Fox sightings in Woods Hole are on the rise, particularly near the Steamship Authority terminal.
West Tisbury resident Tina Miller saw one at the SSA ticket shack as she rolled up just before 8:30 pm Wednesday.
Pie in the Sky employee Paul Evans told The Times he and other employees have seen them, too. Last Friday he saw a fox and kits on a lawn across the street from Pie in the Sky.
“I sit here at the front desk,” Woods Hole Inn assistant manager Kaylee Kosta said. “Pretty much at the same time of day, I see the same fox crossing School Street.”
Kosta said she’s heard of numerous sightings from guests, fellow employees, and people around town. “They just do their own thing,” she said of the foxes.
With docked ferries often left with vehicle doors open overnight in Woods Hole, whether foxes have snuck in, or could stow away and cross to the Vineyard, were questions The Times posed to the SSA.
Spokesman Sean Driscoll wrote in an email that Assistant Port Captain Charles Monteiro told him, “It’s extraordinarily rare that a wild animal would be found on board.”
“One would hope that they wouldn’t be able to stow away,” Suzan Bellincampi, director of Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, said. Bellincampi noted that if a breeding population were to take hold on the Vineyard, it could have “a lot of implications” for ground-nesting birds and be a nuisance to poultry farmers.
“One animal does not make a breeding population,” she said. “A breeding population is very different from one or two animals.”
Though rare, it’s not unprecedented for an animal to sneak aboard a ferry. “He remembers a skunk once, about 30 years ago,” Driscoll wrote of Monteiro. “Roughly 20 years ago, there was a pair of dogs — Bull and Bear, they were dubbed — who would wait for the boat on the Island, ride over to Woods Hole (getting treats and love from passengers and crew all the while), and then catch the boat back later that day. No one was ever particularly sure where they came from, but they became a fixture for a time.”
Fossil records indicate both red and gray fox lived long ago on the Vineyard, Bellincampi said. More recently, in 1825, the Island population was extirpated. Foxes were reintroduced in the late 19th century, she said, only to die off again in 1905.
Now and again Bellincampi said she receives unconfirmed reports of fox and coyote on-Island. Thus far, she’s only seen dead coyote that have died attempting to swim across.
“They’d definitely be pests in neighborhoods,” she said, if foxes made it to the Vineyard. They would root in garbage among other things, she said.
Bellincampi said it’s a matter of when, not if, for foxes or coyotes to appear back on the Island. At least for now, she said, “I’m used to life without foxes.”
And there’s bears in the Berkshires. What’s the point of this story?
The point is a species that could affect us all could very easily be reintroduced here. Think skunks. They haven’t always been here.
That’s a misconception; historic records reflect otherwise.
Thanks for you 2 cents. For what it’s worth I am aware that foxes, as well as many other animals, used to exist here. We have not had any in at least 100 years and skunks were reintroduced here in the 60’s. I was here when they started showing up.
I saw a gray fox in the early to mid 1960’s in Gay Head, at the town line, near the spring.
Turkey would be on their menu what would be so bad
You’ve been saved the price of tickets to visit the zoo. Brush up on nature so you’ll present as marvelously intelligent to your family; teach your children not to approach wild animals or any animal outside on its own.
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