The Unlikely Refuge for the West’s Most Adorable and Endangered Fox

http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/12/15/cute-and-critically-endangered-san-joaquin-kit-fox-has-found-refuge--big-city?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2014-12-15



(Photo: Kevin Schafer/Getty)

San Joaquin kit foxes are thriving in California’s oil capital, and as the drought worsens, these urban pioneers just might save the species from extinction.

December 15, 2014 By Peter Fairley

Peter Fairley is an optimist who writes about climate change and the energy innovations that can stop it.


Drought and development are decimating the San Joaquin kit fox. But the imperiled, pint-size predator has found a surprising sanctuary: Bakersfield, the honky-tonk California oil patch famous for being the hometown of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

This fast-growing city’s irrigated golf links, school campuses, and roadside greenways are providing an unlikely urban redoubt for the cat-size foxes—one that may save the species from extinction.

“They’re living on golf courses and eating junk food,” said Ileene Anderson, a conservation biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson, Ariz.,–based environmental organization. “Virtually every golf course has a kit fox family living on it.”

The federally protected subspecies of the kit fox once ranged across California’s Central Valley south of Sacramento. But farming and development has left as few as 3,000 of the nocturnal carnivores, which occupy remnants of native grassland habitat. Now drought is squeezing the life out of those lands.

FULL story at link.