South Dakota’s red fox record runs corner to corner, 141 records scattered across 27 counties from Clark County in the northeast to Pennington and Harding in the west, with Black Hills National Forest and Badlands National Park among the named sites.
An adaptable edge hunter
The red fox is an opportunist that thrives where cover meets open ground, hunting mice and voles along field edges, shelterbelts, creek bottoms, and farmsteads, and taking rabbits, birds, insects, and fruit as they come. South Dakota’s patchwork of cropland, pasture, and prairie pothole country suits it from one end of the state to the other, and it dens readily in a burrow of its own digging or a remodeled badger or woodchuck hole on a sunny slope.
A winter-heavy season
January produces more reports than any other month, which fits the fox’s own schedule. The breeding season peaks in midwinter, pairs travel and call together, and a red coat against snow makes the animal far easier to spot than at any other time of year. A smaller spring and early summer rise tracks the weeks when kits first venture out of the den, and by late summer the family breaks up as the young disperse.
Status in South Dakota
NatureServe ranks the red fox S5, Secure, in South Dakota, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
