The Urban Pantheist

Last Friday, the zoo hospital staff hiding in a darkened air-conditioned room.

( vixen and wieners )

One of the things about taking care of a variety of different animals for a living, is that you become intimately acquainted with the smells they leave behind.  This is neither a good thing or a bad thing, it simply is.  The negative side is that most of these smells are bad smells from waste products; the positive side is that it helps you understand the animals better, and gives you another tool in determining the animals' health and well-being.

I took care of red foxes at Drumlin Farm for about seven years.  Their cage had a strong skunk-like odor that visitors were sure to mention if someone was there to hear it.  We put up signs explaining that our skunk was descented and that they were smelling the fox cage.  The smell comes from sulfur compounds, possibly from the fox' anal gland, and helps them mark their territory.  It's normally pretty faint, and you aren't likely to smell it in the wild, but in a soil-lined concrete cage, it gets pretty funky.  But that's not the smell I want to discuss.

There's another smell, beneath the powerful skunk smell, which I especially noticed when the foxes would urinate into their food bowl.  (This wasn't unusual--wild foxes sometimes urinate on their food caches.)  There was something so familiar, and dare I say it, pleasant about this other smell.  I realized that it was the smell of Concord grapes--above and beyond the normal smell of grapes, Concord grapes have a musky powerful essence that distinguishes them from other grapes.

I thought I might be crazy to think this, or that perhaps some component of the grapes we fed the foxes (each fox got three grapes per day) came out into their urine.  Then I encountered a reference to "fox grapes" and did a little digging.



Concord grapes, as it turns out, are one of several cultivated varieties of Vitis labrusca, the fox grape.  Concord grapes are so well known that their common name has eclipsed the name "fox grape" in recent years.  But for a long time the name fox grape was used to describe this fruit-bearing vine native to eastern North America.  It appears that the name came from the "foxy" odor and flavor of these grapes.   Early colonists would have been much more in touch with the essence of fox, since killing them was a sport and a duty (protecting the chickens and all).  Fox urine would have been part of the olfactory palette of life, along with horse manure, freshly chopped firewood (different kinds distinguishable by odor), and smoked cod.   The modifier "foxy" when referring to grape flavor, is still used by wine enthusiasts.  That essence that I attributed to concord grapes is one of the many flavors that can be found in wine. 

Clever chemists have delved into the secrets of the flavors of grapes, and found a compound called Methyl Anthranilate, both in the skins of grapes and in the musk glands of foxes.*  This chemical can be artificially synthesized, and has been, by the ton.  It is used as grape flavoring in candy, soda, popsicles, you name it, basically any processed food that is purple gets its purple flavor from Methyl Anthranilate.  So what?  Chemists synthesize lots of flavors (like the chemical found in the Western Conifer Seed Bug which is the same chemical used to flavor candy like sour apples).

Then in 1994, someone discovered a new use for Methyl Anthranilate.  Someone (I don't know who, or how, or what the hell they thought they were doing) found that if you spray this stuff on grass, Canada geese won't eat it.  There are a great many people out there willing to pay a great amount of money to keep Canada geese off of grass, so MA (as it is known in the pest control biz) became a commercially produced goose deterrent.  The main problem with it is that if it rains, the stuff washes away and needs to be reapplied.  I haven't read if runoff has produced any grape flavored ponds.

I learned about MA a few years ago when I took a course on "Living with Canada Geese" sponsored by the MSPCA and run by an outfit called GeesePeace.  The people running that class explained that MA affects birds in a way that's analogous to the way capsaicin (the active ingredient in hot peppers) affects mammals.  In researching the relationship between these two chemicals I quickly found myself over my head.  "Repellency in birds is enhanced by electron richness of the phenyl ring and basicity and reduced by acidic functionalities.  The reverse is true for mammals."  (Chemical Ecology of vertebrates By Dietland Müller-Schwarze, p. 397).   However that paragraph did include the information that MA "given in water also reduced feeding in mice."  Mice don't like grape juice?  Mice have adapted to avoid fox odor (mice and voles are the primary prey of foxes)?  Lots of room for study, for someone.

Lately there has been more movement on the pest control front, as regards to the use of MA.  I learned (via gmail text ads) of a product called Bird Buffer.  According to the maker of this product, they have found a way to adapt machines used to make fog for stage shows, to blow "nano-particles" of MA over the area you wish to protect from birds.  The idea is to keep big flocks of birds (they don't specify what kind of birds, but presumably pigeons--there are more complicated instructions for dealing with "small birds," sparrows and probably starlings), from roosting in open warehouses and other places.  The machine is meant to be used at dawn and dusk when most of the birds are flying in and out.  The particles of MA are so small that the product is supposedly only effective on flying birds, which are "breathing faster." 
This causes a minor irritation which makes the birds choose a different roost.  Also your warehouse then smells like grape Kool-aid all day, which beats the smell of bird shit.

This isn't an endorsement--I certainly can't use the thing at the zoo and tear-gas all my ducks just to keep the sparrows out.  But it is interesting to me.  The fox urine thing nagged at me about five years ago, and it wasn't until I read about the Bird Buffer that I filled in the blanks in between.  It makes me want to have a glass of wine to celebrate.

* I found this information from one source only: a blog entry from April 2002 called "How Foxy is She?" by Larry Moore on a site called RE: Whatever.  It connected a lot of dots for me, but I can't verify some of the stuff in there, including the presence of MA in fox musk.

Here's a cute site on MA done by a chemistry student.  I found it helpful.

Open for good.

( video of frolicking behind cut )

Good news for animal picture lovers! The alarm went off just as we were finishing up some work in the fox exhibit.

News item: Cryptozoological mystery is an obligate urban animal.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0321_060321_tyco_fox.html?source=rss

Perry Sumner, a biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, said it's likely a red fox with a rare genetic condition known as Sampson, an abnormality in which the animal lacks a layer of fur called guard hair. Without this thick outer coat for protection, the normally nocturnal fox would be forced to hunt during the day when it's warm and sleep under heated buildings at night. In recent years, Sumner said, other Sampson foxes have been spotted in urban areas around the state