Earlier this year a custodian at Sandburg Middle School on the eastern edge of Elmhurst noticed a couple of wild red foxes had dug dens and taken up residence under the school’s cafeteria.
Before long, school officials discovered that the foxes had a litter of five pups in the two dens. The entrances, partially blocked from view by shrubbery, flanked the spot where pupils line up each morning to enter school. The kids quickly caught on to what foxes eat as the den entrances became littered with squirrel carcasses and fluffy bunny tails.
It was a lesson for the school’s administrators, teachers and pupils about Mother Nature.
New, not always obvious ecological shifts, usually tied to changes wrought by humans, in recent years have pushed many wild, seldom-seen animal species into becoming commonplace and probably permanent urban denizens.
The arrival of Canada geese is well-documented. Endless supplies of garbage and plentiful nooks and crannies to settle into have given Chicago and its suburbs the densest raccoon populations in Illinois, 100 to a square mile, compared with 10 to 45 per square mile in rural areas.
The stench of skunk musk now frequently wafts through suburbia. Even white-tailed deer and coyotes, not seen here for 100 years, are back.
Now red foxes are moving in. They began showing up rather suddenly and mysteriously about two years ago in dozens of suburban neighborhoods in the Chicago area. Today they are not as plentiful as, say, opossums, but they’re hardly an oddity either.
Animal control offices in all of the metropolitan counties and Chicago itself say they have received increased reports of fox sightings this spring.
Nobody is sure what is pushing red foxes into closer proximity to humans. Most biologists, however, strongly suspect it is due to the recent burgeoning of coyote populations in suburbia.
Both species live and hunt along edges of woodlands. Coyotes, weighing 30 or more pounds, win any turf war with 10- to 12-pound foxes. In the Chicago area, coyotes may have taken most traditional fox haunts–forcing their smaller cousins to find new digs.
With no place else to go, the foxes see residential neighborhoods as the new frontier, with abundant sheds and porches to den under and lawns teeming with squirrels, rabbits and mice.
“These are changes in (fox) behavior that seem permanent,” said naturalist Carl Strang at Glen Ellyn’s Willowbrook Wildlife Center. “I’m expecting to see red foxes become more and more widely distributed in the suburbs.”
The foxes weren’t exactly welcomed at first at Sandburg School. School officials called in police and animal control experts to see about getting rid of them.
“Our first concern always has to be for the safety of our children,” said David Ripley, Sandburg’s principal.
“They said removing the fox at that time would be tantamount to killing the kits (pups). They told us the history of the animal is such that they aren’t antagonistic to humans, and that, with a little caution, we could safely and even enjoyably coexist with the foxes.”
And that’s what happened. As spring unfolded, the kits on occasion came out to gambol and leap on the school’s sunny lawns, and soon Sandburg’s windows were lined with fascinated pupils and teachers.
Nocturnal hunters, the adult foxes took to sunning themselves during the day too. One of them favored napping on the bleachers behind the school, occasionally rousing itself to romp along at a respectful distance as young runners jogged on the track.
“The longer the foxes were here, the more they seemed to get in tune with the rhythm of the building,” Ripley said.
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Red foxes have always populated the area’s suburban forest preserves, golf courses and cemeteries. Usually, however, only the most dedicated nature lovers knew how and where to spot the shy and elusive animals.
In highly urbanized Europe, long bereft of wilderness, the fox has been a prized suburban neighbor, said Canadian ecologist J. David Henry. Henry is to foxes what Jane Goodall is to chimpanzees, writing such books as “Red Fox: The Catlike Canine.”
“Britain has a high population of foxes in its suburbs and cities,” Henry said in a recent telephone interview. “British people enjoy them tremendously. Foxes are incredibly graceful and interesting animals that can be wonderfully enriching to people lucky enough to be around them to watch them.”
Don Miller, a retired heavy machinery salesman, this spring has had two adult foxes raising eight pups from a den in his back yard in the middle of far south suburban Crete. “We don’t watch television anymore,” he said.
“We just sit by the patio door and watch the foxes. About the first of April, the mother came into the back yard and started nursing all eight of those pups at once. They’re here every day now. I’ll be up at 2 a.m. for an asprin and see them in the yard. Sometimes at 5:30 in the morning, the mother will be sitting up on the woodpile in the back yard watching the pups play on the ground. In the afternoon, she’ll come sit in the front yard, luring my wife and me to watch her so that the pups can play in the back.”
Miller said he built the house next to a creek so that his back yard would attract wildlife. While he has been charmed by the foxes, he called in wildlife experts recently to explore having them moved.
“They ran off all the raccoons,” he said, “and you won’t find a squirrel or a rabbit in our back yard anymore. The pups have been digging in my flowerbeds, and I’m wondering if these rascals will ever leave.”
State conservation officials assured Miller that as the pups are big enough and skilled enough to hunt on their own, the whole family will leave.
Late in May, the foxes at Sandburg School left, shortly after a pup was hit by a car in front of the school in the middle of the night. The school since filled in their dens to keep other animals from using them and to discourage the foxes from returning.
Homeowners often miss the foxes once they leave. Elsa and Roy Dames, who live in a La Grange subdivision, had a family with two pups in their back yard two years ago.
“They were just fun to watch, once they got used to us,” she said. “We left them alone, and they left us alone. Sometimes our teenage son would go in the back yard and hit whiffle balls for them to chase. They were lovely.”