Ringtail
Small, cat-like animal with a long fluffy, black and white ringed tail. Body color is grayish brown. Delicate pointed face and dark, round eyes. Total length is 25-30 in. (half of that is tail), shoulder height is 6 inches, weight about 2 lbs. Nocturnal and omnivorous like the raccoon, consuming a great variety of foods: small rodents, birds, lizards, insects, fruits, acorns, berries and other vegetable matter. These animals prefer animals but will eat plants.
Unlike the raccoon, it may be found long distances from water – lives by familiar desert survival techniques: hides from sun during the day, is active at night when it’s cooler and eats anything edible it can find or catch to provide food and moisture. Very agile, can reverse direction and ascend narrow passages by ricocheting off walls. Their hind feet can rotate 180 degrees. Their claws are semi-retractable, making them excellent climbers. When threatened in the open will arch tail over back to look larger and vocalize with barks, screams and high pitched calls. May emit a few drops of musk scent from anal gland but does not spray like a skunk.
Ringtails were often adopted by miners as mousers thus the nickname “miner’s cat.”
Swift Fox
The Swift fox is strictly a prairie species, but shares many characteristics with its desert cousin, the Kit fox, Vulpes macrotis. Unlike other North American foxes, both species use burrows year round, not just for raising young. This behavior is an adaptation for conserving water in the arid environment of deserts and prairies. Both species spend the entire day inside the burrow when the above ground temperatures are at their highest and the air the driest. The burrow environment is many degrees cooler and much more humid then the above ground during the day. A hot fox would need to pant to keep cool, thus using valuable water just to keep cool. At night both species are active pursuing their preferred prey of rodents and rabbits when the external temperatures are lower, the humidity is higher, and their prey most active. Both the Swift fox and the Kit fox can live in environments where there is no free water getting all of their water needs from the bodies of their prey. A ground squirrel’s body is 70% water.