Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage Is adapted from the article "The Little Foxes" by Adele Conover (©2001 by Smithsonian Magazine).

Champagne-blond in the failing light, seven tiny animals engage in what looks like a game of touch football. Their big-eared parents, five-pound San Joaquins kit foxes, mark the playground's boundaries with an occasional sharp woof. I could be anywhere in the 8.5-million-acre San Joaquin Valley a century or so ago.

Reality intervenes. I am standing in a nondescript field, and that dark "cliff" in the background is an insurance company. I am in Bakersfield, California, in early April. This family of 9, along with 200 or so fellow San Joaquin kit foxes, shares this town with some 250,000 humans. Biologist Brian Cypher, who studies this unique urban subtribe for the San Joaquin Valley Endangered Species Recovery Program, notes that the human population is growing by 3,000 to 5,000 annually.

Although Cypher's tribe is safe for the moment, in order to ensure its long-term survival, he seeks the secret to its success. His data is being matched by the research of Katherine Ralls, a scientist with the Smith sonian's Conservation and Research Center, on a wilder kit fox population living just west of here, in the Carrizo Plain National Monument. The combined information will reveal much about genetics, behavior, distribution and population size that can be applied to the little carnivore's conservation. One of several sub.species of kit fox, and the only one that is listed federally as endangered, the San Joaquin kit fox is considered an umbrella species for this part of California: if it survives, then other threatened and endangered animals and plants that share its habitat will too.

Scientists estimate that the range-wide population of the San Joaquin kit fox prior to 1930 was 8,000 to 12,000; in 1975, about 7,000. The current population is unknown. Three "core" and several satellite population exist in California, but they are widely separated.

The San Joaquin kit fox came to such dire straits-less than 5 percent of its original habitat remains—as a result of the usual suspects: agriculture, development, oil exploration and, more so in earlier days, "varmint control" poisoning and trapping.

In Bakersfield, says Cypher, the attitude toward the kit foxes is mixed. "Some are afraid of them. Some no doubt would like to shoot them. Some regard them as 'their' kit foxes, and if they see us trapping to put on ear tags and change [radio collar] batteries, they want us to stop."

Now, in a bow to the tiny fox's rare status, the city keeps a map of the known dens that may harbor kit foxes, says Cypher. In the early 1980s, however, the city's first conservation plan did not even mention the little foxes despite their 1967 federal endangered listing. "Negotiations took more than seven years until the Metropolitan Bakersfield Habitat Conservation Plan was approved in 1994," says Cypher.

Officially, no one paid much attention to urban kit foxes in Bakersfield until 1985, when Cal State biology professor Ted Murphy approached the Bakersfield city council about 440 acres of riverbed and floodplain that he hoped could be set aside to create a riparian studies area, in part as a way to protect the kit foxes that lived there. Murphy later used nine radio-collared kit foxes to document the peril that vehicles, expanding development, predators such as domestic dogs and even rodent poisons continued to pose for kit foxes in the city.

Now Cypher's study has investigated 220 dens in town. "Eighty-four percent were dug in dirt, 12 percent in structures created by human activity, and 4 percent in open fields that have so far escaped development," he says. Humans are everywhere. But the little foxes have two speeds, fast and faster, and sometimes they can avoid trouble with urban predators by squeezing into openings no larger than four inches across. The little foxes dig make-do dens under storage areas, and in school yards, storm-water drainage sumps, concrete rubble piles and pipes.

"Their urban life is a bonus," says Cypher. "Storm-water storage sumps are proving to be good habitat, and every time a new housing division comes along, builders have to put in a new sump—so unknowningly, developers are actually creating kit fox habitat."

For the most part, in the "real" world kit foxes escape their predators and the high temperatures of their desert environment by spending the day under ground in a den In Bakersfield, they follow suit. Kit foxes move eve ry couple of weeks to a new den Moving to different dens may be one reason why they have persisted—the constantly changing abodes provide new places to hide.