Jeff Miller
Marcus Mueller prepares a sedated fox for release in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve at the UW-Madison.
In the winter of 2014, some unusual freshmen were spotted on the UW-Madison campus — a family of red foxes, denning under a building on Linden Drive. “They were kind of the Hollywood stars for that spring. Everybody would walk out of class and see the foxes playing,” says Marcus Mueller, a UW graduate student in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology studying urban canids. Students’ curiosity grew. What are they doing downtown? What can we do to keep them here? Do they bite?
Around the same time, dog walkers in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve discovered their pups weren’t the only canids enjoying the trails. Reports of roaming coyotes picked up, along with more questions.
For answers, the public turned to David Drake, a UW-Extension wildlife specialist. While safety was — and is — on the minds of caring canine and feline companions, something additional piqued his interest: Foxes and coyotes rarely share a landscape, let alone an urban one. Historically, when coyotes arrive, they drive out or kill resident foxes. Drake wanted to know how these so-called incompatible species were sharing Madison.
Enlisting the help of an undergraduate student, Drake caught and outfitted a fox and a couple of coyotes with radio collars to begin collecting data on how they’re using the area.
That pilot grew into a full-fledged study, the UW Urban Canid Project. Mueller was brought on in January 2015 to help. Interestingly, he says, “We don’t see that same level of aggression [to foxes] from the coyotes. We don’t see the level of mortality on the foxes that you traditionally see in the rural areas.”
Like Drake, Mueller is interested in their “interspecific interaction,” or how they’re tolerating one another. Are they separating themselves spatially? Are coyotes eating one food while foxes are eating another?
They’ve got their work cut out for them, but luckily they have help: citizen scientists. “Anyone and everyone” is invited to take part, Mueller notes, whether you want to report a sighting on the project’s iNaturalist.org page, collect scat, invite researchers to set live traps in your yard or tag along on a trap check to watch them “process” an animal.
This involves sedating it, giving a physical exam and collecting blood, nasal and fecal samples to check for disease. Before it wakes up, researchers attach a radio collar. Once collared, an animal’s location is tracked using radio telemetry once a week for five hours.
But there’s more to public participation than free help for scientists. Researchers want to know where people are seeing animals to map out potential “hot spots” for conflict. It also clues them in to where they should set traps. “If we know there are a lot of foxes in an area but we don’t have any collared out there, we can increase our sample size.”
Perhaps most compelling, by comparing their telemetry data with citizen-generated data, they hope to be able to tell if it’s a reliable estimate for where you might find foxes and coyotes on a much broader scale across an urban area. Mueller explains, “If we can find a way to use this free citizen-generated location data, it’s going to go a long way for folks trying to manage wildlife in urban areas.”
Much of managing wildlife, Mueller points out, involves managing people. This is not breaking news for folks in the Madison area whose dogs have been preyed on by coyotes. Mueller says that in some circumstances coyotes’ “scary stigma” is justified, but not in most. “The problems that come with coyotes in urban areas can be avoided if you take certain precautions,” he notes.
He warns that the knee-jerk reaction a landowner or resident might have to coyotes — kill them or trap and relocate them — usually backfires.
“In the majority of cases,” Mueller says, “simply taking an animal out of a situation doesn’t address the main problem: why the animal is there in the first place.” If a coyote is using your yard, it’s probably because there are ample food resources there — a garden, compost pile, fruit tree, backyard chickens.
“If you take away that coyote, all of those resources are still going to be available,” he says. “Studies have shown that another coyote will just take its place almost instantly.”
What’s more, he adds, coyotes have been shown to increase their reproduction to counteract lost pack members. “By killing off certain members of the pack, that basically puts them into a cycle where they’re going to have more pups and potentially try to increase the number of animals on the landscape due to this increased source of mortality.”
Trapping and releasing isn’t a humane alternative. “Studies show that it’s not good from a survival standpoint,” Mueller explains. “Being dropped into an unfamiliar area, they don’t know how to find food or water, and they may be in another animal’s territory...the end result usually isn’t too pretty.”
Based on 75 reported sightings on iNaturalist.org and the data collected by tracking six additional coyotes and four foxes between January and March 2015, researchers have learned that coyotes tend to stick to the fringes of urban areas, like parks or golf courses, avoiding humans, pushing the foxes into the city.
They’ve also learned that both species, but coyotes in particular, are managing to stick to a natural diet. They’re not dumpster diving like some might expect.
This year’s trapping season is right around the corner. It’s slated to start in November and run through April, to coincide with predicted snowfall, since canids are infinitely easier to track if researchers have pawprints to follow.
If you’d like to get involved, visit the UW Canid Project’s iNaturalist page, like them on Facebook, or visit their website, uwurbancanidproject.weebly.com.
