GROUND ZERO OF WHAT I’ve come to regard as “the fox war” on San Juan Island is called a prairie but isn’t much of a prairie anymore. It has been chewed up by human endeavors such as agriculture, then tunneled under for the warrens of imported rabbits and the dens of red foxes brought in to control the resulting bunny population explosion. Even Elexis J. Fredy, the superintendent of the national park that holds this expanse of land, dubs it a “postnuclear zone.” Some folks I know on the island refer to it as “the ponderosa.”
Whatever you want to call it, it is about 200 acres — or the size of 150 football fields — of little more than grasses, hardened soil, rocks and two nonnative wildlife species, one of which has been elevated to celebrity status.
San Juan Island National Historical Park marks the tense co-occupation of the island by two colonial powers. It therefore is comprised of two units — English Camp on the north end of the island, and American Camp on the south. The prairie is at American Camp, with its grand vistas of the Salish Sea and bordered by a road named for a Confederate officer, George Edward Pickett, and another unpaved thoroughfare that leads to old U.S. military fortifications called the Redoubt.
The years have extracted vitality from the large old field, but not the fight. The pig over which the Americans and British had a snit in 1859 has been swapped out for red foxes as the objects of modern-day dispute — now between mostly visiting photographers and their mostly island-resident objectors.
Word of the controversy has scared off enough photographers — and the park has shut down enough of its more controversial measures — to have imbued a semblance of comparative order in prime fox habitat. Still, photographers continue to go where residents don’t want them, and residents continue to attempt dissuading them. Suffice to say, neither side has sued for peace.
Because of their ubiquity, on the island and globally, foxes are a cute, however curious, choice over which to cross swords. Though a national park representative declared on regional television that, “The island’s beloved red foxes are in jeopardy,” there is little to no evidence to support that claim.
What seems actually in jeopardy, for the island’s residents as well as its national park, is a quiet existence that their relative isolation once seemed to guarantee. And so the sensitive habitat that off-island photographers actually might be encroaching — at least, symbolically — is that belonging to people, not foxes.
THE PRAIRIE IS well-suited to hosting a war over foxes. It is so elevated, flat and wide open, it seems as if you could spy a wild animal on its surface from a mile away. That also means you can spot humans there even more easily. And if there are several, they can appear to be … “ ‘Swarming’ is a good word,” Kyle Kittoe, a retired outfitter and river guide, says when describing what he and some other San Juan Island residents see when photographers are arrayed near fox dens.
The first time I beheld the prairie, in a quest for foxes to photograph two years ago, I was drawn by a gathering of people. I first thought they might be a family on a picnic or, for some reason, a church group singing in a field. It all seemed joyous, not foreboding. They actually were photographers.
As a wildlife photographer myself, I’ve spent a good part of the past two years trying to reconcile the discord on the prairie over photographers’ access to red foxes. It’s not just the difference between what I saw when I looked upon the prairie and what Kittoe saw. It also includes, even more impactfully, conflicts with prairie protesters, whom Kittoe called “zealots who want to be angry at something, so they find something to be angry about.”
The best explanation for the turmoil came from Fredy. She suggested that fox photographers are surrogates for the stress over breakneck, growth-infused change on the island. Her own park has been a party to it; visitation there skyrocketed above 700,000 people the past year — more than double that of 2019. Crime is on the rise; Kittoe says the simple act of having to lock car doors is a recent development. Tourism on the whole is increasing, bringing slews of strangers to the idyllic island off the Washington coast. And photographers, with all their gear, are among the most conspicuous.
WHEN I VISITED San Juan Island in April 2022, there was something in the air. And it wasn’t just spring. I was on a family vacation and, as is my custom, I purchased copies of the local newspapers. The headline of the lead story in The Journal of the San Juan Islands made me gasp: “National Historical Park discusses the increase of disrespectful fox photographers.”
That was just the opening salvo.
Referred to by some on the island as “foxerazzi,” wildlife photographers say park volunteers and other locals essentially engineered an unsanctioned shutdown of the prairie by declaring it off-limits last year, then barring or harassing those who didn’t abide or simply hadn’t received word. Sheriff’s deputies were summoned by photographers at least three times during the first two weeks of May 2022 over incidents at fox den sites.
After that initial vacation, I returned to San Juan Island eight more times for multiple-day visits. I observed residents, social-media influencers, local media, and national park staff and volunteers disrupting (or fanning talk about disrupting) photographers and other perceived off-island transgressors. Island residents were observed, and photographed, feeding hot dogs and chicken wings to foxes, unleashing dogs and firing air horns into dens, then using social media to blame such tactics on photographers trying to get better pictures.
Of the many San Juan Island residents not tied to tourism or island businesses whom I approached, only one agreed to be quoted about what has been happening and why. That was Kittoe, who also was an original member of the all-volunteer Fox Brigade, commissioned in 2019 to greet and educate park visitors.
Kittoe is concerned about photographers who surround fox dens “from dawn till dusk — 20 people, a dozen people, within 20 feet of the kits and the mom, surrounding them, taking pictures,” he says. “These critters live on the edge of survival. They need time and space to live their lives. And if you’re intruding on it, it makes it harder for them.”
THE VOLUME OF protest registered by residents over fox photography at San Juan Island’s national park has been in its own category. Nothing else the unit deals with — even protection of the only habitat on the planet for the island marble butterfly — has come close, according to Fredy. “We’re caught in the middle,” she said during one of several interviews.
The pressure to protect the foxes reached such heights that Fredy called an in-person town hall meeting in March 2022. Thirty-five residents attended; some photographers’ requests for remote access, such as over Zoom, were not addressed, and their viewpoints therefore not represented.
Containing mostly regular National Park Service fare, such as restricted distances between humans and wildlife, the rules adjustments released after the town hall produced mixed results. The Fox Brigade was overly aggressive in interpreting and policing the guidelines, Fredy says. Some anti-photographer sentiment also was expressed by park staff on social media — something Fredy says should have been better monitored.
The Fox Brigade has been disbanded this year in favor of volunteer Prairie Ambassadors who are stationed at tables and limited to greeting and educating visitors, according to Fredy. She also said access to the prairie would be relaxed, but messaging from park staff about the fragility of the prairie and its “imperiled species,” as well as the recently increased height of split-rail fencing around the area, has been inconsistent.
This May, I talked to two people who had been offered volunteer positions at San Juan Island National Historical Park to, as they described, walk around, observe, talk to people, take notes and report back to park personnel. One of them showed me a park uniform he’d been issued for accepting the position. This sounds a lot like the old Fox Brigade member duties, but Fredy said these were full-time members of the National Park Service’s Volunteers-In-Parks (VIP) program and that, though they’d outfit the Prairie Ambassador stations, they’d also “rove park trails.”
The incongruities in park guidelines and messaging stretch back to the post-town-hall banning of tripods from the prairie. Wildlife photographers typically stay a respectful distance from their subjects by use of expensive telephoto lenses, long and heavy enough to require support, such as tripods. Banning tripods virtually encouraged use of smaller lenses, which have shorter reach and could tempt photographers to actually move closer to dens.
Despite it all, as the island has become increasingly urbanized and contentious, the red foxes have adapted. It’s difficult to go much of anywhere on San Juan Island and not spy flashes of red.
“Red foxes can do quite well from being in close proximity to us,” says David Drake, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied red foxes extensively in urban environments.
“When they move into an urban environment, they are well aware that there’s a density of people and that activity patterns of people are different than for nonurban areas. There’s more light pollution, more noise, more human activity — and they adapt. The red fox can benefit from being near people because there might be refuge from predators, and they are likely getting some type of food resource that is both natural and might be even provided. There’s also a lot of different types of shelter availability.”
THE TENSION OVER access to wildlife is a familiar one, particularly in the U.S. West. There has been angst in Jackson, Wyoming, for example, over the wanderings of world-famous Grizzly 399, her cubs and their burgeoning fan club. Park officials at Point Reyes National Seashore in California are accused by local wildlife advocates of valuing cattle ranches over dwindling native Tule elk. In 2016, a rare and protected northern hawk owl was shot and left hanging on a tree branch in a corner of the Colville Indian Reservation near Brewster, in Washington’s Okanogan County, by a resident fed up with the parade of bird watchers the species attracted.
Friction on San Juan Island over the increased presence of camera-toting tourists has echoes of recent disputes involving photographers over access to the habitat of short-eared owls and other overwintering raptors on a plot of land outside Edison, about 90 minutes north of Seattle. Because the land is under the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife’s private lands hunting access program, the agency stepped in at the end of 2022, clarifying laws and regulations and posting updated signage delineating boundaries and restricting access.
San Juan Island itself was the site of considerable debate over the proximity of whale-watching vessels to the endangered southern resident orca pod. Significantly stricter whale-watching rules were issued by the state’s Fish & Wildlife Commission at the beginning of 2021. The state Legislature in 2023 increased the buffer around the endangered southern resident orcas to 1,000 feet.
BY COMPARISON, “the fox war” seems rather like fighting to protect dandelions and poison oak in a rare-plant garden. The red fox, the most widely distributed nonhuman land mammal on the planet, and its quarry, the European rabbit, are introduced species. Red foxes live in areas around the planet covering more than 27 million square miles and in habitats as diverse as city neighborhoods, deserts and Arctic tundras, according to the Canid Specialist Group. The San Juan Island park is home to two protected species, the bald eagle and island marble butterfly, and another, the sand-verbena moth, that is expected to gain listing as endangered.
In 2010, as a precursor to attempts to restore the rare prairie habitat at American Camp, the national park began eradication of the rabbit and fox populations by pumping their dens with carbon monoxide gas. The project was abandoned after considerable outcry by San Juan Island residents and other wildlife advocates.
“Although foxes are not indigenous to the island, they live here now,” says Richard Walker, who operates the Protect the San Juan Island Foxes group on Facebook. “They have a role to play in the local ecosystem.
Growth has been a major stressor for the national park and the community that surrounds it. The island’s rural industries — agriculture, timber and lime mining — steadily have been replaced by tourism. This is not a widely welcomed trend on the island of an estimated 8,600 residents. Only 6% of residents and 20% of local businesses believed the San Juan Islands could accommodate more tourism, according to a 2020 study for San Juan County, in which the island resides. The study revealed an appetite for managing vacation rentals as a means of limiting visitation; the San Juan Island County Council in May 2022 imposed caps on vacation rentals, including a limit of 337 for San Juan Island.
Rolled into the unfolding distress over change, three buildings suffered an estimated $10 million in damages from a fire in the heart of the historic downtown of the island’s largest town, Friday Harbor. The blaze occurred April 6, 2022, shortly before the unofficial start of last year’s “fox season.” A Whidbey Island resident was charged in federal court with arson.
This was the minefield onto which mostly out-of-town wildlife photographers set foot in the spring of 2022.
Waiting for them was what Mary Perrollaz called “a small group of very vocal people who got crazy riled up.” Perrollaz owns Dockside Treasures, a souvenir shop next to the Friday Harbor ferry terminal that must bob with the ebbs and flows of island tourism. She and other Friday Harbor business owners said tourism related to red foxes doesn’t move the needle nearly as much as that driven by whale-watching. San Juan County’s whale-watching industry annually generates more than $216 million in economic activity, $12 million in local and state tax revenue, and 1,800 jobs, according to a 2019 study by Earth Economics, a science-based economic nonprofit based in Tacoma.
“Locals have been singling out one user group [fox photographers] that maybe doesn’t deserve it,” says Amy Nesler of the San Juan Islands Visitors Bureau.
THERE IS SOME irony that San Juan Island National Historical Park would be the site of a battle over animals. Unlike many other National Park Service units, this one was not established to preserve a supposedly unspoiled landscape. Rather, it commemorates a built environment for the so-called “Pig War” of 1859. The CliffsNotes backstory is that an American shot a pig, the British summoned their Navy and a tiff between the dual occupiers ensued.
The national park and its foxes gained global notoriety from that wildly viral 2018 photograph of an airborne bald eagle, rabbit and young red fox (or kit). Whatever that image of our national symbol carting off two furry-faced mammals once inspired — whether hope or curiosity about nature, or even the simple, soaring spectacle — has five years later come crashing back down to Earth at a place where a pig has been replaced by a fox as the agent for distress on an island where one of life’s constants — change — continues uneasily.
In the middle of all the bickering last spring, the prairie sat under a glorious, partly cloudy evening sky. A wondrously honey-colored red fox sniffed around dens belonging to other fox families. He discovered a rabbit cached for later consumption, dug it up and devoured it. The fox, a crowd favorite known to many as “Cinnamon,” then sauntered off and curled into a doughnut for a post-meal nap.
Not long afterward, another male red fox entered the scene of the crime; the purloined repast had been his. Upon confirming the theft, he casually walked over to the other fox and, with sudden accuracy, leapt and bit him in the back, then just as causally walked off. Somehow, it seemed like an apt metaphor for all the ruckus the humans were raising over them.
Originally Published in Pacific NW Magazine