A Grey Fox was a rare sight in all but the southern couple tiers of counties in Michigan when I was growing up in the 50's and 60's. I saw my first one in my central lower peninsula county in 1972. They were practically unheard of in the U.P. and northern lower. I have lived in the northern lower now for well over 40 years and in that time they went from nonexistent to very common in about 20 years. Then, around the mid 2000's, I took in 3 to either tan or mount livesize in a 2-3 week time..........that folks had walked up on laying dead. One fellow found two like that! I suspected distemper at the time. Locally they became scarce again. It has been several years since I last saw one.

Greys have a small home range as said before, they also don’t disperse like red foxes. That being the case there is some inbreeding, which over time causes them to have lower resistance to disease and” INFECTION”. When the state was tagging trapped greys and releasing them most didn’t make it thru the winter.most had no visible foot damage. I think over time, after I’m dead, they will come back. Like swamp said they are scarce in Ga., the first time I lived there I caught them everywhere, I then left for 4 years. when I moved back they were very scarce. I have been catching more every year since I moved back to Ohio. Evan saw a road kill this summer.
They are my favorite fur.
I also think there are less incidentals as most coyote trapping in the east is in more open area, away from brush.

I’ll say that coyotes are probably a secondary threat to the greys,,, I agree wholeheartedly with the aforementioned statement that greys are able to escape coyotes more readily than reds because of their ability to climb trees.
There’s a primary cause…the interbreeding and making them susceptible to a lower immunity does make sense.

… every other time I catch one a coyote kills it

My father owns a couple of properties that have greys on them. One actually has a healthy family of them on it. If I catch them I release them. Another property I hunt I once saw a mating pair strolling though. All in all I see more greys than reds. Coons devastate our turkey population around here. My father’s friend had several trail cameras set up at turkey nest sites. Coons ate almost all eggs.

Hey Savell. Are they just killing it, or ripping it out of the trap and dragging it off?

i try to avoid grays around here at all cost, mostly pan tension, but still catch a handful a year.

When I trapped heavily and cats were worth some folding money I'd have more cat sets wrecked by grey fox than anything else. If temps warmed any they'd want to roll on my set. It took one caught by the skin on its neck to figure out what the issue was.

Not buying that for basically a complete disappearance. Here we still have cedar bluffs and rough land that gray fox loved. We once had a good population here now there are basically none. It’s definitely disease related imo. Be in coon related or not I tend to think it may be coyote being a disease vector also. Coon numbers have increased but as gray fox disappeared coyotes started exploding at the same time period. Catching them in 220 coon trails was quite common in the 90s.

…. I think you know their mo lol

We've never had coyotes, only reds and greys. Our greys are gone, at least where I am. I would catch a dozen incidentals targeting reds... last year trapping reds didn't even see a roadkill. Reds numbers have increased if anything. Disease is my guess... Our DNR has asked to report any grey bycatch and location, that's how far they have declined.