Watch a not-so-sly gray fox steal three trail cameras in Marana

The thief struck before dawn, snatching all three security cameras from Esmeralda Egurrola’s backyard in Marana in 11 minutes.

There was just one problem: The not-so-sly criminal didn’t realize the whole caper was being recorded.

When the footage showed up on Egurrola’s cell phone first thing Monday morning, she could hardly believe her eyes. Her cameras were pilfered one after another by a fluffy-tailed gray fox.

“I’ve tried to go find them, but I can’t,” she said, adding with a laugh, “He owes me $200.”

Egurrola’s house backs up to a wedge of open desert at the base of Safford Peak, better known as Sombrero Peak, in the Tucson Mountains. She got the Blink motion-activated cameras as a gift about 4 years ago, so she decided to set them up along her back fence to see what kind of wildlife they might catch.

Until Monday, nothing had seriously bothered the devices.

“We’ve had javelinas poke at them or snort on them,” the Tucson native said. “This was the first burglary of sorts.”

The crime spree started at about 4 a.m. and was captured in a series of 5-second clips. In scene one, the fox walks up and sticks its snout on the lens of the first camera. In scene two, captured by the second camera, it trots back into the bushes with camera one in its mouth.

Then it returns for camera two.

As the fox trots off with the third camera, it records a clip of its own front paws padding through the desert.

“He or she is something else. This was very deliberate,” Egurrola said. “That was the last footage I had, because (the cameras) went off-line after that.”

The resulting video she stitched together is already a big hit at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, where it was making the rounds after being emailed to a staff member by a curious newspaper reporter looking for answers.

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Shawnee Riplog-Peterson, the museum’s long-time curator of mammalogy and ornithology, especially loves the part where the fox films itself running away with that last camera.

It’s definitely a gray fox, she said, but she can’t tell from the footage if it’s male or female. Though Riplog-Peterson hasn’t seen this exact behavior from a fox before, it doesn’t surprise her too much.

“They are just so inquisitive,” she said. “This is probably the original porch pirate.”

According to Riplog-Peterson, there has been a huge surge in backyard wildlife camera use in Tucson and elsewhere that began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were stuck at home and desperate for a distraction. She said the Desert Museum gets lots of phone calls these days from excited residents who want to know more about the critters they are capturing on camera.

“People are showing a real interest in nature,” Riplog-Peterson said. “That’s the only good thing I can say about COVID.”

Egurrola said a fox started showing up in the videos from behind her house about a year ago. She’s not sure why it suddenly took such a keen interest in her cameras, but she’s happy to speculate.

“I’m thinking this fox is toying with me,” she said.

Or maybe it’s a message. Maybe the fox thinks she needs to get out of the house more, so it’s trying to lure her outside to enjoy the beauty of the desert, she said.

More than likely, though, it was the vanilla-scented lotion Egurrola used on her hands the same day she handled the cameras for the last time, barely 12 hours before they were taken.

Riplog-Peterson said foxes rely heavily on their sensitive noses, so zookeepers at the Desert Museum like to provide new smells to the captive animals there to keep them stimulated and entertained.

“We use a lot of scents for enrichment,” she said. “It’s all about the snoot.”

Riplog-Peterson can’t say for sure that the vanilla lotion is to blame, but it certainly fits with what she sees in the video.

“So what’s the moral of the story?” she said. “Wash your hands first before you put your cameras up.”