Kit fox? No way
I now know what San Joaquin kit fox tastes like. It tastes like
crow.
Not long ago, I reported in this space that I’d received several
photos from an acquaintance via e-mail. They depicted what I was
certain was a kit fox, prowling in a tree at Ridgemark.
The animal appeared cat-sized, based on the foliage around it.
Its ears appeared large and its tail was capped with a sporty black
tip.
Kit fox for sure. Wrong.
Kit fox? No way
I now know what San Joaquin kit fox tastes like. It tastes like crow.
Not long ago, I reported in this space that I’d received several photos from an acquaintance via e-mail. They depicted what I was certain was a kit fox, prowling in a tree at Ridgemark.
The animal appeared cat-sized, based on the foliage around it. Its ears appeared large and its tail was capped with a sporty black tip.
Kit fox for sure. Wrong.
Not long after the article appeared I got two requests for copies of the photos. The first was from former county Ag. Commissioner Mark Tognazzini and the second was from his successor in the job, Paul Matulich. Both are gentlemen, so both took pains not to make me feel stupid. But both noted that they’d never heard of San Joaquin kit foxes climbing trees. Neither had I.
Red foxes, an introduced non-native in our region, are adept climbers. Kit foxes prefer to while away their leisure hours spending time in underground burrows.
But there’s also the native gray fox. Gray foxes are climbers. And on Monday, Matulich sent me a small sheaf of paper on the fax machine.
He asked Dennis Orthmeyer, assistant state director of USDA’s California Wildlife Services, for an opinion. He wrote that, in spite of the dark photos – they were taken at night – he is “reasonably sure the photos are of a gray fox.” That was seconded by the primary state agricultural biologist in the California Department of Agriculture. Duane Schnable said all the clues are “consistent with identification as gray fox.” Just in case he was not making himself clear, he went on to write “this is definitely not a kit fox.”
Oops. As long as I’m eating crow, I may as well have humble pie for dessert.
Last week, I wrote that hawks are not truly migratory. That’s not exactly what I meant, but that’s what I wrote down.
Some raptors are very definitely migratory. Merlins, small falcons, follow the shorebirds that are their primary prey. Swainson’s hawks migrate across continents. As North and South America collide along the narrowing channel that is Central America, fantastic numbers of raptors can be seen in the sky at peak migration.
What I actually meant to write was that many hawks are not true migrants, even though numbers of our resident hawks certainly rise in the winter. These are among the large group of hawks who congregate at the southern end of their range. Bald eagle numbers soar in California through the winter, for example. Like ospreys, they depend on open water.
I asked a friend if she knew of a term for this particular brand of sort-of, kind-of migration, because that’s exactly what I’d been struggling – unsuccessfully it seems – to describe.
That’s it. Readers have been kind enough not to point out any other stupid things I’ve written about lately, so it seems a prudent time to end this week’s column before I commit another gaffe.
