The gray fox is an uncommon but widespread Colorado carnivore. Open occurrence databases hold 195 records for it in Colorado, most of them iNaturalist photos, drawn largely from the canyon country of the southwest and southeast.
The fox that climbs trees
The gray fox is the only North American member of the dog family that regularly climbs, using hooked, semi-retractable claws to scramble up trunks to escape danger, reach fruit, or rest on a limb. It favors broken, brushy ground: oak and pinyon-juniper woodland, chaparral, rocky canyon slopes, and streamside thickets. That habitat sits mostly in the southern half of the state, so records concentrate in Montezuma, La Plata, and Archuleta counties in the southwest and in Pueblo, El Paso, and Las Animas in the south and southeast.
Grizzled coat, secretive habits
A gray fox is easy to separate from a red fox once seen well: a grizzled salt-and-pepper back, rusty sides and neck, and a bushy tail marked by a black stripe and a clean black tip, never the red fox’s white tail tip. It is also more nocturnal and retiring, so despite a broad Colorado range it is recorded far less often, and its sightings stay low and scattered through the year rather than surging in any one season.
Status in Colorado
The gray fox is native and apparently secure here, ranked S4 by NatureServe and least concern by the IUCN. The pinyon-juniper canyons of the southwest, including Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, are among the better places to turn one up.
Full species profile
