Fresh Encounters With Foxes and Weasels

The weasel dashed forward, grabbed the rabbit, and dragged it under the fence and away.”

Joe Hendricks of Glen Cove thought the raven was squawking at him.

It was dawn, barely light. He had rounded the first switchback on the trail that snakes through his property, which he walks every morning, and the raven was just above him in a Douglas-fir.

Then, in the grassy area ahead, he saw a critter leap into the air. A large, beautiful, and dramatically white-tipped tail followed the critter back to earth.

Hendricks edged closer. The fox dashed off with the raven in pursuit. As Hendricks chewed on what he had seen, he realized that the grassy area is where he sees the most evidence of voles on his land. I perked up when Hendricks told me this story. Alongside skunks and porcupines, foxes are high on my list for local sightings, as several longtime residents have told me they just don’t seem to be around like they used to be.

I would guess it’s not voles alone that drew the fox, that drew the raven. Before Hendricks’ arrival, his land was stripped of trees and haphazardly bulldozed for an ill-advised home site, leading to an extensive and scrappy ecosystem of grass and Canada thistle on structureless soil — far more vole habitat than he has today. Foxes may be among the cleverest of animals, but even they cannot perform their disappearing acts without a stage set with thickets, glades, and hidey-holes.

Hendricks has been intensively reforesting his land with an encyclopedia of West Coast native trees. With pruned limbs and living shrubs, he is weaving thickets. He is scattering duff and dead wood. Foresters call this structure. Bird life has blossomed. Bears are regular visitors.

This is the first fox he has seen on his land. I have recent reports from others as well: a fox caught on a doorbell camera at night near Victor, and a family of foxes on a forested farm south of Penrose, where apparently the best time to see them each year is after haying, when they emerge from the woods to see if the mower has left behind delicacies.

Please send me your sightings. I’ll add them to a file alongside a photo of my mother as a child, looking pretty uncertain as my great-grandfather poses with her next to four strung-up foxes he trapped on his Lakebay farm.

Foxes here are elusive and far less common than coyotes. Like coyotes, the story of foxes in North America is one of sneaky expansion. Our lowland species, the red fox, has been here for about 100 years but is not native to the Puget lowlands. Red foxes are, however, the world’s most widespread land carnivore, native across much of the northern hemisphere, including Canada’s boreal forest. A strikingly colored subspecies, the Cascades fox, lives in high-elevation haunts like Mount Rainier.

Red foxes spread with people across lowland America. But where did they come from? Are they derived from releases by hunters, escapes from fur farms, or natural range expansions of northern foxes? Biologists have recently attempted to untangle their DNA. Interestingly, eastern U.S. populations seem to represent an unassisted range expansion by boreal foxes taking advantage of human-altered landscapes, while our genetically mixed Western Washington foxes suggest a history of successive introductions and escapes.

Research wildlife biologist Keith Aubry collected stories of local fur farms and hunter releases for decades, including a silver fox farm near Tacoma and others near Yelm and Castle Rock.

Most locally, Aubry reported, “Mr. Andy Rogers of Seabeck, Washington, in Kitsap Co., a trapper of over 40 years’ experience, informed me that ‘foxes were unheard of (in Kitsap Co.) until they began to be sighted …shortly after World War II. Some years ago, in a conversation with Bill Glud of Brownsville, I learned that he and Russell Root of Fernwood … had released foxes here thinking they might be good game for hound hunting.’ ”

Here is another predator story.

Katie Hall, who lives on a small farm near Lake Holiday, heard a squeak near one of her fence lines. She found a weasel atop a teenage cottontail rabbit. She approached. The weasel scampered off. The rabbit twitched a few times and died. It looked like it had been bitten in the jugular. She was a few feet from the rabbit, but she saw that the weasel had circled around. It cautiously approached. She took a step back.

The weasel dashed forward, grabbed the rabbit, and dragged it under the fence and away. Every bird in the vicinity shrieked at the weasel. Hall was impressed. The weasel was determined to keep hold of its kill.

Hall has seen a weasel twice before on her farm, one scampering from under her car to the woodshed, one running over their back steps.

Our species is the long-tailed weasel, and it is renowned for its outsized mettle — some would say viciousness. Weasels are highly active animals in the mustelid family alongside otters and martens. They can swim, climb, and squeeze through tiny holes. Voles and deer mice are their primary prey, but they can take out creatures much larger than themselves, and they do not always eat their kills, as anyone with a chicken coop raided by a weasel can attest.

My old gullible Works Progress Administration guidebook to American wildlife, seeking an explanation for such behavior, offered, “A large parasite in its stomach is said to drive the weasel to its unbridled ferocity and wanton killing.”

It continued, “It is so speedy that some people believe the weasel can get out of the way of a bullet by dodging as it sees the flash of the gun.”

Scientists, focusing on the long-tailed weasel’s extensive fossil record rather than frustration and speculation, have found that it evolved in the postglacial landscapes of the last half-million years. From a larger tropical predator, long-tailed weasels evolved shorter legs and smaller size, giving them access to tunnels under snowfields and burrows in the massive postglacial plains, where rodent populations skyrocketed.

Another mustelid likely once present on the Key Peninsula is the fisher, a one-and-a-half- foot creature that, according to early naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, “is probably our most active arboreal animal. The squirrel is considered a marvel of nimbleness, but the marten can catch the squirrel, and the fisher can catch the marten.”

Fishers vanished from Washington by the mid-1900s thanks to over-trapping and habitat loss. They like extensive older forests. Fishers were reintroduced into the Olympic and Cascade Mountains from 2008 to 2021. They seem to be doing well.

Perhaps one day fishers will reappear here. Then the weasel might have something to worry about.