Susan J. Tweit is a scientist who evolved into an award-winning writer and radio commentator. She is the author of five books for adults, including Barren, Wild, & Worthless: Living in the Chihuahuan Desert, personal stories about the history and natural history of Southern New Mexico, The Great Southwest Nature Factbook, a browser's guide to nature in the Southwest, from A to Z, and Seasons in the Desert: A Naturalist's Notebook, from Chronicle books. She has also written two children's books, Meet the Wild Southwest: Land of Hoodoos & Gila Monsters (Alaska Northwest Books) and City Foxes, a picture book which was named one of the Outstanding Science Books for Children for 1998.
Her "Wild Lives" radio commentaries are heard three times weekly on KRWG-FM, Southern New Mexico public radio, and her columns run in the Las Cruces Sun News. Susan's essays and stories have appeared in Harrowsmith Country Life, New Mexico, Sierra, Cricket, Bloomsbury Review, and other magazines. She is the co-founder of Las Cruces' wildly popular - and fun - Border Book Festival. She is currently living in Colorado with her husband, Richard Cabe, and dog, Perdida Imelda.
Susan is a popular public speaker and leader of workshops. Her stories of our natural and human history have captivated a wide variety of audiences, including school classes, workshops, banquets, and professional meetings. As Bloomsbury Review put it, she brings the precision of a scientist and the passion of a poet, and is able to refocus readers' vision and ignite their imaginations.
Susan has a new web site! She invites you to come visit. Her books are available there, at local bookstores, or on-line through http://BarnesandNoble.com and http://Amazon.com (search by author for Susan Tweit).
Kit foxes are almost exclusively nocturnal, and thus rarely seen. These smallest of North American foxes are beautifully adapted to life in the desert. Their pale coloring makes them nearly invisible against a background of light-colored desert soils. Thickly-furred paws allow them to trot silently as they go about their nightly rounds; the hair also helps them float on sandy soils. Large ears help these dusk-to-dawn hunters to pick up night sounds. Even their small size may work to their advantage, making it easier to keep cool.
A kit fox's day begins at dark, when the little fox emerges from its burrow and sets out across the desert to hunt kangaroo rats, cottontails, and other small animals. Biologists figure that a kit fox needs to eat about six ounces of meat each night in order to survive. They obtain all the water that they need from their food.
Kit foxes live alone in their underground dens for half the year. Then in winter, male and females pair up, mate, and begin preparing the natal den - used year after year - for the coming family. They haul out last year's debris and dig new entrances. In February or March, four or five pups are born. For the first month of their life, the mother nurses the pups; the father hunts for food. Later, both parents hunt. Kit fox families stay together until autumn, when the pups are ready to live on their own.
Along with coyotes, kit foxes play an important part in controlling desert rodent and rabbit populations. For example, biologists say, the parent kit foxes must bring the pups about one hundred pounds of meat during the two months they feed them - the equivalent of about eight hundred kangaroo rats! Yet people have harassed these little foxes almost into extinction: kit foxes are trapped, shot, poisoned, and their habitat destroyed by farming or suburban growth.
I carefully picked up the limp kit fox, carried it off the highway, and laid it gently in the shade of a nearby shrub. As I walked away, I realized sadly that I'd seen only one wild kit fox since I moved here: the dead one that I had just laid down.