If a red fox tunnels under your toolshed or burrows beneath putting greens on nearby golf courses, you won’t guarantee it a long, healthy life by hiring a trapper to move it to a suburban woodlot or even a rural wetland.
That’s what researcher David Drake concluded in a talk Feb. 12 at the annual winter meeting of Wisconsin’s Wildlife Society in Stevens Point. Drake, a professor at UW-Madison, put it bluntly in the conference’s three-day seminar schedule: “Urban red fox translocation leads to dispersal and low survival.”
As UW-Madison researchers have found repeatedly the past 20 years, red foxes wreck stuff when living among humans. Yes, they’re cute when young, and pretty when mature, but mitigating their damage isn’t easy, and moving them elsewhere isn’t necessarily humane…