A small white mammal spotted in Portland this week seems to be outfoxing experts who’ve been asked to identify it.
OPB podcast producer Julie Sabatier was one of several people who turned to Reddit Wednesday with photos and video of a young white animal on trolley tracks east of South Macadam Avenue and north of the Sellwood Bridge.
A small, white, fox-like animal near the bike path off South Macadam Avenue in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 9, 2024. Experts aren't sure what kind of animal it is.
Julie Sabatier / OPB
It looked like a fox kit — but it was white, not a color typical of vulpine species native to the Pacific Northwest. Arctic foxes, which are white, live much farther north in cold tundra regions of the continent.
Redditors were intrigued at the sighting, and so were wildlife experts.
Jennifer Osburn Eliot, who oversees the North America area of the Oregon Zoo, declined to identify the animal because the zoo does not have any resident foxes.
“I can tell you that we have grey foxes in Oregon, red foxes (most but not all are invasive), and there are people that have pet foxes (which may or may not be legal),” Eliot said in an email. “I have never heard of an arctic fox this far south.”
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife also was uncertain of the creature’s origins.
Beth Quillian, spokesperson for the agency, shared more — including a few relevant vocabulary words:
“This does look like some kind of fox. White morphs are more common in red fox than gray fox and the ears and snout are atypical for red fox,” she said in an email.
“Morph” refers to the color variations that different fox species display.
“This animal looks closer to an arctic fox than any fox native to our area,” Quillian continued. “It is potentially some kind of hybrid animal that escaped from captivity, however we can’t 100% rule out that it is a wild leucistic gray fox either.”
Leucism can cause an animal to partially lose pigmentation — so its skin or fur might be mostly white, but not entirely. That’s distinct from albinism, when an animal has no pigment in its skin or fur.
As to what the fox says? No sightings have been reported since Wednesday, so OPB was unable to obtain a comment.