All the pretty little foxes

Palo Alto: Gray foxes decimated by disease in December

PALO ALTO — For seven years, Bill “The Fox Guy” Leikam has kept close tabs on the gray foxes that lurk largely unseen amid scrub and marshland near the edge of San Francisco Bay. So he was quick to notice that they’re in trouble.

The 17 foxes belonging to four skulks, or groups, that Leikam has studied as a retirement hobby and given names like Dark, Sideburns and One-Eye, have gone missing or turned up dead in the last month, victims, he believes, of a fast-spreading disease.

“It was like a black wind swept through the area and infected all of them,” said Leikam. “They’re all gone now.”

Twelve dead gray foxes have been found, with two sent to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife for analysis. Five more are missing and believed dead. Wildlife officials say they are victims of canine distemper syndrome — a common virus that afflicts carnivores, including man’s best friend. But while the family dog is usually inoculated against the disease, wild relatives including foxes, coyotes and wolves as well as raccoons and skunks, are very vulnerable.

Other possible culprits wildlife officials considered before tests confirmed distemper included speculation that the animals could either have been poisoned deliberately by people who consider them pests, or accidentally by eating poisoned rodents or even toxic mushrooms.

Dr. Deana Clifford, a lead veterinarian with Fish and Game and researcher at UC Davis, said that such numbers are “unfortunately very typical of a localized outbreak” and that the virus can “dramatically reduce the number of animals in an area and even make it seem like they’ve disappeared altogether for a while.”

Leikam been called the “Jane Goodall of gray foxes,” and said he was the first person to do a comprehensive assessment of gray fox behavior in the country since he first happened upon a specimen while on a bird-watching hike in 2010. Unlike the invasive red foxes that are also found in the area, the gray fox is native and has the unusual ability of being a canine that can climb trees.

Recently, Leikam and Kerekez have been talking with other conservationists about the need for better wildlife corridors. David Johns of the Wildlands Project said that when Leikam told him about the die-off, he thought it was a clear example of the need for animals to have more room to roam.

“You have this small population, they’re often very genetically similar, and very easy to wipe out if they are susceptible,” Johns said. “That’s why connectivity is so important — it’s a reach for these foxes to find other populations that are bigger and wilder and that might bring in some new genes.”

All the foxes in an entire city wiped out by distemper, and  two guardians left with nothing to guard. This article gave me a total flashback of our lost kits, and Junior. I think I even called the high tide a ‘wave of death’ that took them away at the time. Deanna Clifford was the same veterinarian who was investigating our kit mortality. And many locals logically assumed poison. Or rat poison. It was hard not to.

But for us there were no causes to pinpoint: no culprits to blame and identify. Beavers can’t get distemper and what they could get and they knew to look for was never found. We couldn’t even say a wildlife corridor would protect them, because our beavers had all Carquinez Strait as their corridor and we think that’s where death came from. (Come to think of it, maybe that’s what our beavers think too and that’s why they moved so far up stream?)