The red fox ranges across both of Michigan’s peninsulas. Its 1,187 records run from Washtenaw and Oakland counties in the urban south to Keweenaw, Marquette, and Chippewa in the north, and the single heaviest contributor is Isle Royale National Park, where foxes patrol the island’s shore and campground edges.
An edge hunter at home anywhere
A red fox hunts mice and voles in open ground but beds in cover, so it favors the seams between field and forest, meadow and marsh, dune and woods. Michigan supplies those seams from one end of the state to the other, in farm country, in suburban parks, and along Great Lakes shoreline. Records at Tawas Point State Park, the Kellogg Biological Station’s fields, and the Ottawa National Forest show the same adaptable animal in very different settings.
Spring is den season
Foxes pair in winter, and by April the vixen is nursing a litter in an earthen den. Through May and June the kits emerge to play at the den mouth, the season when Michigan’s record climbs to its yearly high, and by autumn the young foxes disperse to find ground of their own. The species stays abroad in every month, hunting through deep snow by listening for prey moving underneath.
Status in Michigan
NatureServe ranks the red fox S5, Secure, in Michigan, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
