Friending Wildlife
THE FACEBOOK FOXES AND WILDLIFE CORRIDORS IN SILICON VALLEY’S HIGH-TECH WORLD
“The Facebook foxes that live on our campus are pretty amazing. It makes me happy that we got our campus certified as an official wildlife habitat so these guys could stick around.”—Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO
“A fox never found a messenger better than himself.”—Irish proverb
In June of 2013, a gray fox pup emerged from nearby bushes and peered into a window. The business discussions taking place in Mark Zuckerberg’s office at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus suddenly ceased. As the young fox with its curious eyes, pointed ears, and black-spotted muzzle considered him through the glass, the social media pioneer whipped out his smartphone and began snapping photos. Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, did the same, capturing Mark in his characteristic plain T-shirt beaming a smile at one of the adorable new campus mascots. “FB Fox crashed Zuckerberg’s meeting”read the caption when Boz shared the picture online.
From there, the news spread. The blog Gawker announced “Mark Zuckerberg ‘Likes’ Something That’s Awesome: Baby Foxes.”The Huffington Post declared “And they’re the cutest. Little. Creatures. In the World.”Even the Wall Street Journal took a break from pontificating about the one-year anniversary of Facebook’s IPO and reported “Baby Foxes Check Into Facebook.”
The pup was the offspring of a female fox that had first been spotted wandering in Hacker Square about a year before. Glimpses and rumors gave way to confirmed sightings, and soon three new pups rounded out a “skulk”—the proper collective noun—of Facebook foxes. Employee and enthusiast Alexis Smith set up a page, “FB Fox,” about a month before the famously crashed meeting. “Everybody was posting photos to their personal pages—I wanted to create a space we could honor the foxes together,”she said. After Mark liked the page, it gained three thousand fans in twelve hours. After the media picked up the story, page subscriptions skyrocketed. Today it boasts more than one hundred thousand followers from forty-four countries around the world.
As fully as any sports mascot at a university, the foxes became embedded in the DNA of the campus. The employee store offered stuffed toy foxes sporting Facebook monogrammed shirts, the staff proudly wore “Fox Club” buttons, and the company commissioned an artist to paint a fox mural in one of the buildings. Alexis even championed the creation of Facebook fox emoticons—a series of foxes brandishing the thumbs-up sign, a pint of beer, or a happy face—for all your metacommunicative needs.
People could not get enough photos of the foxes dashing across the basketball court, relaxing on the picnic benches, playing tag on the lawn, or simply trotting through an outside work area, casually passing employees coding away on their laptops. Technology humor abounded on the FB fox page, such as when staff person Steve Kaye shared a photo of the mother fox, nicknamed Firefox after a popular Internet browser, strolling on the campus carrying a meal of a dead bird in her mouth; the caption read “Mama F putting an end to all the tweeting,” a dig at the social media platform Twitter. The page also featured an entire series of photos of foxes napping contentedly on the hoods or roofs of the employees’ cars, with captions like “BMW: The ultimate driving and napping machine.”
Fox pups playing on the Facebook campus.
Foxes pose at the famous 1 Hacker Way sign.
Perhaps the most endearing shots depict what makes the animal distinct from its other fox relatives. Tamara Eder, author of Mammals of California, describes them thusly: “Truly a crafty fox, the Common Gray Fox is known to elude predators by taking the most unexpected of turns—running up a tree.”The FB foxes darted up trees and climbed the awnings above campus walkways as people passed underneath.
To ensure the foxes’ health and safety, Facebook’s facilities management team worked with wildlife services and contacted local gray fox researcher Bill Leikam, who gave a presentation to the employees designed to educate them about the animal. Facebook employees initiated additional steps to guarantee that these wild creatures stayed wild, an encouraging echo of Yosemite’s efforts to educate the public about healthy interaction with black bears. The motto of the FB fox page became “Please honor the foxes—no chasing or feeding—just mutual respect.” Staff posted signs on campus asking people to keep their distance. An employee shared a photo of one of the foxes resting under his automobile and warned, “Before you drive off, please check if there is a fox under or near your car.”
Bill, known by many as the Fox Guy, accompanied me on my tour of Facebook’s campus to witness the foxes for myself. After we posed for the requisite selfie at the famous 1 Hacker Way “Like” sign, we met Jacqueline Rooney from corporate communications in the front lobby for our tour. Once inside, I no longer had any questions about why a fox family would want to take up residence here—I now wanted to live on the Facebook campus. Designed by consultants from Disney, the campus exudes the “happiest place on earth” vibe. Tree-lined pedestrian and bike paths pass the Sweet Stop ice cream parlor, a pub, and an assortment of cafes, most free to the employees. The array of amenities also includes a bank, a bike shop, a barbershop, a health care center, a music studio, and a woodshop. The campus is saturated with greenery, from a community garden to abundant plots of trees, flowers, and native grasses. Employees program on comfortable lounge chairs and outdoor sofa sets, periodically rising to do tai chi stretches and yoga poses on the lawn.
Alexis met us at the Zen Garden, an expansive deck in between two buildings surrounded by a mulched garden area of trees and flowers. She pointed to the space underneath the deck where the foxes denned and gave birth. She recalled when she first viewed the pups romping here, wrestling and chasing each other’s tails; their antics made it easy for employees to become smitten with the three “foxeteers.” Alexis also recounted that the pups “would nurse right here on the boardwalk as employees walked by.”
Unfortunately, the foxes were nowhere in sight that day, so we chatted about our favorite fox antics (my vote was for tree climbing), and Bill answered some questions about fox biology (they are able to climb because their forearms rotate). Before leaving, I presented fox-friendly Facebook with the National Wildlife Federation’s official Certified Wildlife Habitat designation sign (see page 178), which was proudly received. The next day, Alexis posted to the “FB Fox” page a photo of the sign, already mounted on a fence post in the community garden, a favorite hangout of the foxes. About a week later, above a photo of two fox pups curled together while napping, Mark commented to his tens of millions of followers the epigraph to this chapter.
In that one post, Mark did more to promote awareness about urban wildlife coexistence than I could ever hope to achieve in my career.
Aside from fueling a social media #cuteoverload #fbfox trending topic, I began to think about what all this meant—for the foxes and all urban wildlife. One of Mark’s goals is to “connect everybody.”Could this “everybody” apply also to wildlife? The Facebook staff—including those more schooled in HTML and JavaScript than in the principles of conservation—had grasped the whole coexistence thing with their usual savvy and quickness. The staff rapidly integrated “wildness” into their campus, and they did it without endless committee meetings and hundredpage employee manuals of rules and regulations, and nary a task force to guide them. In its championship of the skulk of foxes, Facebook had pioneered yet another frontier in Silicon Valley, marking a milestone for human-wildlife coexistence. Had social media, and the culture that created it, changed the game? Did we ultimately owe this embracing of foxes to crowdsourcing?
In my quest for forging new paths for urban wildlife conservation, I started concocting possibilities. BuzzFeed had asked in one of its features on the Facebook foxes, “Ugh, why can’t all offices have a family of foxes living in them?”My mind began racing. Should my new conservation tactic be releasing charming wildlife onto high-tech campuses? Maybe some bobcats to tempt Google’s CEO? Or beavers for Apple’s leadership?
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“My conception of grandeur, beauty, and commercial magnificence is realized in the Santa Clara Valley.” —Edward Jeffery, president of Western Pacific, 1913–1917
“And yet, as the humans eat dosas and climb fake mountains and learn acupuncture and buy lap dances, beneath the asphalt and concrete, the microbes eat toxic waste sweetened with molasses, cleaning up our mistakes.” —Alexis Madrigal, Atlantic Monthly
That foxes romp anywhere in today’s Silicon Valley seems a remarkable feat given the environmental history of the region. Like the porpoises in San Francisco Bay, it required restoration—intentional or unintentional—before wild things would venture back into some areas. Among the early settlers of Santa Clara Valley who recorded its incredible beauty was William Brewer, who in 1861 wrote, “The Santa Clara Valley is the most fertile and lovely of California.”O(jiān)nce word of its allure spread, the inevitable followed; as more recent chroniclers of California history, the Eagles, warned in a song, “Call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
First the cattle ranches arrived, their animals sustained with plentiful grazing on hill and dale. Next, the arrival of the railroad and the discovery of abundant artesian well water attracted agricultural interests, and the livestock were soon replaced by extensive orchards of apricots, cherries, and plums. Each spring, tourist publications touted “blossom tours” to lure visitors to “the Valley of the Heart’s Delight,”the region’s new nickname. Population and development subsumed the native landscapes of oak-lined hillsides, fresh- and saltwater marshes, expansive grasslands, and naturally flowing rivers and creeks. And with this incremental banishment of natural space came a gradual loss of wildlife. Over time the plentiful herds of tule elk and pronghorn vanished, followed by the grizzly bears, beavers, and otters. The once numerous flocks of shorebirds and waterfowl significantly diminished.
Yet the environmental impacts of cattle ranching and fruit farming paled in comparison to the rapid degradation that befell the region during Silicon Valley’s industrial age, which started in earnest after World War II. The tinkerings of Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard in their garage (which is now a private museum) heralded Silicon Valley’s birth as the center of the high-tech universe, but unlike the largely serviceoriented economic base of today, manufacturing then reigned as the dominant industry. Companies including National Semiconductor, Xerox, IBM, Atari, Apple, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard actually built their products within Silicon Valley’s borders, instead of building them overseas as they do today.
Silicon Valley’s orientation toward technology manufacturing required paving over much of the land to meet the rampant demands for commercial space and housing; more than two hundred thousand jobs were added during the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, and those people needed places to work and live. Meanwhile, toxic chemicals associated with the manufacturing process contaminated the land and water, rendering many places uninhabitable for flora or fauna. Today, Silicon Valley ranks as one of the most toxic areas in the country, with almost two-dozen Superfund sites. With the double whammy of poison plumes and land sealed off with asphalt and concrete lacquering, the local wildlife’s future didn’t looking promising.
A group of mothers concerned about chemicals leaking into the groundwater raised an alarm in 1982, and in response two attorneys formed the Silicon Valley Toxic Coalition to strengthen regulations and advocate for mitigation efforts that are still underway to this day. Although Silicon Valley is now largely devoid of manufacturing plants, the toxic leftovers still pollute thousands of gallons of water, which must flow through extensive treatment systems to exorcise the chemical ghosts.
One of the Facebook foxes on campus.
Above ground, the grassroots open-space movement raised funds to purchase land, lobbied for changes in zoning laws, promoted conservation easements, and formed a new type of agency for land management called Open Space Districts. And it worked. Daniel Press, the author of Saving Open Space: The Politics of Local Preservation in California, acknowledges the effectiveness of this movement: “For all the ways in which the Golden State resembles and differs from the rest of the nation, preservation in California communities serves as an object lesson for the rest of the nation, not only in land loss but also in redemption.”O(jiān)rganizations like the Committee for Green Foothills and POST (the Peninsula Open Space Trust) have stemmed the rising tide of development to keep greenspace alive.
Consider Silicon Valley on a map. It’s a nebulous designation with shifting borders roughly centered around San Jose. Highway 101 is its backbone, attached to an uneven ribcage of major freeways from roughly Palo Alto to South San Jose. This skeletal system supports a dense swath of urbanization. Despite the cityscape, however, if you were to stand on any high-rise with a 360-degree view in San Jose, you could easily observe the immense accomplishments of the open-space movement.
And what a view! “It is a view that has the quality of bigness without actual size, and it used to comfort me to know that these little mountains, like everything else around, are very lively, very Californian,” wrote Wallace Stegner. The Santa Clara Valley, a.k.a. Silicon Valley, has always been “l(fā)ively”: even today it ranks as one of the most geologically active areas in North America, and its long tectonic history is full of booms and busts that can rival any tech-bubble cycle. The upheavals shaped this landscape of sublime extremes.
Foothills ripple across Silicon Valley on both sides, eventually cresting into two mountain ranges: Santa Cruz to the west and Diablo to the east. Open-space advocates have focused their efforts on preserving the foothills and mountains, even as a dense urban ocean laps at their feet. From an aesthetic standpoint, the greenbelt approach was successful. From an ecological standpoint, however, it left a fragmented ecosystem.
As we are finally learning, our favored approach to conservation— preserving islands of habitat—hasn’t worked well. As Mary Ellen Hannibal states bluntly in her book The Spine of the Continent: The Race to Save America’s Last, Best Wilderness, “Nature doesn’t work without connection.”Stand-alone protected areas are not sufficient—think about P-22 stranded in Griffith Park after his daredevil journey—and animals are disappearing even within national park boundaries, the best-protected places on the planet. Mary Ellen offers an example of this problem: Pronghorn use an ancient migration path in the Rocky Mountains that dates back more than six thousand years, and even though ranches and roads and oil drilling block their path, the animals refuse to deviate from their course. It is not enough to place them in a habitat of our choosing when instinct draws them elsewhere. Their insistence on following the path of their ancestors would have spelled their demise had it not been for a dedicated group of people—representing a range from industry interests to environmental activists—now actively working to help the pronghorn.
As for our foxes, they don’t migrate, but they do need to disperse. Like P-22 and his mountain lion kin, foxes (and all wildlife, really) rely on genetic diversity to survive; isolation can lead to extinction, and city boundaries are formidable barriers.
Lucky for the Facebook foxes, they found an inviting habitat. As a result of a rising environmental consciousness, a trend of sustainable building, and the desire to keep talented high-tech workers happy, technology companies are now designing and building campuses that bring back greenery into the city. The campuses are not untouched wild areas, but foxes don’t differentiate.
A gray fox named Cute, in Palo Alto.
When the foxes stood at the Facebook campus considering their next move, did they try to see past the concrete buildings and roadways? Did they sense the cattle grazing on the distant hillsides from 150 years ago? Could they smell the toxic metals swirling in the wastewater being pumped underground, or the lingering scent of apricots and cherry blossoms? Did they see the marshlands of 500 years ago, deafening with birdsong, or the flowing creeks lined with willow trees that their ancestors used to climb, now long cut down? When they marched onto the Facebook campus, and trotted past the first stunned employees, did the view of their historical birthplace persist, urging them on? Or did they simply do what worked, napping on the hood of a BMW in the employee parking lot, warmed by the sun, content with their new world as it was?
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“But there’s one sound That no one knows: What does the fox say?”—Ylvis
The Norwegian musical comedy duo Ylvis’s video for their hit song “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say)” went viral in 2013 and has almost five hundred million views to date. Their silly and clever electronic dance pop routine, featuring the artists dressed as the different animals along their onomatopoeic quest for a fox sound, stumbles—probably completely unbeknownst to them—on a legitimate gap in scientific inquiry. The truth is we really don’t know much about what the gray fox says, or what he does, or how he behaves and relates to the world.
But the Fox Guy might have some answers. “I’m working on language now, and I think I am starting to understand their basic vocabulary,”Bill Leikam tells me in our latest interview. He describes a recent encounter in the field, where he witnessed the arrival of a mate seemingly from out of nowhere, without any vocalization or other form of announcement from either animal, or at least not any he could detect. “I wonder how gray foxes communicate across distance without making a sound, or do they? Do they communicate as we normally understand that word, or is something else happening?”he wondered.
Bill’s nickname is well earned. Having spent thousands of hours in the field observing Urocyon cinereoargenteus (the Latin name translates as “bushy-tailed dog of ashen silver”), he is the Jane Goodall of the gray fox world, immersing himself in the study of the urban foxes of Silicon Valley as fully as Jane did with the chimpanzees of Gombe, duplicating her assimilationist approach. He spends almost every day in the company of gray foxes. And the foxes seem to enjoy his presence; he has a calm manner, a soothing voice, and a rhythm to his movements that put animals—and people—at ease. A navy veteran, a teacher by trade, and a lifelong citizen scientist, Bill has significantly advanced our knowledge of the gray fox.
He entered the field of study quite by accident. One day while walking in the Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve he stumbled upon a fox sitting at the side of a dirt road. “I hadn’t seen a gray fox, much less thought of one, since I was about thirteen. The fox at the Baylands just sat there as I took picture after picture, walking closer and closer, until I stepped around the edge of a gate. At that moment, the fox stood, turned, and nonchalantly walked back into the thicket,”he remembers.
Something about the animal captured his imagination. “The following morning I returned, but there was no fox. Two days later as I passed through the area, I stopped and waited. From out of the thicket emerged three young gray foxes. I was stunned for I realized that I had come upon a family of foxes.”The law of the irresistibility of fox puppies applies as much to Bill as to Mark Zuckerberg. He went back the next day, and the next. He watched as the male fox streaked by, most mornings carrying a field mouse or some other rodent to feed the pups. Though gray foxes are omnivorous and will eat almost anything—insects, birds, fruits, grasses—small mammals are a staple of a healthy fox’s diet.
Bill started making daily visits to the area, which he named Fox Hollow, taking notes, posing research questions, and immersing himself in the scholarship of these canids. “I enjoy seeing how research questions unfold,”he tells me. “They’re always like picture puzzles; the piece must fit perfectly before it’s accepted.”
That the puzzle of the gray fox hasn’t yet been completely assembled seems odd given both their wide distribution across the United States and their status as the oldest living member of the Canidae family. They represent a tie to the ancient world that stretches back further in time than coyotes, wolves, and jackals—all animals we know significantly more about.
Fast-forward five years of sharing his days with the foxes and Bill was being recognized and lauded by scientists in the field. Dr. Ben Sacks, the director of the Canid Diversity and Conservation Unit at UC Davis, wrote a letter of commendation about Bill in which he said, “I was thrilled that he was studying the behavior of these foxes because so little was known about them….I have watched with great interest as Bill has sent periodic updates, photos, and film clips detailing his accumulated observations of the courtship, mating, pup-rearing, territoriality, and provisioning behavior of these foxes.”
Bill’s field reports sketch out the character of this enigmatic animal. Consider this excerpt from an entry titled “High-Speed Climbing School”:
[T]hrough the weeds, I saw a movement, and out from the weeds came Gray, the male of the “family,”followed in a line—one right after the other—by his five pups. Before I realized it, the foxes were up in the lower branches of a huge eucalyptus tree. Down they came, out on a fallen branch from the tree, further out, out until the tip of the branch could no longer hold Gray and two pups, and they leapt to the ground. That was only the beginning of what turned out to be dad Gray teaching his pups high-speed tree climbing and navigation.
Surveying Bill’s plentiful and exacting notes, you get to know the cast of fox characters. Gray, the attentive dad, is the mate of Bold, and they jointly reign over Fox Hollow. Bold, named for her tenaciousness, fought off her father, Squat, for possession of her natal den and territory. Usually the parents maintain the home turf and the youngsters disperse to new territory, but Bill is observing that in urban areas, where habitat is scarce, territorial boundaries are not as firm, and foxes bend the rules. He’s documented two mating pairs and their offspring in close proximity, which would be unusual in wilder areas. He even witnessed the youngsters from both families playing together—again, not typical.
A gray fox pup giving its mother, Little One, a fox kiss.
Joining Bill in his study of gray foxes and other urban wildlife in Silicon Valley is Greg Kerekez, who is also not a trained scientist. A wildlife conservation photographer and videographer, Greg grew up along the American River in Sacramento. “I spent my childhood fascinated by wildlife, collecting butterflies and frogs and other creatures all through high school to study them,”he says. “When I found photography, I realized I could take pictures of animals instead of catch them.”
For years, Bill had eschewed company on his excursions to see the foxes, and he initially resisted Greg’s request to join him in the field for a day. But Greg’s sincerity and persistence paid off, and after their first outing together, Bill sensed Greg’s dedication to understanding the natural world and his genuine desire to help wildlife. He reconsidered his solo approach, thinking, “Maybe I am being too stodgy,”and invited Greg out for a second and third excursion. This eventually led to their formation of the Urban Wildlife Research Project (UWRP), proving that opposites attract, even in the research world. A baby boomer, Bill retired from teaching in 2005 and tends toward introversion, while Greg’s a millennial whose artistic expressions in film and music attest to his extroversion. Together, they are a formidable advocate for Silicon Valley wildlife.
In the field, they are two musicians playing a seamless duet. I joined them on fox patrol early one morning in the Baylands, watching the sunrise unmask a foggy landscape to reveal one of the largest tracts of undisturbed marshland in the San Francisco Bay. As we strolled toward Fox Hollow, blue herons flew by, and an array of ducks paddled along noisily in the slough. Some consider the Palo Alto Baylands the best place for bird watching on the West Coast, and for the same reason that foxes like the area.
As we waited for the foxes to appear, Greg gave us his best fox impression—a hoarse call that sounds like a mix of a raven’s caw and a yippy dog’s bark, each with a case of laryngitis. In contrast to their wolf and coyote relatives, gray foxes don’t howl and are not rated high as songsters. Not surprisingly, they are at their most communicative during mating season—a time that brings out the chattiness of many in the animal world—and their repertoire also includes mews, coos, and some growls and snarls. Yet, vocalization may not be the most important form of communication for this canid. The gray fox employs subtle tactile, chemical, and visual signals in social encounters, as Bill’s diligent and constant observation has often uniquely documented.
A fox kiss greeting.
As if the foxes could get any more endearing, their traditional way of welcoming another fox is with a kiss. And these are no mere cursory pecks on the cheeks. Pups will eagerly touch noses with their parents, lowering themselves to the ground and curling under the adult’s chin, while males and females who have been separated will swish their tails and snuggle into each other, celebrating their reunion by rubbing snouts. Under certain conditions, adult foxes from different families may use the affectionate greeting as a sort of handshake.
But it’s not all kisses and group hugs in Fox Hollow. Gray foxes have their conflicts over territory and food, like any other animal, but they lack the violent and lethal outcomes typical of wolves, who will often kill on sight other members of a rival pack. Foxes even have their own “peace sign”to avoid fights, which “works about 97 percent of the time,” according to Bill. To placate another fox, the animal will approach with its belly low to the ground, swish its tail, and sometimes give a fox kiss, maybe rolling on its back and speaking in a series of high-pitched squeaks.
Foxes are largely amicable, engaging in mutually beneficial practices such as grooming and other displays of kinship, including this one Bill and Greg documented in their research: An adult female appeared one day in the Baylands with no mate or pups. She wandered into the territory of foxes named Creek and Little One, who had a den site with four pups alongside the levee road near Matadero Creek. As the family considered her, they recognized her as Little One’s sister. They made no move to chase her away as they typically would an ordinary trespasser. This new female was the first documented instance of helper females within the gray fox community. She helped raise the pups. She hunted for them and brought in food, and she played with them, teaching them the basics of being a gray fox. She became a fully accepted member of the family, and for the entire childrearing season she stayed and helped. Then, even after the pups were grown and had dispersed, this wolf, whom Bill named “Helper,” remained in the vicinity.
As Greg remembers, “We were stunned. This provided the first documented occurrence of a helper female in the gray fox world.”And Helper didn’t just make history, she also instigated a soap opera. “Interestingly enough, the male ‘Creek’ disappeared the next season, and the two adult females ‘Helper’ and ‘Little One’ stayed together, neither of them having pups,”read Bill’s report. The following season, Helper and Little One remained on their own until another male, Brownie, arrived, who whisked them both away to another location. Foxes are monogamous—to a point—although this example shows that foxes in urban areas with less habitat may prove less faithful than those that live in wilder areas.
While we walk, I notice that this 1,940-acre nature preserve is still a highly peopled landscape. We pass visitors hiking, running, biking, walking their dogs, bird watching, and canoeing. The city’s airport and the landfill border the park, and some of the foxes have made their dens in close proximity to the nearby water treatment plant. It now made sense why the Facebook foxes, who likely traveled to the campus from the Baylands, didn’t shy away from denning in the highly trafficked Zen Garden or napping on cars in the staff parking lot.
Bill makes a distinction between the urban gray fox and its wilder counterparts, citing behavioral differences that come with city living: “These urban gray foxes have frequent interactions with people. As such, they do not fear being around people, but at the same time they will dash away if a person approaches too closely. Unique to the urban fox, adult gray foxes seem to intentionally introduce their young to people, as seen by direct observation. This is in contrast to the gray foxes that, for instance, live in the wilderness of the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. These gray foxes are seldom seen.”
We created the new world of Silicon Valley, but the urban foxes might be guiding us in how to live there. In their folklore, many of Northern California’s Native American tribes consider Silver Gray Fox a cultural hero—he creates the world and teaches people how to live in it. I see the Facebook foxes as emissaries, and as they do with strangers of their own kind, they are making those first tentative peace offerings toward us in hopes we’ll share our territory. Foxes can adapt to us. It remains to be seen if we can adapt to foxes.
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“I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.”—entrepreneur Elon Musk
“Carnivores, fortunately, are here to stay, and so are cities. More than 50 percent of the world’s human population now resides in urban areas….A bobcat in Tucson, Arizona, a coyote in Los Angeles, California, a raccoon in Chicago, Illinois, and a red fox in London, England, can all add significantly to people’s experience of nature, benefiting the people, the animals, and we hope, in the long run, the wider world.” —Urban Carnivores:Ecology, Conflict, and Conservation
Wildlife are returning to the Santa Clara Valley. Although the landscape will no longer support abundant herds of tule elk, the pronghorn have long vanished, and the closest grizzly bears are in Washington State, we are not without hope. We may never return to the past of plentitude, yet something new is emerging—a model of urban refugia. Our actions, while not perfect, seem to have issued a clarion call for wildlife, and animals, like the Facebook foxes, are tentatively answering.
After more than 150 years, beavers returned to the Guadalupe River in the spring of 2013, busily gnawing trees near the Shark Tank (the SAP Center) in the downtown river parkway in San Jose. Greg discovered the beavers, first an individual and then a family, which he features in his “Beavertown San Jose” video series. In 2013 scientists also documented the first successful nesting of Swainson’s hawks in Santa Clara Valley since 1894, and noted in their research paper that conservation efforts might have played a role, “or that it [the hawk] may be adapting to human-modified habitats.”The endangered condor returned to Silicon Valley in 2011, when five of them were sighted soaring over Mt. Hamilton—not twenty miles from San Jose—and then hanging out not on a ponderosa pine or blue oak but on the roof of the Lick Observatory dome.
All of this echoes the situation several miles north in the bay, where harbor porpoises have returned after a sixty-five-year hiatus. As Bill observes, “I think we are seeing that some of the original ancient passageways are partially intact and that the animals in some cases are not giving up, even with cities moving into their areas.”
Yes, wildlife would be better served in a Silicon Valley of total open space, undeveloped and restored to the native landscape. But barring a stunning reversal of the trends of human existence, this won’t happen any time soon, and a developed Silicon Valley that incorporates wildlife is surely better than one that doesn’t. People should continue advocating for protections and restorations, knowing that the wildlife already here is probably better served by a more porous view of nature and cities.
Wildlife are certainly adapting and giving it their best efforts. On an airport landing strip in San Jose, two burrowing owls hatched to different families played in the fenced-in fields and became used to the deafening noise of jet planes. After they grew up, they decided to pair up, at which point they journeyed away from the strip, hoping to find a patch of land they could call their own. They settled on some of the only open space available to them, right next to a sidewalk and road. The city intruded constantly, automobile noise never ended, helicopters flew overhead frequently, campers parked on the road nearby, and people walked their dogs off leash. And still the owls prevailed on their small plot of green. Every day at lunch, people would stroll or bicycle by and marvel over the owls, the last outpost in the city. Soon the female hatched six chicks, which also drew crowds. One day, the male owl disappeared, probably a victim of urban-caused death: hit by a car, attacked by a dog or cat, or poisoned by pest control bait. The female soldiered on, miraculously managing to raise all six chicks herself. She hunted constantly to forage enough food for them, running herself ragged. Soon after her chicks had grown, she heard the loud sound of machinery as the bulldozers approached.
Unlike many of the stories I relate, this one doesn’t have a happy ending. This owl’s home, Orchard Parkway, is now plowed over, not even a small green patch left. The burrowing owl, once ranked as one of the most common birds in California, has in the last two decades lost 60 percent of its breeding pairs. In the Santa Clara Valley, predictions give them less than two decades before they disappear entirely from the area. The burrowing owls of Orchard Parkway, like the Facebook foxes, tried to adapt to the urban Silicon Valley lifestyle. Yet unlike the foxes, they didn’t stumble on a campus with a Zuckerberg-type leader and twenty-five hundred employees championing their survival.
In Silicon Valley, however, there remains some hope that the high-tech industry will be good for the local wildlife. A generation of high-tech workers are coming to expect the natural world as an integral part of their work environments. Facebook’s new campus, just across the freeway from their old one, is designed to “naturally fit into the surrounding marshlands,” and it offers a green roof with transplanted trees from across California as well as drought-resistant grasses. Architect Norman Foster described his plans for Apple’s new campus in Cupertino as “essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape.”It will cover only 13 percent of its 176-acre site, and six thousand trees will cover the landscape that also includes 15 acres of native grassland. The complex’s circular structure and attention to ecological planning almost gives the impression that Apple is attempting to build its own bio-dome.
A technology campus might not be the traditional view of nature for most people, yet these sites are paving the way for the future; they are taking their landscape into account, in some cases partially restoring them, or perhaps the right term is “reenvisioning.” The San Francisco Bay little resembles its self of two hundred years ago, yet the porpoises still approve. The Facebook campus—and all the new nature-inspired campuses—might not be the Santa Clara Valley of the past, but the foxes had no problem setting up house.
A mother burrowing owl feeding her chick.
And this new nature, taken in totality, just might lead to something pretty significant for conservation. Bill and Greg have a vision. Beyond studying the behavior of the foxes, they are also charting something fundamental and vital to the future of foxes and all wildlife in Silicon Valley: how to maintain and reestablish ancient and modern pathways through the land. Bill and Greg’s dream is to establish a San Francisco Bay Wildlife Connection Corridor. Utilizing public and private lands, and enlisting the cooperation of a wide array of government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, and individuals, they hope to restore enough connectivity in Silicon Valley to create a thoroughfare that allows animals passage as far north as Oakland and San Francisco. It’s as ambitious as it is necessary if wildlife is to have a future here.
Can we unite the high-tech companies, the cities they are located in, and the residents who live there to develop the version 2.0 of wildlife refuges, to create something innovative like a High-Tech Open Space District? Can we open-source open space? These companies and their leaders have transformed so many lives with technology, and they can do the same for urban wildlife. What if Apple, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Adobe—all the titans of Silicon Valley—all had Certified Wildlife Habitat campuses that were connected into this San Francisco Bay Wildlife Connection Corridor? What if the neighborhoods surrounding the high-tech campuses took the lead and certified their yards? What if Palo Alto or San Jose or Mountain View united to create a corridor that foxes and other wildlife can travel through unimpaired?
Silicon Valley’s wildlife have decided to give us a second chance. They forgave us cattle grazing, orchards, development burying the marshes and wiping out grasslands, toxic soups and litter choking their waterways, asphalt and automobiles blocking their pathways. They can adapt to urbanized spaces, but not to total oblivion. Facebook has this motto painted on one wall: “Done is better than perfect.”Let’s apply this to our efforts to make room for wildlife in urban spaces. Burrowing owls, foxes, beavers, and their kin are willing to compromise. Are we?
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Bakersfield Shares a City with Endangered Foxes
A San Joaquin kit fox at Seven Oaks Country Club.
More than ten thousand San Joaquin kit foxes once lived in California’s Central Valley, but today the endangered animal struggles to survive, as its traditional habitat has largely vanished. One population of kit foxes has been successful at making a new home in the most unlikely of places: Bakersfield, the ninth-largest city in the state.
Brian Cypher, a biologist at Cal State Stanislaus, commented on the foxes adapting to life in the big city to the LA Times: “At first, we thought they were displaced stragglers that would be pushed out or die off as development continued. But they’re doing surprisingly well in the urban area.”An estimated four hundred foxes live within the city limits, making their dens in such unlikely places as schoolyards, athletic fields, culverts, and golf courses. Dens are key to these creatures, who occupy their homes year-round to escape the extreme heat. Some groups have even installed artificial dens for the foxes, such as the Seven Oaks Country Club, which constructed one right on the green and has seen generations of fox families raised on its golf course.
Don Ciota, general manager of Seven Oaks, says his organization is committed to sharing the space. “We respect we are on their habitat,”he says. “Members like having the foxes around and we all try to live in harmony.”He points out that life with the foxes, however, is not without its challenges, citing their habit of stealing food from the clubhouse or golf balls during games; a remote camera revealed a stash of hundreds of balls in one den. Mischief aside, the foxes seem to be accepted members of the club, which even has a local kit fox rule on the scorecard.
