Fur Flies Over Fate of Red Foxes Living Alongside Freeway : Wildlife: State officials are rethinking plan to ignore the 9 animals now that the governor and a state senator have been drawn into the debate.

The fate of a family of red foxes living beside the Costa Mesa Freeway has turned into one of the hottest ecological debates in Orange County, drawing in the governor, a state senator and California’s top wildlife officials.

A construction worker found the nine foxes, including six pups, last week in a den along a stretch of the new Costa Mesa Freeway extension that is scheduled to open Tuesday.

Officials with the California Department of Fish and Game’s Long Beach office said last week that they planned to leave them there, letting the foxes, which have lived beside Orange County freeways for several years, decide where they want to move when the extension opens.

But that decision angered state Sen. Marian Bergeson and prompted a fiery TV editorial and emotional calls from animal lovers to the governor’s office. As a result, Gov. Pete Wilson has directed the Fish and Game Department to study the options regarding the fate of the foxes.

Peter Bontadelli, the agency’s director, is expected to announce a decision today. The options being debated are to let them be, put them in cages, induce them to move or find another state that will accept them.

“As hot an issue as this is, with as many people involved and as much interest from the governor, I would assume it will have a speedy resolution,” said Larry Sitton, Southern California’s regional director of Fish and Game. “We are trying to convince the politicians that the best option for the foxes and for our scientific research is to leave them there.”

At stake is more than the fate of the one litter. The controversy is the latest in a longstanding dispute over the future of the unwanted species in Orange County and throughout the state.

Red foxes are non-native predators that disrupt the balance of nature and kill California’s native birds and animals, some of which are on the edge of extinction, wildlife biologists say.

Sitton called red foxes the “Saddam Hussein of wildlife,” because they are wreaking havoc on so many animals, including Orange County’s rare marsh birds, the least tern and clapper rail.

“These foxes are an environmental disaster of enormous consequence right now,” he said. “Now they are all over California, all the way down to the Mexican border. They are displacing the endangered kit fox in Kern County. They are causing population problems with our state bird, the quail. This character is a real bad guy.”

Sitton said the foxes on the Costa Mesa Freeway are valuable to the Fish and Game Department because for the past year they have been equipped with radio transmitters as part of a statewide project to monitor movement of the species. The scientific research will be used to develop a plan to eliminate or control the foxes throughout California, a plan supported by the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, Wilderness Society and other major environmental groups.

Bergeson, R-Newport Beach, said that Fish and Game’s plan to let the foxes stay on the road is heartless, like letting children play on the freeway.

She said Tuesday she is confident that the department has agreed, and is coordinating efforts to move the fox family to another state.

“Now we just have to find a place. Oregon doesn’t want them. We are trying Arizona,” Bergeson said.

For three years, Bergeson has been involved in a debate with Fish and Game over the fate of the foxes at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach.

The department’s biologists planned to trap and kill foxes at the wetlands. But Bergeson got involved, and top officials at the agency decided to relocate the Bolsa Chica foxes instead. They are now part of a research project at Humboldt State University.

The senator said there has been so much public concern about the foxes on the freeway that “it gives us the ability to be very persuasive” with Fish and Game officials in Sacramento.

Bergeson said she understands that the red fox poses a threat to Southern California ecosystems. But, she said, “they need consideration too.”

“I can’t help but feel in this vast state that there isn’t a place they can go. (Leaving them) is a bit like turning your 2-year-old loose on the freeway.”

Sitton, however, said the foxes are safest left on their own, adding that other foxes are living “all over our freeways.”

“They have hunted and lived and walked along the freeways--the 405, the Costa Mesa Freeway--for three years,” he said. “They always have lived between there and Newport Bay. They are urban foxes and they know what they are doing. They had their babies around a functioning freeway last year.”

Widlife biologists are concerned that if the foxes are sent to live in the wild in another state, they can contaminate the gene pool there with genes from foxes born and raised in an urban environment, Sitton said.

“I would rather see them left in a cage than reintroduced in the wild. But who wants to see an animal live in a cage the rest of its life?” he said. “These animals have the best option right now of being left alone.”

Sitton said he would not speculate on what his boss’s and the governor’s decision will be.

“I want to give our new governor--supposedly our ecology governor--the benefit of the doubt,” he said.