The Book & the Urban Wildlife Research Project

Background Bits

This is a book of true accounts, observations that I have made and documented regarding gray fox behavior. It reveals information about gray fox behavior never before known until this book. It is meant for the general audience.

After struggling with the manuscript for over nine years, I finally pulled together what I considered the final manuscript and sent it to Di Angelo Publications, with the hopes that they might publish it. When they let me know that they had accepted it, I cried out, “Yes, yes, oh my God yes.” While working with one of their editors, Mr. Cody Wootton, we cut, reorganized and smoothed out the narrative so that we could all feel good about the final product and we gave it a name. We chose to title it The Road to Fox Hollow because Fox Hollow is where my study of their behavior began. The photo on the cover is the gray fox that I named Laimos (Greek for long neck) making an about turn out along the trail in early morning.

You can purchase the book at Barnes & Noble Online, Amazon, but publisher Di Angelo Publications discourages Amazon because they take 55% on each sale, leaving me and the publisher less of an income, and finally you can purchase it on the publisher’s website here https://www.diangelopublications.com/books/the-road-to-fox-hollow.

And then toward the end of last year a journalist, Hannah Hindley, working with Bay Nature Magazine contacted me and wanted to do an article on my gray fox work in the baylands. Over the years I have had a very respectable number of articles written about me in magazine, in video/streaming interviews, newspaper and elsewhere, but this one is the best, most comprehensive article of them all. It has gotten a slew of hugely positive reactions from the wildlife community. Within the article, Dr. Marc Bekoff is introduced to my work and he lays down some very important comments about it. Link to that article is here: https://baynature.org/article/how-to-be-a-fox/

And then on January 28^th my book was released to the public. As part of the promotion, since Marc Bekoff had responded to my project, I timidly asked if he would write a review. I say timidly because Marc is known globally for his work with wildlife and he is an extraordinarily busy guy. He replied, “Of course, I’m happy to do so.” So, then I asked where he would publish it and he said, “On my Psychology Today website/blog.” I wasn’t too impressed because I wanted very broad distribution so that a maximum number of people would see it. I asked, “So how many hits do you get on your blog?” He replied, “Right around 9 million a day.” That cinched it. Publish. Get it out there and so we did. See this link for his review of my book. The Social and Emotional Lives of Urban Gray Foxes https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/202201/the-family-and-emotional-lives-urban-gray-foxes

I’m sending along some other info like my work with the University of Zurich. Within that project, the lead organizer, Dr. Katherina Weikl, from the University of Zurich flew to San Francisco to meet with me. There she introduced me to a very large international project that she wanted me to be a part of a 14-nation wildlife video installation. All I needed to do was to dedicate a single trail camera to a specific location where there were critters coming and going for a year and a half. During that time, I shipped her thousands of files that were then edited down to a twenty-minute video showing the gray foxes, the raccoons, opossums and other critters that live in the Palo Alto Baylands. That became known as Triggered by Motion and that installation opened on February 10^th of this year at the Museum of Design in Zurich. Once it’s run its course in Zurich, then it will go on the road as a global tour. See https://www.grc.uzh.ch/en/focus/Exhibitions/Cameratraps.html for a sneak peek at what this is all about.

 Sincerely,

“If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other.  If you do not talk to them you will not know them, and what you do not know you will fear.  What one fears one destroys.” Chief Dan George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, British Columbia

We cannot call ourselves civilized until we freely give all living things on planet Earth their rightful place beside us. – wcl October 2015

“Failure is a wonderful professor.” Excerpt from my book The Road to Fox Hollow, 2022 wcl 

Alternative facts can be deadly. – wcl April 2017

Ignorance precedes knowledge.  Wcl 2019