Foxes on Runways Imperil Passenger Safety at San Jose, Officials Say : Airports: Run-ins with the animals can cause pilots to lose control of aircraft. If relocation attempts fail, canines may be eradicated.

To crowded skies, rain-slick runways and an occasional fog bank, pilots landing at San Jose International Airport can add yet another hazard: foxes.

Lately, it seems, a dozen or so furry creatures entrenched in a den between two runways have been playing a game of chicken with commercial aircraft at the state’s third-largest airport. The results have been unpleasant and potentially dangerous.

On the evening of May 8, three foxes were crushed under the massive tires of airliners within a half an hour of each other. No one knows how many close calls with the canines have followed. As pilot Mark Wingert put it: “When you’re landing at 160 miles an hour, you don’t notice something as small as a fox.”

Airport officials, worried that the foxes jeopardize passenger safety, called the U.S. Department of Agriculture in late April, when the creatures first dug in, and asked federal workers to remove the beasts.

“Any time you have the potential where an aircraft and an animal the size of a fox meet, you have the potential for trouble,” said David C. Pecota, airport operations superintendent.

This is only the latest conflict in California pitting unwanted foxes against progress. In Orange County last month, the state Department of Fish and Game trapped a mother fox and six pups nesting near a newly opened extension of the Costa Mesa Freeway and transported them to the Los Angeles Zoo.

Like the Orange County foxes, the ones in the Bay Area are not on any endangered species list. USDA officials said they will be less lenient with the airport foxes than authorities were with the freeway clan.

Ridding the runways of the menace will start with “natural relocation,” or generating a disturbance to chase the foxes away. The next step will be to set traps and forcibly relocate the creatures to a zoo or shelter. If that does not work, officials will don night-vision goggles, sling rifles over their shoulders and hunt the foxes at night while the airport is closed.

Because this particular variety of canine--called the Eastern red fox--is not native to the state, animal control officials say the airport’s unwanted guests should be put to death.

“It is this department’s view,” said Capt. Phil Nelms of the California Department of Fish and Game, “that the foxes should be eradicated.”

Part of the reason officials favor eradication over relocation is that the red foxes eat some endangered species, said Richard Coleman, wildlife manager with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in San Francisco. The foxes prey on birds such as the California clapper rail, a chickenlike animal whose population has shrunk from 1,500 to about 300 since the fox migrated north to the Bay Area a decade ago. They also snack on the salt marsh harvest mouse, another endangered species, he said.

Ron Thompson, who as state director of the USDA’s animal damage control division is overseeing the elimination of the foxes, said: “It’s critical that we get this done as soon as possible because of the danger.”

Complicating the task is a litter of pups sheltered in at least one of the burrows. “We may just have to dig the pups out of their hole,” Thompson said. The young foxes would either be trapped or destroyed on the scene.

Airport officials consider the removal of the foxes worthwhile.

“The key to having the airport run safely is having the runway clear of debris,” said Marily Mora, an airport spokeswoman.

Competition between a pilot and a fox for runway space is almost always an unfair and tragic matchup. Unless a tire blows upon impact with the animal, the crew rarely knows of the collision until the animal’s remains are scraped from the runway.

If the tire happens to explode, bits of rubber can be ingested into the engines, possibly impairing the aircraft’s hydraulic systems and making control extremely difficult, officials said. There is also a slight chance--given the correct wind currents--that a small fox might find itself sucked into a spinning propeller of a smaller aircraft.

“A landing plane is sort of like a bullet,” said Wingert, a pilot for a commuter airline. “If you hit something that’s just 10 pounds heavy, something’s going to happen.”