The family next door

Part II: Adaptation and survival

When we last left off, mankind was doing an absolute bang-up job of laying waste to my little state.

The largest wetlands in the state were an open landfill. Polluters were pumping industrial waste directly into waterways. Developers were wiping out huge tracts of environmentally sensitive land to make way for commercial buildings.

No joke, during the Vietnam War, the manufacturer of the cancer-causing defoliant, Agent Orange, was literally piping the now-banned cancer-causing agent DDT directly into the state’s longest river, the Passaic, only a few miles from its outlet to the ocean. It now has a riverbed of a six-foot thick goo scientists describe as “toxic marshmallow”. It is one of the EPA’s largest Superfund sites in the country.

It will literally never be remediated. It has been 50 years and scientists are still arguing over how to “fix it” because there are no good answers.

Some damage cannot be reversed.

Some can be though... and some can be avoided.

And that brings me to a place I go that I wanted to introduce you to.

Friends, meet the Great Swamp. A 6,600 acre national wildlife refuge under the protection of the federal government.

It is a 6,600-acre expanse of protected wetlands, grassland and mixed forest right in the center of New Jersey.

Back in the day, it was slated to be razed to the ground to make way for an unneeded fourth major New York City-area airport. It came within a whisker of being turned into just another LaGuardia or JFK. Activists and allies fought for over a decade to keep that from happening. Good people fought for a good thing and succeeded… but only barely.

There was a documentary made about the battle to save the Great Swamp. It’s interesting and uplifting... but back to our story.

I just love the place. I go there often. Early and late; during summer and winter; in good weather and bad. It has seasons and moods. It breathes in and out with a sort of rhythm you come to know if you spend enough time there.

Among the myriad species that make their home there are red foxes.

In spring, like clockwork, litters of new fox kits emerge from their parents’ winter dens for the first time. They are adorable and playful, cautious but curious. They’re wary of people but not skittish in the way adults are… and for a couple weeks, if you’re lucky, you can sometimes spot an entire litter together and sit quietly and watch them from a distance.

I have come to love foxes. The kits, the adolescents, the parents, I love those damn animals.

They are survivors. Their story is one of resilience and adaptation. Their lives are filled with all of the peril, and sometimes tragedy, that comes from being both wild animals and living among mankind.

But they soldier on.

In the wild, foxes are not nocturnal per se. They don’t prefer the dark of night any more than the light of day. When they have enough space distant from people, they follow a schedule like ours. Up with the sun or just before. Back in the den by dark or just after.

When there are no people to manage around, they do their living out in the open and in the light of day.

There aren’t a ton of open spaces in New Jersey though… and the ones that remain are already populated with their fair share of whatever animals the terrain will carry.

And that leaves foxes to make homes in places where they will either encounter people or live entirely among them.

To make that possible, foxes adapt. And adapt. And adapt.

A typical fox’s natural range would be somewhere around 5-10 square miles (with range meaning the footprint they typically travel around and live within). Within that would typically be a “territory” they police and defend from competitors.

The one little problem there: in New Jersey, the average 10-square mile parcel has 12,000 people living on it.

So, foxes adapt. They limit their ranges to smaller footprints which can look like gerrymandered congressional maps. They live where they can even when that means carving oddly shaped ranges through little green seams between and through towns.

And they limit their territories. They cut each other more slack and protect smaller footprints.

And that brings me to The Family Next Door…

I have a family of foxes in my backyard. Well, not my yard per se but in the one just behind it.

The adults are wise and savvy.

They know the neighborhood’s rhythms and flows. They come and go in windows when yards are quiet and people are few. In summer, when sunrise is early, they’re up before the light. In winter, when it gets dark early, they border on nocturnal. In between, you’ll see them any time the neighborhood is sufficiently quiet.

They live under a neighbor’s shed. They’ve been there for years. Each spring, the mother fox gives birth to a litter of kits. Their litters are smaller than their country cousins’ and the kits are warier from early on. But they are still kids with all of the precociousness and rambunctiousness and curiosity of youngsters (and young siblings).

The kits, like all kids, grow up too damn fast.

In a matter of weeks they go from little balls of fur to youngsters and then adolescents.

They are fully mature in under a year.

And then they leave the den and find their own home.

In the wild, that would mean finding their own range and territory.

But again, New Jersey… and the limits of life among people.

So, they adapt.

Three yards over from where my backyard foxes’ den is located sits a lovely little shed.

I have looked at this thing for years and thought “Boy, that’s an awfully foxy shed.”

It is. It is the perfect shed to build a den under. It sits on cinder blocks low to the ground but not flush. It is located at a point where a fox could easily slip out along a fence to any number of other yards or across the street to a seam between houses and out toward a stand of trees between a highway and road.

It would be going for a lot of whatever foxes use as currency if it were listed on Fox Zillow.

On New Year’s Day, I was up with the sun and looked out towards The Very Foxy shed.

Laying in the grass next to it was a red fox. A youngster. No longer a kit but not one of the older adults.

And I think it is one of last spring’s kits.

I am not certain but the markings on the face are extremely similar to the curious youngster that got almost all the way up to me unaware of me last spring before I coughed so as to let him know he oughta look around…

A few days later, on my way out for coffee at the ridiculous hour of 5:30, I heard a fox making mating calls from roughly that direction.

Y’all, I think one of the kids may have moved in around the corner from their parents!

I can’t be sure. It could be a secondary den for the adult foxes. I don’t think so though.

What I think is that here in this little suburban neighborhood in a state that once nearly rid itself of habitat and now has little in the way of open space, foxes have put aside their rules about territory and found ways to live among each other - and among us.

That is what I think.

And I think that because foxes adapt. They are among the most resilient of the wildlife around me. They just… adjust to change… and overcome adversity… and engineer around threats and dangers.

And that is what much of nature does. It adapts.

Back in the Great Swamp, there was a pair of nesting bald eagles. Now, there is a second.

There are families of foxes with their large litters and unbearably photogenic little ones.

And across the state, waterways have gotten cleaner. Polluters have been forced out or forced to comply with increasingly stringent regulations. Landfills have been capped and remediated.

I took this picture above rolling grassland atop what was once a landfill.

It is of a bald eagle named Alice. She was released in my old neighborhood at the tip of Manhattan almost twenty years ago.

She has raised countless eaglets to maturity and is still active.

Like my backyard foxes, she has just adapted and survived.

And that it the great hope for nature.

Even in the aftermath of great injury, nature adapts and overcomes and survives.

There is a metaphor in there.

I see it in my little backyard foxes. And maybe that’s why I love them.