Grad Student Meets His Match in Rare and Wily Sierra Red Fox

Anyone who believes studying wildlife in a beautiful national park is a glamorous profession, full of the excitement of seeing animals up close, should spend a day in the field with John Perrine.

Perrine is a UC Berkeley graduate student who has spent more than three years searching for the Sierra Nevada red fox in Lassen Volcanic National Park.

In that time, he has caught and radio-collared five of the elusive animals. His goal is to learn about the foxes--the size of each individual’s range, their eating and mating habits, and how they move around from season to season.

But finding a fox can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And on this autumn day, the haystack is Lassen Peak, the 10,457-foot dormant volcano in northeast California. Somewhere on the mountain, Perrine suspects, is a fox wearing a radio collar.

Trudging across boulder-strewn slopes, Perrine and his assistant, Megan Jennings, pause as they try to pick up a signal from one of the collared foxes. But the steep terrain plays havoc with radio signals, leaving Perrine to think that his quarry is either near Lassen’s summit--or perhaps on another mountain entirely.

Perrine is writing his doctoral dissertation about the animals. He needs to be able to establish the locations of several foxes to show the type of habitat they use at different times of year.

So he and Jennings climb higher, then slide back down, then scramble higher again. They are pursuing an animal dubbed by a California trapper nearly a century ago as the “wildest of wild creatures,” said to have “a greater fear of man and his scent than all other fur-bearers combined.”

Finally, with his luck and daylight ebbing, Perrine gives up.

“What we really need are some dumb foxes,” he says as he and Jennings make their way back down the mountain.

One of the State’s Wildlife Mysteries

Disappointed as this day is, Perrine can take solace in the fact that so little is known about this subspecies of red fox that virtually anything he learns will stand as a major achievement.

The last field study of the species, in fact, was conducted in the 1920s. Even then, the results were sketchy, documenting only a few small populations scattered about the highest, most remote regions of the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade ranges.

“It’s a cruel project for a student because it’s so thin on data,” says David Graber, a scientist at Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park. “But it’s also terribly important because the foxes are so incredibly rare.”

Indeed, the red fox remains one of the state’s great wildlife mysteries. No one knows how long they live, or exactly where they live and why. Nor is it known how often they reproduce or what animals they compete against for food and territory.

More than anything, researchers want to know if Sierra foxes are on the decline. The state designated the fox as a threatened species in 1980. But in reality, says Perrine, no one knows if their numbers are dwindling or holding steady.

“If the foxes are in trouble, then how bad are they in trouble?” he muses. “We don’t know.”

There’s another wrinkle. In the late 1800s, red foxes from the eastern U.S. were introduced into California for fur farming, sport and rodent control. These foxes are common today in much of the state’s lower elevations and are virtually indistinguishable from the Sierra red fox. But the imports are considered pests, because they steal territory needed by the endangered San Joaquin kit fox, a native species, and plunder the nests of ground-dwelling birds.

There is even the possibility that the handful of foxes inhabiting the Lassen area aren’t native red foxes, but descendants of the imported foxes--or perhaps hybrids of the two.

As Perrine knows all too well, the only way to answer any of these questions is to outfox a fox by luring it into a trap.

Seeking Samples for Genetic Testing

On this late fall day, one of Perrine’s tasks is to set traps. But persuading a five-to 10-pound fox to walk into a small wire cage resembling a dog kennel is no easy feat. This is why Perrine baits each trap with the kinds of things a red fox may find irresistible, such as fox urine (available commercially from fox farms), raw chicken and a few drops of something called Gusto.

Gusto is a trapper’s brew that comes in a tiny bottle. But there is nothing diminutive about Gusto’s smell, which is so offensive to the human nose that it’s hard to be within 100 yards of it. Yet, Perrine often finds himself crawling into the traps, his nostrils inches away from the stuff.

“I got it in my mouth once when I wasn’t paying attention,” he said. “I went through a large pack of gum and it definitely outlasted the gum.”

Whenever Perrine captures a fox, he takes blood and tissue samples for genetic testing. The tests, in turn, may tell him if the foxes are natives or exotics.

Without a live animal to work with, however, Perrine settles for whatever else is available. At one point, while driving between traps, he spies something out of the corner of his eye and suddenly swerves to the side of the road.

It’s fox scat, sitting on the pavement’s edge. Perrine dutifully scoops it up and, later that night, deposits it in a park freezer filled with dozens of other such specimens.

Each will eventually be put in a nylon bag and run through a cycle in Perrine’s washing machine. Soap and hot water break down the scat, allowing Perrine to compile an inventory of the bones and fur of animals the foxes eat.

Puzzling Deaths a Troubling Sign

“Want to see something else?” Perrine asks a visitor. Downstairs, in a dank basement, is another freezer. Inside are the remains of a male fox. Last winter, this fox and a female died within half a mile of each other.

The deaths are troubling. Perrine doesn’t know what killed them. Both were wearing radio collars, representing two-fifths of his study subjects. And the male was the only male so far captured.

He picks up the skull and shows how it is intact. This means it probably wasn’t attacked by another animal. In winter, a hungry predator probably would have crushed the skull and eaten the fox’s brain.

It’s not much of a clue to what happened, but it’s something. And, at this point in Perrine’s attempt to unravel the mysteries of the Sierra red fox, a dead animal in a park freezer is sometimes as good as it gets.

“The paradox of science is you always end up with more questions than answers,” Perrine says. “You just hope you learn something along the way.”