It was hard to believe, but the tracks in the dirt didn’t lie. I had been hiking the familiar piece of farmland I access each year, setting for late October raccoons. I was surprised to see nearly as many fox tracks as raccoon tracks, especially away from the river and on the edge of the forest and ditches. Even more surprising, there wasn’t a coyote track to be found.
Red foxes used to be the main target of trappers from the Dakotas to the East Coast. In fact, I have a booklet in my collection of outdoor books, called “Furbearers of North Dakota,” published by the state Game and Fish Department in 1961, that classifies the coyote as scarce in the state. Red foxes and even gray foxes were the main quarry of canine trappers, with more than 35,000 bounties claimed in 1958. That’s compared to less than 2,000 coyotes for the same year.
Of course, we all know that has changed. The coyote has moved eastward and expanded its range in ways that even biologists didn’t expect.
