Moscow’s urban foxes inspire student research

One morning last spring a Moscow resident heard dogs barking in her back yard.

She opened the curtain to see a red fox perched on her fence scolding a wild-eyed dog on the other side.

This wasn’t the sole sighting of a red fox in Moscow city limits.

Foxes have been caught on camera at the University of Idaho gayly trotting across the Hello Walk before students are awake. The canines have been seen carrying food in the form of rabbits and squirrels in residential neighborhoods and digging dens under garden sheds in the city’s alleys.

“There seem to be foxes everywhere,” said Lindsey Van Horn, a senior wildlife major in the College of Natural Resources who began a research project to study Moscow’s urban fox population by collecting fox scats to analyze DNA.

She has organized fundraising events to cover the cost of her research and has a social media network where citizen scientists can help her locate foxes and document den sites.

For Van Horn, a non-traditional student and mother from Pocatello, the abundance of foxes trotting around Moscow at all hours was a research opportunity too good to pass up.

She approached her mentor-professor with a proposal.

“I asked her if I can do a research project to learn where the foxes came from, how many there are, what they eat and where their dens are?” Van Horn said. “My professor thought about it, went to sleep and the next morning she woke up, called me, and said, ‘Let’s do this!’”

Van Horn’s mentor, Simona Picardi, a professor of wildlife ecology and management, expected catching foxes and outfitting them with radio collars to monitor their movements would be difficult, but worthwhile. Picardi pulled in U of I wolf researcher David Ausband, for additional guidance.

“He said we don't need to trap and collar the foxes, we just need to collect the fox scat and we can get all kinds of information from the DNA,” Van Horn said.

Genetic material will show how closely a population is related; it can help determine where the foxes came from, and researchers can build a family tree from that information.

“It’s noninvasive,” Picardi said. “We don’t have to get our hands on the animals. It’s so much easier.”

Not far from a pizza place on Pullman Road last June, Van Horn and a small team climbed through an alley past blooming lilac and syringa bushes then kneeled near an outbuilding in a residential backyard to locate fox droppings in the grass. Under the wooden outbuilding that abutted the alley was a fox den site that had recently been abandoned. The summer air was pungent with something like the smell of a skunk.

“That’s fox smell,” said Ausband, who coached Van Horn in proper scat collection techniques as Picardi and graduate student, Koryna Boudinot, looked on.

Van Horn used a tweezer to flake off an outer scab of scat. The sample contained epithelial cells from which DNA can be extracted. She placed the flake in a marked vial and inserted a toothpick into the remainder of the uncollected scat to note it had already been sampled. This happened repeatedly until all the droppings in the small plot of grass beside the shed had toothpicks in them.

Over the summer, Van Horn developed a social media network dedicated to the fox project where people can post about fox sightings and possible den sites, and she added a fundraising page.

“I made an Instagram and Facebook and sent it to everyone in my contacts, and it kind of blew up from there,” she said.

A recent tip included a fox sighting in a meadow not far from the alleyway where she collected the samples. The small crew of researchers walked a few blocks to a grassy area and found a trail that meandered under pines and past an apartment complex. Along a chain-link fence they found more fox droppings from which to collect DNA.

“In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten so many people just coming around and asking me about the foxes and sharing pictures and videos,” Van Horn said. “Everyone’s super excited.”

Ausband said the in-town wildlife research is novel and has the potential to become a long-term research project for wildlife students who can’t travel or leave Moscow.

“A lot of times what’s really expensive in wildlife research is the cost of getting to where the animals are and finding them and getting samples from them,” he said. “This gets rid of all that, because we can literally get there by walking out our office doors, and it’s so much more economical. We can get so many samples in such a short amount of time and learn so much rapidly.”

Van Horn is also hosting fundraiser events to help pay for the genetics lab work which is done outside of the university.

Lab technicians will extract DNA from the outer mucus layer of the stool that contains shed intestinal cells and analyze it to track species, individuals and population.

The research presents many opportunities for community engagement, Van Horn said. She is already thinking about reaching out to schools in the area and involving a dedicated group of citizen scientists interested in the project.

“I think it’ll be a cool opportunity for schools. We can share what we find and talk about the project with schools in Moscow and Pullman. There’s just so many possibilities that could happen with this,” she said.