08Alie Ward?

  Do you know Rusty's backstory?

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  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 study. 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 gonna find a gray fox that really is representative of what I'm seeing out in the field.

• 1:00:49Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  And I contacted a guy over in Massachusetts.

• 1:00:54Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  And he had some online for sale mounted gray foxes. And I looked at them all and I, I didn't, I wasn't attracted to any of them, but he had his phone number up there, too.

• 1:01:05Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  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. There was all there was to it.

• 1:01:17Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  That was the fox that I needed. I bought it, gave it to San Jose State.

• 1:01:22Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  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 gonna do with it. But Rusty is part of that. I went booming down there to State and picked up Rusty and I, I have him now here.

• 1:01:54Alie Ward?

  Oh, I can't imagine him being in better hands, obviously.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's cool.

• 1:02:00Alie Ward?

  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 Nasology 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?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  They are not strictly nocturnal.

• 1:02:50Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Foxes, when they sleep, they don't sleep like you and I do.

• 1:02:55Alie Ward?

  Oh, really?

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  There's another characteristic like cat-like. They nap. They'll nap for about maybe 20, 30 minutes. And then they they wake up. And they go to another location where they have another sleeping bed.

• 1:03:13Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:26Alie Ward?

  They've evolved to just function sleeping in these kind of naps?

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:32Alie Ward?

  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 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."

• 1:04:11Alie Ward?

  Speaking of sadness and worry, some of you, Alia Myers, Lisa Gorman, Ally is Tired, Andy Pepper, Clara Noon-Gosser, Chris Curious, Alicia Harris, Lauren Robinson, Her Ladyship Jen, and first time question askers Lydia Traum 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.

• 1:04:30Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:04:47Alie Ward?

  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?

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:31Alie Ward?

  Oh, got it.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:43Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  So you have to isolate your chickens off to the side and make sure that they are inaccessible.

• 1:05:51Alie Ward?

  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 Hen Fluence, 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 We Who, 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've got to keep your side of the street clean, and don't complain about foxes acting like foxes.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  And then, then we can live side by side. So with development coming in, I, I, 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 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.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  You're gonna 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

• 1:07:33Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  by gray foxes.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  I'm really rather envious.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:44Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  The people just got so used to them that they they 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?

• 1:08:19Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  My first impulse was to say, leave them alone.

• 1:08:23Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:41Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  He said, then then they left, they disappeared.

• 1:08:46Alie Ward?

  Oh, poor sweeties. Do they ever eat cats or little dogs?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  I've never heard of any, no. I've never heard of any coyotes, yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:59Alie Ward?

  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 Thai with a Sharpie, foxes poop on top of their cache site to say. Don't dare, but no poop, fair game. Now, on the subject of microbes, et cetera, let's talk about a bummer. Disease in wild populations. Bill opened up about a very difficult aspect of being the fox guy.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:05Alie Ward?

  And this was in 2016, a very dark time for Bill and his foxes.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  So in November, I noticed some of the foxes missing. And Mama Bold was one of those. And at that time, 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.

• 1:10:41Alie Ward?

  No.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. They were hit by canine distemper. And we had the necroseed 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.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  So with that dieout, then I lost all of my foxes.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  And I waited, I waited two years and one month.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:50Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  The last two gray foxes that I monitored out there at the Baylands before they died of canine distemper.

• 1:11:59Alie Ward?

  No.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

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

• 1:12:10Alie Ward?

  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? Is it, does it mean if there was kind of a pandemic in that area that more foxes will catch it from environmental causes?

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:44Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  In it that would kill off canine distemper, but that hasn't worked too well.

• 1:12:50Alie Ward?

  Oh, 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?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Do not put that rat poison out there. Put an owl out there instead.

• 1:13:16Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  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. It'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.

• 1:13:35Alie Ward?

  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 they're helping so much. Just a side note, a barn owl or a great horned owl can eat thousands of mice a year,

• 1:14:17Alie Ward?

  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, your favorite thing about studying animals in the wild and, and your favorite thing about maybe gray foxes?

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Overall, um, I've, I've always said this, okay?

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  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

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  what they are all about.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:36Alie Ward?

  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?

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:16Alie Ward?

  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've been on my list of people to talk to for literally years.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  How, how come? I mean, what, what initiated that? I always want to know this kind of thing.

• 1:16:41Alie Ward?

  I think looking for fox experts, looking for people who mention other people, other, you know, animal behaviorists. So you just end up hearing little chatter. And then when someone has the fox guy as their middle name, you can't not talk to that guy. You've got to talk to the fox guy.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:07Alie Ward?

  I would love that. I'd need to make a trip up there.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:17:11Alie Ward?

  So ask fox people facts because honestly, their favorite topic is my favorite topic. I think you will 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 nonprofit. 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 Ologies on Blue Sky on Instagram. I'm Ally Ward with one L on both. You can sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/ologies. Ologies merch is at ologiesmerch.com. We also

• 1:17:55Alie Ward?

  have shorter, kid-friendly episodes that are G-rated. Those are called Smallologies and available at the link in the show notes or wherever you get podcasts. Erin Talbert admin ZEologies 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 the 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 Jared, your podmother, my spouse, has had me simply the fox emoji in his phone for years. And it is a vulpos fox. And now I'm like, well, okay, but I'll take it. Also, I want to leave

• 1:18:35Alie Ward?

  you this week with Bill's email signature, which reads, "Have a good day. Keep moving on. Keep doing our best. Bill." Ah, freaking love this guy. Okay. Pachydermatology, homology, cryptozoology, lithology, nanotechnology, meteorology, geology, geology, geology, seriology, geology.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Hey, you're cool.

• 1:19:08Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jake Grez, also known as Nurse Jake. As a travel nurse, I've worked in all kinds of places, different settings, cities, and climates. Every assignment brings on a new challenge, which is why I always bring my Figs. These scrubs are built for whatever the job throws at you. They're breathable, flexible, and comfortable in any environment. No matter where I land, I know they're going to keep me looking and feeling my best. And don't sleep on the details. The pockets, the features, the finishing touches, everything has a purpose and it makes a real difference when you're moving nonstop. The fit is clean, tailored, and super polished, and they come in a huge range of colors. In other words, they feel great throughout a 12-hour shift and they always look good. See every healthcare professional on Instagram. If you work in healthcare or know someone who does, check

• 1:19:52Speaker 06

  out Figs and get 15% off your first order at wearfigs.com with code FIGSRX. That's wearfigs.com code FIGSRX.

• 1:20:02Alie Ward?

  Father Ward, you say, there's no way you would need a career coach. You have it all together. That's a lie and you know it. I actually hired a career coach and without them I wouldn't have started Ologies. It was one of the best investments I've ever made. And if you're like, I don't know where to find a career coach, I can help you. You need an experienced pro who asks the right questions, sets you down a path where you're most likely to succeed. And that's what you can expect from a coach at today's sponsor, strawberry.me. This is so cool. They match you with a certified coach who's been vetted to work closely with company founders. And yeah, sometimes I'm like, oh, wait, that's right, I am one. And if you're founding a business, even if you're along the way and you're maybe stuck in a rut or you have to make a decision about expansion

• 1:20:46Alie Ward?

  or what direction you want to take your company, that's what I did. I went to strawberry.me and I was like, okay, can you help me pare down some stuff? I think I have too much on my plate. I'm not sure what to say yes to and what to say no to. And they were super helpful in helping me streamline and now I get to sleep more and I enjoy that. So get the help every entrepreneur needs. Go to strawberry.me/ologies. That's strawberry.me/ologies. You're the boss.