Fox Den

The Red Foxes seen frequently on our property have taken the next step. After seeing some suspicious tracks in the snow in late winter, I set up the trailcam at a strategic spot one night. Retrieved the next morning, the camera was filled with photos. A den, with fox cubs!

At the den entrance, keeping watch in the morning.

We found this spot through canine curiosity. Both our dog and the neighbor’s dog seemed to be lingering around a particular spot on a hillside near our house. I mounted the trailcam there one night, but it got nothing. I waited about a month, and found many more tracks in the late spring snow during a daytime visit. So I mounted the trailcam once again, and captured the critters in the middle of the night. A fox family!

It's a bit hard to see, but two cubs are in the shadow behind the adult

Mom and Dad made regular visits through the night, according to the trailcam. They visited at 8 pm, 10 pm (adult bringing food), midnight, 2:15 am, 4:30 am, 5:50 am, 6:04 am, and 9 am. Then I arrived, and the parents put the kids to bed for the day. At 6:04 am, there was a photo of Mom at the den entrance nursing two of the young. Looking through the photos, we counted six young ones in total.

Nursing time at 6 am

As I noted before, the Red Fox doesn’t get much respect in Vermont. It gets hunted  for three months each year. It is an excellent predator of rodents, but it’s been known to grab the occasional chicken from the coop. To the fox, this is just a meal found in nature; a poorly installed wire fence is simply an obstacle like a pile of logs that must be navigated, not a symbol of ownership by a farmer or homeowner. It must hurt to lose a chicken that way, but we live amongst wildlife, not in our own imaginary bloodless world.

The kids playing in the yard

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Speaking of which, one of the burning issues in Vermont today is predator control. Our legislature just finished up a round of discussions on something called Senate Bill 258 (S.258). The bill has two components: place two non-hunters on the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board, and change the way Coyotes are hunted in the state. The bill has produced heated debate from every corner. It is currently stalled, by being bottled up in committee, but it awaits a renewed attempt next year.

S.258 is pretty much the same contentious issue that has arisen in almost every state in the country. When people find out how predators are being handled by hunters in the state, there is outrage. The majority of hunters are respectful, warm, kind, and wonderful people, controlling the White-tailed Deer population as a much-needed service. A few of them exhibit despicable behavior. The element of this issue that has raised eyebrows is the use of packs of hounds to find and kill predators. This is a comparatively new method brought about by technology. It is not traditional. Hounds are outfitted with GPS locating devices and set free as a pack. The “hunter” sits in his truck with the motor running and waits until his pack has surrounded or treed something. Then he notes the location, walks through the woods to get to the spot, and dispatches the Coyote (or the fox or bear, or in other states, the Mountain Lion or even the Jaguar).

Many Vermonters would like to dispatch this execrable method. A few die-hard hunters want to keep it. Thus the argument.

The words that always arise in these debates are “tradition,” “culture,” “heritage.” Let’s examine those. To be sure, there is nothing at all objectionable about a hunter on foot with a dog at his side, walking through the woods to find game. It’s been happening for thousands of years on every continent, with spears and arrows. It’s been common for hundreds of years with a shotgun or rifle being the implement. But GPS devices? Come now. They’ve become cheap in the last few years, and that’s not long enough to qualify as “tradition.” What makes it worse, though, is that the one dog has been replaced by a pack, sometimes five or ten. The photos (to be found in seconds on the web) of a group of hounds mercilessly baring their teeth and barking uncontrollably a few feet from an exhausted Coyote or fox are really hard to take. The action of the hunter simply walking up and blowing away at a motionless animal from the sporting range of 10 feet is also really difficult to countenance. In some cases, the Coyote is sick or injured before the event, and the dogs will kill it in the way of canines protecting a territory. But these Alpo-fed hounds are not hungry, nor defending a true territory.

Feeling the pressure from many citizens, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board took action. They proposed new rules for hunting Coyotes. That’s good, but the legislature believed the rules did not go far enough. The VFWB proceeded anyway, ignoring input. The Board is composed of hunters, anglers, and trappers who are private people appointed by the Governor. They don’t like taking input. So a few concerned senators drafted S.258, mostly to get more voices of reason on the board. Senator Chris Bray from Addison, VT has been leading the charge. The senators propose to replace some members of the Board with non-hunters who have some kind of professional experience with wildlife management or research.  A very reasonable approach.

But Vermont’s hunters have protested with indignance. It is easy to find their objections online, and some of it is dismissive, derisive, crude, hostile, belittling, and contemptuous. For their part, the animal rights groups are quick to weigh in, condemning hunting in all forms as inhumane, and things get ugly really quickly. In the words of Rodney King, “can we all get along?”.

I know a few hunters, and I think it’s important to point out that the most vocal hunter in this conversation is not the average hunter, which is often the case in public debates. Many hunters want to go on hunting the way they are accustomed to, and they privately voice frustration with the radicals. But they are feeling the loss of opportunity as more private landowners close off access and hunting seasons contract to protect populations. A phenomenon occurs with the reasonable hunters not openly condemning the radical hunters, and the radical voices seem to be the only ones in evidence. Trumpism, anybody? The demise of the Republican Party?

One line of objection is to portray the voices in favor of the Coyote as being out of touch with rural reality, and as being “out-of-staters” from the city dictating to locals. Hmmm. I have heard that view before. One hears this claim in predator control debates In Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Wisconsin, Arizona, Tennessee … you get the point. By dismissing the wildlife advocates as “coming from out of state,” the hounding lobby is pretending to be blissfully unaware of the fact that nationally, attitudes have changed, and people everywhere want to have a voice in how predators and all wildlife are managed. These issues are no longer the purview strictly of those who buy hunting and fishing licenses. In a similar vein, we should no longer allow logging companies to have the sole voice in forest management practice.

In my beloved New Mexico, three contentious issues of the past come to mind. Cock fighting was defended for years as “heritage” and “tradition” until wiser minds finally took the center and ended the barbaric practice in 2007. Coyote-killing “contests” were defended for years as necessary to control the population until the highest elected officials found it unwise to reject the findings of research to the contrary. It was banned in 2019. The effort to reintroduce the Mexican Gray Wolf was proposed for decades by wildlife advocates, and opposed bitterly by the ranching lobby as causing the death of their centuries-old livestock operations. The feds finally re-introduced a small number in 1999, and they have remained isolated in wilderness areas, where abundant elk provide most of their sustenance. (A few are wandering, which is a natural part of range expansion.) In all three issues, the dreaded phrase “out-of-staters” was trotted out as the conspiratorial cause of destroying “our way of life.” Boy, these out-of-staters do get around, don’t they? They come from out of state in …. every state. (Pardon the Jon Stewart sarcasm.)

S.258 did not manage to get to the finish line this year, but we advocates need to keep trying. For myself, I will keep quiet about the exact location of our Red Fox den. A few foxes running through our fields and prowling in our woods are a good thing. And they will be kept in check by their larger cousins, the Coyotes, who we hear in a night-time chorus about once a month. The pets in the neighborhood seem to be surviving.