Kansas’s 336 red fox records scatter across 54 counties rather than bunching anywhere. Johnson and Douglas counties hold the largest shares, with Sedgwick and Shawnee next, a map that leans toward the settled eastern third but reaches across the state. Karlyle Woods and Cheney State Park are the only named sites with repeated records.
A hunter built for broken country
The red fox thrives where cover meets open ground, and Kansas offers that edge everywhere: cropland against shelterbelts, pasture against brushy draws, suburbs against parkland. It hunts mice, voles, and rabbits with a listening pounce, and rounds out its diet with insects, fruit, and carrion as the seasons allow. For denning it digs a burrow into a bank or enlarges one dug by something else, and it has proven as willing to raise pups under a porch or barn as in a remote draw, which explains its presence from open plains to city greenbelts.
Most visible when the den is full
The Kansas record crests in May, and the breeding season explains why. Pups born in early spring first come out of the den in April and May, and both parents make repeated hunting trips to feed the litter, putting the whole family on the move through open country. The rest of the year the fox stays a mostly nocturnal shadow, and records run lower and steadier through every other month.
Status in Kansas
NatureServe ranks the red fox S4, Apparently Secure, in Kansas, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
