Simcoe County Emergency Animal Response has rescued four sick foxes over the past month using crafty methods<\/p>\n
If you see a wild animal wandering around Collingwood, who are you gonna call? Simcoe County Emergency Animal Response (SCEAR).<\/p>\n
Over the past few weeks, Collingwood\u2019s community social media pages have exploded with news of fox sightings in different areas of town. Since then, SCEAR has responded and has managed to capture four foxes, possibly a family, they believe have mange.<\/p>\n
Today, the foxes have been taken in at various wildlife sanctuaries and are on a road to treatment and recovery.<\/p>\n
Erin Longo, response supervisor with SCEAR, is based in Wasaga Beach and responded to the first Collingwood report.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to foxes, it can be a little bit time-consuming because … we need a lot of sightings in a certain area to be able to place a trap and understand their routine,\u201d said Longo in an interview. \u201cI worked with some residents who would send us daily emails on where they saw the fox.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe quickly realized there was more than one,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
SCEAR is a volunteer organization acting as a transportation service for wild and domestic injured animals, serving all of Simcoe County. It formally launched<\/a> in December 2025, and is registered as a formal non-profit organization.<\/p>\n Volunteers from the agency respond to calls of animals in crisis and deliver\u00a0them to local rehabilitation centres, veterinarians and animal shelters. There is a three-member board of directors and five volunteers.<\/p>\n Longo said many people having home security cameras these days made it easier to track the fox movements.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce we (understood) the routine, we set a trap. Foxes are smart animals. When you put something new in their surroundings, they want to stay away,\u201d she said. \u201cI baited the traps with sardines. They\u2019re nice and stinky.\u201d<\/p>\n Longo visited the traps daily. About a week after setting them, she and another volunteer managed to corner the first fox in a culvert. She said it made the job easier, as there were only two access points.<\/p>\n \u201cMy volunteer grabbed the first one. A similar situation happened with the second one, within 10 days of the first,\u201d she said. \u201cThen, we got a call from one of the residents saying they were able to trap one in the culvert. We went to assess, and there were actually two more.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne of our volunteers actually ended up crawling through the culvert to push it out the other side,\u201d said Longo. She said they haven\u2019t had further reports of foxes in Collingwood since the last one.<\/p>\n Longo said Collingwood isn\u2019t the only town in Simcoe County encountering foxes, with others collected by the organization in Midhurst and Barrie as well.<\/p>\n SCEAR works with Procyon Wildlife in Beeton, Bear Creek Wildlife Sanctuary in Barrie, Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge in Pefferlaw and the National Wildlife Centre in Caledon.<\/p>\n \u201cDifferent rehabs specialize in different animals, so we usually reach out to whoever is the specialist in that (animal),\u201d Longo explained.<\/p>\n While Longo couldn\u2019t commit to whether the four foxes they trapped in Collingwood had mange, the Bear Creek Exotic Animal Sanctuary posted on social media on Aug. 22 that five foxes had recently been brought into their care with severe sarcoptic mange, with all five being treated with antibiotics. The sanctuary is accepting donations for the foxes’ care, which can be sent by etransfer to [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mange is a contagious skin disease marked by eczema\/inflammation and loss of hair\/fur, affecting domestic animals, caused by a parasitic mite.<\/p>\n \u201cI would say this is a particularly bad year for mange,\u201d Longo said. \u201cSometimes, when it gets far along, it impairs them from hunting, so they can get emaciated. A fox cannot survive the winter without their fur.\u201d<\/p>\n Longo noted that SCEAR typically doesn\u2019t release information on the health status of the animals they capture and send to rehabilitation centres until they are fully recovered and released back into the wild.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will be in touch with the public specifically in Collingwood because it was so publicized, once we have more information,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n SCEAR is surviving on donations, which can be made through the scear.ca<\/a> website. The organization communicates news through the group’s Facebook page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Simcoe County Emergency Animal Response has rescued four sick foxes over the past month using crafty methods If…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":875370,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,303625,66,323],"class_list":["post-875369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-scearsimcoe-county-emergency-animal-responseerin-longo","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/875370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}