When it comes to human sprawl, most animals tend to keep their distance to some degree. The fox, however, is learning how to make urban areas part of it’s territory. Not only that, they are learning to semi-coexist with another predator that they would normally stay away from – the coyote.
In the wild, these two predators keep their distance from one another. Coyotes are bigger than foxes, and higher upon the predator food chain. Like any wild animal, the smaller one will do whatever it can to not be noticed by something bigger! But when it comes to urban areas, people are making reports to researchers about how foxes and coyotes are getting along, or at least ignoring one another to live peacefully.
A professor, Dr. David Drake, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus along with an undergraduate student studying wildlife ecology in 2014, trapped and radar collared two red foxes and two coyotes that were often seen around the campus. This was the beginning of the UW Urban Canid Project (UWUCP) in Jan 2014. They had questions they wished to discover – what were these animals eating? Were they dangerous to students or each other? Where were they living? How were they doing so well? They wanted to find out the answers because until then, most of the information on foxes and coyotes in the wild, came from rural or forest settings. No data had been gathered in an urban setting.
They have gathered information, not only from their own research, but from reports gathered from citizens living around campus and the students themselves. It has helped them learn a lot about how the foxes and coyotes manage to live together without any incidents. From foxes who don’t hurry through coyote territory, to even one vixen watching a coyotes forage near her den with pups, and she never moved her den.
What do they hope to learn from all this information? Well, ultimately, they hope to gain the information that might better help wildlife and humans coexist as well, especially in urban areas. Humans keep edging them out of their natural habitats, and while they adjust to ours, wildlife managers would like to know how to handle when humans and animals come across one another.
http://uwurbancanidproject.weebly.com/
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-coyotes-red-foxes-coexist-urban.html
https://www.citylab.com/environment/2018/02/why-coyotes-red-foxes-live-in-cities-together/552377/
Animal Encounters: ENGLISH 1020 