#westermontane

At Home 6U8A3447 by Daniel D'Auria Via Flickr: Common folklore suggests that the red fox was an introduced species in North America, but red foxes existed in the boreal forests and western montane long before any introduction of Eurasian red foxes by European settlers. Studies of mitochondrial DNA in 2012 showed that foxes that came to populate the east and southeast were actually derived from those from Canada. There are pockets of foxes sharing Eurasian lineage in western Washington and California that likely derived from crossbreeding between native and introduced species. In short, the red fox is more at home in North America than most humans.