And just as Gombe had Jane Goodall’s sharp-eyed attention, the Baylands have their own documentarian, too.īill Leikam, “the fox guy,” unlatches the casing for one of his wildlife cameras in the predawn gloom just past the end of Palo Alto’s Embarcadero Road. (Around the early 2000s coyotes, which are not above making a snack out of a fox, began making a comeback in the city.) But the Palo Alto Baylands, one of the largest fragments of intact marshland remaining in San Francisco Bay, are the nucleus for what we know about the local lives of these shy animals-in the same way that Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park became the geographic heart for the world’s understanding of wild chimpanzees. In 2015, a solitary gray fox became a local news celebrity at San Francisco’s Presidio-the first sighting within the park in over a decade.
Families of foxes have resided on the Facebook headquarters campus since it opened in 2011, gaining a broad online following of enthusiasts. Gray foxes are elusive but not rare-in the last year alone, citizen scientists logged nearly 350 sightings of foxes on the iNaturalist biodiversity map of the greater Bay Area. But between the channels and pipes, the Baylands are snarled with small trees and tall grasses gone blond with summer heat: perfect habitat for Urocyon cinereoargenteus townsendi, the Townsend’s gray fox. A water treatment plant hums steadily and a drainage pipe, still wet with raccoon tracks from last night, sieves salt water into the wetlands. Within the wetlands, a cement overflow channel fills with floodwater during heavy rains. The Palo Alto Baylands are roughly three square miles in area, a little corner of relative wildness carved into the deep south end of San Francisco Bay where 15,000 years ago Columbian mammoths and dire wolves roamed a grassy river valley.
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