Red Fox rare in the U.S.

I read, when scrolling down the fox news sight, a story about large numbers of problem red fox in England. It started off by saying red fox were rare in the United States. If fur prices were as high in todays dollars as they were 40 years ago that nut would be catching them here himself and saying there were too many. Probably got information by a desk bound biologist limited in actual reality.

It reminded me of an article in my sons college newspaper describing the four "endangered" otters that were seen in one of the ponds on the campus. During that time otters were over 100$. I just wonder if the author was an ignorant nut spouting out false information or just trying to save the drainage for themselves. They are prevalent now and they were then. Farmers have always hated them here. They need to catch a live one and cuddle up.

Fake news every where. Fact and history is rewritten every day.

Guess the English have to take advice from our F&WS and stock coyotes there Sure that Britain is their historical home range problem solved

Not to Hijack this thread but it seems to me the numbers of red fox started to drop with the influx of confinement hogs .I believe disease and mange come from these buildings .

Problems come form any confined monoculture. Even your lawn causes problems......jk

Red fox in western Oregon have dropped off in a big way. I used to hobnob with an old trapper when I was a kid who had caught 200 red fox in one season in my county. That would have been the mid 1950's. Two years ago the total red fox take in western Oregon's 15 counties was under 20.

Two problems that I see, one changes in agriculture eliminating prime habitat and the spread of coyotes to areas where we never had them.

Not nearly as many foxes here like there once was.

It's uncommon for me to see a red fox here. They used to be seemingly everywhere.

Some wildlife books like Peterson's field guide show red fox as non-existent in extreme southern US....what a crock! I've caught them on boundary roads on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp....40 miles from the nearest ag field/pasture in the heart of near wilderness southern swamp country..

rare compared to what , the English epidemic level of them?

I didn't hardly ever see a fox growing up , then the coyote moved in thick , but later learned there was a reason for not seeing fox. My grandpa and many of the farmers in out area had made a solid effort to eradicate fox in the 50s and 60s.

it involved air craft , cars and shotguns mainly. so if your wondering why those rules are in the DNR rule book in WI , I am sure his crew wasn't the only ones doing it but it worked well.

Yup, ogorman said something about hogs n fox catching mange, if I remember correctly

Fox are holding their own up here, not overpopulated but not rare either. Certain places will always hold fox.

numbers booming here since the coyotes started disappearing from heartworm.

I hope Phil Brown doesn’t find out red fox are rare!

Farm practices , urban sprawl, and coyotes nocked the numbers down. But they are slowly learning to adapt and actually increase in some habitats hear. Most are where the Grey fox used to be. Still not even close to the population of the 70s and 80s. Never will be, to much habitat has been lost, IMO..

I'm overrun with red fox. They are a long ways away from rare in these parts, sign is everywhere.

These answers made me think of our yearly survey. It asks what animal and if the population is declining or increasing. I think it depends on how the testing is done and the ability of the tester to develop an opinion based on the information given. Whether the animals are there to began with in good numbers as well has historical practices.

A guy goes out and catches all the beaver out of the only drainage there are beaver for 50 miles has a different opinion that another trapper that only catches a few out of 5 drainages that are loaded with them.

Saw an article about 25 years ago that said muskrats were almost extinct in North America. That was at a time when they were as abundant as I have ever seen them.

As of last night reds are rarer by one in Atlanta.



BTW, contrary to that report both reds and greys are doing just fine in Metro Atlanta.

Reds and grays are both rare here in comparison to even 20 years ago. I see one or two year as compared to maybe a hundred sightings a year back when, and coyotes have increased at the same time. Probably coincidental. Fact is the only reds I've seen in a year or so were in town.

When coyote populations go up, red fox populations go down. It's not coincidental at all. Reds do well along side wolves, but not coyotes.

Well...everybody says that anyway. Some places up here wont hardly hold a coyote, but lots of fox live there. Around any lakeshore where there is a large rim of cattail swamp behind it's receded shoreline. And then upland into the farm country you'll have coyotes, but not so much in the ice and shoreline areas, here, anyway.

This past summer somebody posted pictures on FB of foxes sitting on the beach looking out at the ocean. lol

Sure, they suspect England is over there.

lol.

I hate when people generalize and say PA has a high red fox population. In the east, yes, in the west, not so much.

Best red fox population I ever saw was within sight of the Atlantic on Aquidnick Island just outside Newport RI, I counted 27 from the roof top I was working on. iirc 11 den spots, all fox visible against a foot of new snow.
Maybe they were trying to get back to England.

in the SE

More yotes= less fox, the survivors hang close to the populated areas that the yotes shy away from here!

Seems to be the case around here . When I lived in El Reno, you'd see tons of reds in town . Not so much right outside town , though.

I cage more fox in coon cages then in traps unless the breed is on then they travel more from woodlot to woodlot or farm place to farm place.

FWIW, this is my persuasion too. ^^ I have been tromping through the fields and woods in Eastern Iowa for 40+ years now. We used to see red fox very, very commonly and almost never a coyote. This would be back in the 1970's and from talking with my grandfather and others like him, the fox population in the 70's was just a fraction of what it was back when he was a kid. I think it was the early 80's before I ever saw a coyote.

IMO, a big part of the explanation was the advent of the modern day CRP program, which came back in the mid 80's I believe. With radically more farm land idle and planted to mouse and rabbit friendly grasses...coyotes began to be much more prevalent and the fox started fading away. Nowadays, in a given year I easily see more coyotes than fox, probably a 8 to 1 ratio.

In north central Iowa I never saw a single coyote until the late 1980's. We had tons of red fox and we used to hunt and trap a lot of them. The CRP program started in 1986 and soon after that we started to see a coyote now and then, I think I shot my first one around 1989. Then the red fox got mange and basically died out. There were basically no fox at all by the late 1990s.

I release all my reds. I might catch one or 2 each season.
At one time back In the 50s we had a state and county bounty on reds. So a red was worth $10.00 and the season was open all year long. I know of some dog hunters and trappers that killed way over 600 In year. There was NO fur value.
When the coyotes moved In the reds disappeared.

Coyotes made a big push to the East back in the 70-80s for some reason that was when the 1.75 came into play.

We use to have a good number of fox around here till the farmers started taking out fence rows and plowing to the road edge. Some coyotes have since moved in, but I live in the bottoms so to compare it to the bluff country wouldn't be the same.

That's right. Back in the mid to late seventies it was a big deal if a hunter shot a coyote as an incidental on a deer hunt. Made the local paper. One thing I've noticed that runs contrary to some thinking is coyote and fox existing side by side. They do just fine together here, we have a lot of both.

MI had both in the UP woods country, but out in the flat lands the outcome for the fox might be different!