By Elizabeth Weise
That Glen Canyon is home to coyotes is fairly well known at this point. They share the park with skunks, raccoons and opossums. But Friends of Glen Canyon volunteer Mary Huizinga, of Laidley Street recently found out they’re not the only mammals making their homes there.
Huizinga frequently walks her dog, Chester, in the canyon. But last summer Chester came back from a romp near Islais Creek with what Huizinga thought was an opossum jaw bone.
But wanting to be sure, she took it to the scientists at the California Academy of Sciences.
On Saturday, they emailed her back:
“After consulting a dichotomous key we were able to determine that they belonged to a red fox! The red fox is a native California species found mostly around the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains. However, it has expanded outside its natural distribution due to its use by hunters as transplanted game. The foxes that were not killed during the hunt were free to reproduce and develop new populations. Such is the case with red foxes in San Francisco. They are not native and their presence has them competing with native Gray Foxes for food.”
The Academy of Sciences staff offered up a few links for more information: