The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

It has been a very long time since I last laid eyes on a creature I saw last night. For the first time in over five years, I saw a small juvenile red fox. This animal used to be quite common around southwest Minnesota, but for reasons I mention a little later, they have for all practical purposes vanished from my area.

The red fox is in the upper quartile of foxes for size around the world. They range in size from 10-30 pounds. The adult males are called dogs and the females are called vixens. The little ones are referred to as a kit.

They have one litter per year that range in size from 4-6 offspring. They are born blind and toothless. Mom does most of the care for the young, but as she is seeing to the motherly duties she is fed by the dogs in her group. Foxes tend to live in smaller groups made up of mom and her older offspring. Older brothers and sisters will actually hang around and help take care of the next litter.

They are known as the ultimate pheasant predator. Other predators of pheasants, ducks and other ground nesting birds consist of racoons, opossums and skunks. They do the most damage by eating the eggs of unhatched clutches. Waterfowl average a nest success rate of a little over 4% due to these predation factors. Pheasants do a little better, but lose many nests per year due to mammalian predator losses.

Foxes, on the other hand, will eat ground nesting birds at any part during their reproductive cycle and beyond. A fox will eat the eggs; young hatched birds and many cases can and will eat the adults. Many hens are captured and eaten during the incubation period. If a fox wanders across an entire brood they will kill as many as they can and then store the left overs to be eaten later.

Foxes have long, soft fur, and back when trapping was more of a thing, foxes fetched a pretty penny for the trappers who pursued them. The fur market has pretty much fallen apart and fur prices have collapsed. There are very few trappers left to help control predator populations. This has allowed most populations of mammalian predators to greatly expand. This has also greatly increased losses of ground nesting birds. Balanced populations of both are critical to a healthy ecosystem.

The thing that has happened in my region of Minnesota is the great expansion of coyotes. I don’t have any stats to prove it, but I would say that the coyote population in my county has grown 500% over the past 20 years. You can go out on just about any still night and park on a county road in the dark and hear lots of coyotes howling at the moon.

This great increase in coyotes has not been a catastrophe for pheasants though. Coyotes will eat a pheasant or their young if they get the chance, but their diet consists primarily of rodents, racoons, skunks, mice and possums. All of the items on a coyote buffet for the most part help ground nesting birds like pheasants.

Coyotes have one other characteristic, which I can say I actually like. They, for all practical purposes, displace the red fox. Red fox must also be a food item for coyotes. When the coyotes move in the red foxes move out. I would rather have 100 coyotes in an area than 10 red foxes. So, we have almost no red foxes and tons of coyotes. What I would prefer is almost no red foxes and almost no coyotes. Even though coyotes are not the ultimate pheasant predator, they are still a factor in pheasant losses. I do not know, if the coyote numbers were 80% less than they currently are, would the increase in nest egg eaters more than make up for the losses due to coyote predation on pheasants? 

There are few fox and coyote hunters left and most of them hunt these predators at night during the winter months with thermal scopes, which allow the shooter to see warm blooded animals in almost total darkness. Coyote numbers are so high that if you harvested 100 of them from one 10 square mile area, I think there would still be 400 left.

Predators of all shapes and sizes are a natural part of the system and I would never want to see them completely eliminated. Owls and other birds of prey eat pheasants too, but I certainly would not want them eliminated either. Raptors are a protected class, but foxes and coyotes do not have the same protections. If you want to do your part for the natural prey/predator balance, take up fox, and to a much greater extent, coyote hunting. Human activities can and do mess up the natural order of things and we are responsible in many cases for long term population losses, and to an equal extent to predator/prey imbalances.

So, what is it we can do? Habitats of high quality and in sufficient quantity are the only answer. Support public and private lands habitats and the organizations that champion that. Less then 2%-3% of the land base in southwest Minnesota is in undisturbed grasslands. Even yet today flood prone areas and hilly pastures continue to be converted to row crop. Let us farm the best and do conservation on the rest. That is the only way to find the right balance.

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If you have any questions, reach out to me at scottarall@gmail.com.