Sierra Nevada red fox / National Park Service photo
It’s been one hundred years since a sighting of the Sierra Nevada red fox has been confirmed in Yosemite National Park. Also known as the High Sierra fox, it is a subspecies (vulpes vulpes necator) of the red fox (vulpes vulpes) and was captured on camera in Yosemite in mid-December, 2014. The California Fish and Game Commission declared this exceedingly rare subspecies threatened in 1980, and it could receive federal protection under the Endangered Species Act this year.
The Sierra Nevada red fox is slightly smaller and darker than the more common red fox, which is non-native to California. It’s range is limited to alpine and subalpine meadows above 4,500 feet.
“We are thrilled to hear about the sighting of the Sierra Nevada red fox, one of the most rare and elusive animals in the Sierra Nevada,” said Yosemite National Park Superintendent Don Neubacher. “National parks like Yosemite provide habitat for all wildlife, and it is encouraging to see that the red fox was sighted in the park.”
“It’s likely that the Sierra Nevada red fox has been in the backcountry of Yosemite in the last century, but they are rare enough and secretive enough that they haven’t been encountered by anyone who has been able to document them,” said Ben Sacks, director of the University of California, Davis Veterinary School’s Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit to Live Science.
According to Wikipedia, the Sierra Nevada red fox was highly prized by trappers in the early part of the twentieth century for its fur—softer than that of the native California gray fox. Still earlier, on November 14, 1844, the first party of wagons to cross the Sierra Nevada was forced to leave six of its eleven wagons behind because of the difficulties in getting the wagons over what is now known as Donner Pass. Eighteen-year-old Moses Schallenberger, who stayed behind to watch over the wagons, survived the winter of impassibly deep snows, subsisting on a diet consisting mainly of High Sierra red foxes. He trapped, on average, one fox every two days, before being rescued by Canadian-American Dennis Martin at the end of February, 1845. (Take that, Oscar Wilde!)*
Today it’s estimated that there may be no more than fifty of this rare subspecies extant—perhaps even fewer. Click for a full report on the Yosemite sighting in Indian County Media Network.
Posted February 6, 2015
* Irish playwright Oscar Wilde once referred to foxhunters as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”