California’s 1275 red fox records lean toward the state’s settled coastal lowlands rather than its wild interior. Alameda, Los Angeles, and Santa Clara counties lead the record, a map of foxes living alongside people, in farm country, marshland edges, and open ground at the fringe of cities.
An omnivore that fits almost anywhere
Few North American carnivores are as flexible as the red fox. It hunts mice, voles, and rabbits in open ground, takes birds and insects in season, and eats fruit and carrion when they are available, and it dens as readily in a culvert or beneath a shed as in a hillside burrow. California’s record mirrors that adaptability, running from the salt ponds of Eden Landing Ecological Reserve and the headlands of Golden Gate National Recreation Area to the floodplain of Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area, with scattered records in mountain forest like Tahoe National Forest as well.
A spring full of kits
Reports arrive in every month but build to their strongest point in April and May, when foxes den with young. Kits are born in early spring and begin appearing at the den mouth after about a month, which makes the adults’ comings and goings far easier to see. By late summer the family scatters, and the fox returns to its usual habit of hunting alone at dusk and through the night.
Status in California
NatureServe lists the red fox as SNR, Unranked, in California, though the species is native to the state and globally secure. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
