The Last Word On Nothing

Last week my little black dog wandered off into the sloping hillside behind our Colorado home. Fifteen years old, deaf and suffering from congestive heart failure, she appeared to have succumbed to some primordial call to return to the wilderness to die.

She didn’t have far to go. My husband and I live in the foothills of the Rockies, at the quintessential intersection of wildland and suburban living. Houses and ponderosa pines alternately dot the rolling lots; ravines provide the perfect corridors for critters to journey down from higher elevations.

When we bought the house last year, one of the first discoveries we made on poking through local maps was that we were smack-dab in the middle of the local “summer bear concentration.” Next we read David Baron’s chilling The Beast in the Garden, about a mountain lion that in 1991 had killed and eaten an 18-year-old male athlete who was out jogging after a pepperoni pizza lunch. Within view of an interstate highway. Not too many miles from our new house.

Yet over time, we never saw a bear other than its scat or the occasional fur tuft on the barbed-wire fence. Cougars made not a single appearance. One may have made it from the Black Hills to Connecticut recently, but none have figured out how to parse the few miles from the high country to our back yard — at least while we were watching.

What we do, have, though, are foxes. This spring we saw one with a glorious red coat (pictured) prancing and preening himself just off the back deck. One day he got particularly brave, or beggarly, and made his way up to our screen door. Eventually he vanished, and a far more mangy specimen replaced him in lurking around the lot. This one has a festive white tip on his tail, but a look of want in his eye that would make Mark Twain rethink his definition of a coyote.

It turns out that foxes are one of the most successful animals to move into cities and suburbs. In Zurich, Switzerland, dropping rates of rabies infections in the mid-1980s allowed foxes to colonize the city and quadruple their numbers in a decade. Genetic studies have shown how these urban foxes trace back to just a few pioneers that moved in from the countryside. Over time, gene flow will erase most of the differences between the urban and rural critters.

I haven’t tried to capture our fox to swab it for DNA, but I suspect my future will be less like Twain’s western frontier and more like cultured Zurich. In her new book Rambunctious Garden, conservation writer Emma Marris argues that humans need to learn to live with a new paradigm about nature, one that combines the (unrealistic) dream of untrammeled wilderness with human management. The rambunctious garden is a place where bees buzz in the city, where pheasants prance through pastures, and where invasive species invent an ecosystem of their own. My back yard, it seems, is a rambunctious garden of its own, which we weed-whack in an eternal quest to have a little living space, but into which foxes roam regardless.

Last Sunday morning, when my dog re-appeared after five nights alone on the mountain, the garden came into its own. I’m happy to live alongside mountain lions and bears, and even little needy foxes. As long as they return to me my totally urbanized pet.

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A contributing editor to Science News, Alexandra Witze lives and writes above Boulder, Colorado.

Photo credits:  Angie (named obliquely for astronomer Annie Jump Cannon) and Fox, both by Witze.