Blue Ridge Country September/October 2022 - 12

CREATURE FEATURE
Get off My Turf!
Increasing coyote populations in the southeastern U.S.
may be having an impact on gray fox populations
By NANCY HENDERSON
JIM BEASLEY
F
or decades, wildlife biologists had been seeing
fewer gray foxes, which were once abundant
in the Southeast. But no one knew why. A few
years ago, researchers like Jim Beasley set out to
unravel the mystery.
" It could be habitat-related. It could be related
to competitors like coyotes. It could be other
things that we haven't accounted for, like disease. So even
if coyotes aren't directly competing with diet, there can be
some disease transfer, " says Beasley, an associate professor
at the University of Georgia's Warnell School of Forestry
and Natural Resources' Savannah River Ecology Lab,
based in Aiken, South Carolina. " I don't think anyone's
quite pinpointed exactly the driver, but my guess is it's
probably a combination of a number of these factors. "
Unlike red foxes, which generally live along the edges
of fields, the grays can actually climb trees and are typically
found in forests. " They're a charismatic species, "
Beasley notes. " You may not see them very often, but
they're a very neat species to see. And they play a very
important role in ecosystems. "
When he started his study, Beasley expected to find
more use of natural " partitioning, " which allows different
types of animals to share similar food sources without
conflict. Gray foxes were probably co-existing just fine
with the growing numbers of coyotes, at least in some
areas of the Blue Ridge states, he thought.
12 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
But the research revealed little neighborly
sharing among the two groups.
" In the plains area, which was the other
area where we did this comparison, those
species have been living together for centuries, "
Beasley says. " So they've had the advantage
of time to kind of work out how to
share a space, how to utilize resources to their
advantage without being negatively impacted by
one another. In terms of historical timelines, coyotes
haven't been in the Southeastern area all that long, so
not a lot of time has played out for [gray foxes] to be able
to adapt. They just haven't possibly had enough time to
partition things out between themselves. "
This might explain why gray foxes are being spotted
more often on suburban properties with trees; they're
simply avoiding the coyote competitors.
" Maybe that's the more immediate response that we're
seeing, to kind of get along with the new neighbors, if
you will, " says Beasley, whose co-authored study was
published in the Journal of Mammalogy in 2021.
Regardless of what further research will disclose about
the big picture of the gray fox-coyote feud, he adds, " It's
clear coyotes are not going anywhere. If we want to understand
how the expansion of this new predator into
this area is impacting other species in the food web, this
is an important place to start. "
As scientists work to understand the scope of the decline
and the reasons behind it, future plans to stabilize
the gray fox populations, perhaps through habitat conservation,
are " a little far down the road, " Beasley says.
In the meantime, Blue Ridge residents can get involved
by joining citizen science groups that collect information
about wildlife in their backyards, often with cameras that
sense movement at night and capture shots of the secretive,
nocturnal species.
" Those are easy things people can do, " Beasley says.
" And the nice thing is it can offer some pretty widespread
monitoring that just isn't possible with most resources
that are available in a lot of research projects. "
http://www.BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
Blue Ridge Country September/October 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country September/October 2022
