Red foxes turn up across Montana, 483 records spread over 43 counties, with Park, Missoula, Gallatin, Glacier, and Flathead counties at the top of the list. The named settings run from Glacier National Park through Gallatin National Forest to Yellowstone National Park, but this is an animal as comfortable behind a barn as in a national park.
The adaptable hunter
Few mammals take to as many kinds of country as the red fox. It hunts voles and mice in meadows with a characteristic high, pouncing arc, yet it will just as readily take rabbits, birds, insects, berries, or scraps near town. Montana’s farmland edges, river bottoms, foothill parks, and high-country meadows all count as fox country, and the same animal may work a hayfield at dusk and a talus slope by morning.
Spring dens and summer kits
Counts climb sharply through spring to a June crest. Kits are born in early spring in dens dug into sandy slopes or borrowed from badgers, and by early summer the young are playing and begging at the den mouth, the season when a fox family is easiest to notice. The record tapers through fall as the young disperse to find territories of their own.
Status in Montana
NatureServe ranks the red fox S5, Secure, in Montana, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
