Illinois’s 965 red fox records reach from the Lake Michigan shore at Illinois Beach State Park to the wooded hollows of Shawnee National Forest, with the heaviest county counts in Cook, Winnebago, and DuPage. Few wild mammals in the state are at home in such a wide range of settings.
A hunter of edges
The red fox thrives where cover meets open ground: the seam between woods and pasture, the brushy edge of a marsh, the quiet corner of a park. It hunts mice, voles, and rabbits mostly at dawn, dusk, and night, listening for prey moving under grass or snow before pouncing with a distinctive high arc. That flexibility carries it comfortably into Illinois’s farm country and suburbs alike, and pairs den in everything from enlarged groundhog burrows to spaces beneath sheds and porches.
Spring at the den
Illinois reports climb to their highest in April and May, the season when fox kits begin venturing above ground and both parents travel widely to feed them. The count dips through midsummer, then lifts again in December and January as the winter breeding season makes foxes more vocal and more mobile. The animal stays active in every month, an Illinois resident with no pause in its year.
Status in Illinois
NatureServe ranks the red fox S5, Secure, in Illinois, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
