Fox Family Takes New Road : Capture: After three days of effort, trappers remove the mother and her six pups from their freeway den. All are safe. They will start new lives at the Los Angeles Zoo.

COSTA MESA —  A wily mother fox and her brood of six pups were captured at their freeway home Sunday after three days of tireless waiting, watching, digging and chasing by a dogged crew of wildlife officials.

The well-publicized saga of Orange County’s freeway foxes ended just after sunset, about 10 days after the den was found along a 1-mile extension of the Costa Mesa Freeway scheduled to open to traffic on Tuesday. The mother red fox and all her 12-week-old pups, captured by a team led by the California Department of Fish and Game, were safe and on their way to a new home in the Los Angeles Zoo.

“This isn’t pretty, but it’s the best way to do it,” said an exhausted yet relieved Jeff Lewis, as he and six other people dug about 15 feet into the den to excavate the last pup. “If I was that fox in that den, I’d be scared stiff. But we just don’t have any other choice.”

As dawn crept over the empty freeway Sunday, the wail of the mother fox filled the air as intruders began digging inside her den on the embankment. By the end of the day, she seemed to know that the long battle she had waged to protect her family from the humans watching her was finally over, and she stepped into a foot trap--giving up her own freedom in search of her kits.

“We didn’t want to break up the family,” said Larry Sitton, wildlife management supervisor for the Department of Fish and Game’s Long Beach office, adding that the hardest part was trapping the mother fox.

The agency’s wildlife biologists originally intended to leave the foxes where they were and let them move to another den when the freeway opened. Red foxes are agile, nocturnal animals that have safely lived alongside Orange County’s busy freeways for several years, often crossing well-traveled Newport Boulevard several times per night, they said.

But politicians took over for the biologists after the Fish and Game agency received hundreds of phone calls from people demanding that the fox family be captured and relocated out of harm’s way. Besieged with calls from legislators, the media and animal lovers and even the governor, agency director Pete Bontadelli told the biologists to capture the animals.

Even the state’s road builders are caught up in the plight of the foxes. Caltrans officials had planned to cooperate with the relocation effort by delaying Tuesday’s opening of the freeway extension if necessary.

“It’s not a great situation either way--leaving them or capturing them,” said Madeline Bernstein, regional vice president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “We prefer them in the wild, but right now the zoo is the only feasible place.”

Fish and Game’s Sitton also expressed misgivings about putting the foxes in captivity, but he said they are non-native species that cannot be released into the wild in California because they prey upon many of the state’s endangered species, especially rare birds. Also, wildlife officials from other states will not accept them.

Capturing the skinny-legged, pointy-nosed foxes was an on-again, off-again task that stretched over three days.

Trappers Craig Knight of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Lewis, a Humboldt State University graduate student, staked out the den all night Friday and Saturday, watching through binoculars and waiting for the mother fox to return so that all six pups and the mother could be trapped inside and dug out with shovels. But the mother fox was wary of the people and refused to venture inside for long.

Finally, at about 4:30 a.m. Sunday, the female fox slipped into the den and grabbed a pup, then ran to another hole she had dug and dropped her baby inside.

As though taking part in some bizarre “fox rodeo,” Fish and Game officials and a veterinarian chased after the fox by foot and in a truck, hoping to get close enough to stun her with a tranquilizer gun. But the fox easily outran them on the long stretch of empty freeway.

That was when the team decided to go in after the rest of the pups. About 5 a.m., Lewis and Knight, both experienced wildlife trappers, picked up hand shovels and started digging. The mother fox soon returned, watching the intruders from about 100 yards away, barking and yelping, a sound that melted the hearts of the wildlife officials.

“It was an awful sound,” Sitton said.

“She was sitting there barking for about an hour,” said John Massie, a Fish and Game field supervisor. “She wanted to get to her pups, and she was probably in some pain because she’s carrying milk.”

Finally, after about two hours of digging, a trapper, wearing heavy welder’s gloves, reached into the hole and pulled out the first yelping, clawing, biting pup--a 4-pound wad of dirty reddish hair.

Then, four more pups were gently pulled out, including one weak one that had a minor limp, possibly from a problem at birth.

“He was still fighting like a tiger,” said Scott Weldy, a veterinarian and director of the Orange County Bird of Prey Center who helped dig the foxes out.

The team, assisted now by two Caltrans workers, then turned to the other hole, where the mother had hidden the one last kit. But after about an hour of digging, they stopped because the hole was already 12 feet deep and too dangerous--for the men and the fox--to continue.

A few hours later, a cage was installed at the top of the den to catch the kit if it crawled out, and traps were set to trap the mother fox if she ventured close.

By sunset, the mother returned to her freeway home, and after cautiously staying away, she finally nosed up to look for the pups in her den, and stepped into a rubber-coated trap--snared in a dramatic and long-awaited capture of the elusive mother fox.

“We got the vixen! And she’s fine. I didn’t think we’d catch her,” Massie said. “That’s one smart fox.”

The mom and six kits, all dirty, scared and flea-bitten, will be cared for and held in quarantine at the Los Angeles Zoo for 30 days, then released in a 25-by-40-foot display area in the zoo’s North American mammal section.

The Orange County Zoo in Irvine eventually may share some of the pups, since county officials have asked the Los Angeles Zoo if they could have a few.

Bernstein, who assisted in the trapping effort on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said that a zoo isn’t an ideal home but that it prevents the foxes from winding up “in the Garment District” in the hands of furriers or in a fox hunt.

The fox family’s father, who hunts throughout Newport Beach and Costa Mesa and rarely visits his family, and a yearling that also strays often from the den were not captured. They probably won’t return to the freeway den once the family is gone.

Lewis had equipped the male adult with a radio collar about a year ago and has since tracked it.

“Time is of the essence to learn about these foxes and protect our endangered species,” said Ron Jurek, endangered species biologist for the Fish and Game Department in Sacramento. “The red fox is a growing ecological disaster in the state, and we need collars to study how they interact.”