Anyone who believes studying wildlife in a beautiful national park is a glamorous profession, full of the excitement of seeing animals up close, should spend a day in the field with John Perrine.
Perrine is a UC Berkeley graduate student who has spent more than three years searching for the Sierra Nevada red fox in Lassen Volcanic National Park.
In that time, he has caught and radio-collared five of the elusive animals. His goal is to learn about the foxes--the size of each individual's range, their eating and mating habits, and how they move around from season to season.
But finding a fox can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And on this autumn day, the haystack is Lassen Peak, the 10,457-foot dormant volcano in northeast California. Somewhere on the mountain, Perrine suspects, is a fox wearing a radio collar.
Trudging across boulder-strewn slopes, Perrine and his assistant, Megan Jennings, pause as they try to pick up a signal from one of the collared foxes. But the steep terrain plays havoc with radio signals, leaving Perrine to think that his quarry is either near Lassen's summit--or perhaps on another mountain entirely.
Perrine is writing his doctoral dissertation about the animals. He needs to be able to establish the locations of several foxes to show the type of habitat they use at different times of year.
So he and Jennings climb higher, then slide back down, then scramble higher again. They are pursuing an animal dubbed by a California trapper nearly a century ago as the "wildest of wild creatures," said to have "a greater fear of man and his scent than all other fur-bearers combined."
Finally, with his luck and daylight ebbing, Perrine gives up.
"What we really need are some dumb foxes," he says as he and Jennings make their way back down the mountain.
One of the State's Wildlife Mysteries
Disappointed as this day is, Perrine can take solace in the fact that so little is known about this subspecies of red fox that virtually anything he learns will stand as a major achievement.
The last field study of the species, in fact, was conducted in the 1920s. Even then, the results were sketchy, documenting only a few small populations scattered about the highest, most remote regions of the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade ranges.
"It's a cruel project for a student because it's so thin on data," says David Graber, a scientist at Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park. "But it's also terribly important because the foxes are so incredibly rare."
