The Red Fox

We have a fox family that lives in our neighborhood. On snow-covered days, the red-furred fox stands out against the white backdrop of the Nebraska landscape. We watch out the back windows as the mother fox hunts for voles, mice, and other small prey. From my reading about the vulpes vulpes (the Linnean classification of the Red Fox), their eating habits are very "catholic" as the naturalists say. They are quite the curious species of animals. Evidently, it is not uncommon for two adult female foxes to live in the same habitat--the dominant fox is typically the mother, and the second, the subordinate, is often a young daughter fox not quite old enough or healthy or robust enough to birth a litter of foxes of her own; the lesser female in the hierarchy takes on a helper function to the entire family of vixen and kits---but it is a very stressful position in the family. Besides the den foxes, there are also transient foxes cut loose from other fox communities that prowl around looking for another den to call home. When these transients arrive in the neighborhood, fox fights ensue. Per the naturalists who study fox behaviors, it is much better to have home dwelling foxes than the homeless variety---they tend to be nicer neighbors overall...

I didn't realize that foxes are really quite small animals---about the same size and weight of a domestic cat. It is actually the fox's tail, when extended during a pounce or a hunt or while in perceived danger, that creates the illusion of the fox's larger size however much it is a smaller animal compared to other dogs, wolves, or coyotes. Our vixen (and where a vixen wanders, her kits are not too far away) is becoming more and more habituated to our neighborhood. She wanders from her evergreen den, across our yard, over to the unmowed field, and then back to our neighbor's property line. It is a well-worn path by now. We also see her sneaking around our pond especially at night---her distinctive eyes give her away in the evening hours. The neighbors tell us that she hangs out in their driveway and then wanders across their road and watches from her perch there. She has moved in and doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon...

If you look closely, you can spot our red fox making her way across our yard for a hunt in our front pond...

Adele Brand's book, The Hidden World of the Fox, has been a lovely read to get to know a little bit more about our neighbor fox family. Brand writes with a kind of poetry and love for the animal world that makes me recognize the beauty of these wild creatures while also respecting their untamed natures. "Visualize a fox: flame-orange on a white canvas, black paws and thick brush, pointed muzzle and diamond-sharp eyes."

Foxes can eat almost anything and live almost anywhere. They live in suburban neighborhoods and terrorize the school playgrounds (not because they are so much of a danger but more because teachers do not want to deal with the perceived threat or with the scat that they leave behind); they live in urban city centers, scrounging in garbage dumpsters in back alleys and in gutters; and they live in the country forests and fields too. They are a hardy species that preceded humans and will probably outlive us too: "So the fox trotting across a London street is directly descended from individuals that encountered species wondrous beyond our most outlandish fairy stories, survived extremes of climate that we have never known, and crossed land bridges long lost beneath the sea. Human culture is such a late entry into the story of the fox that it would seem disingenuous to mention it---except, of course, we have a strong bias towards it."

I laughed to myself about Brand's description of a mother fox: "By early summer, the vixen looks bedraggled. The exhaustion of motherhood results in a tattered coat and battered brush, and householders dismiss her as scruffy." Oh my goodness, this is a description of ME a couple months into a new baby in the house...

I also laughed about Brand's description of a mother fox's protective instincts toward her babies. I might describe competitive school moms the same way (eek!!!): "No vixen cares about boosting the population of her species. It is her own genetic material--her cubs--in which she will invest every drop of energy. Other foxes and their cubs are rivals; to her, for dominant breeder status, and to her offspring, as competitors for food and subordinate attention. If another vixen in her territory produces young, she will usually try to kill them. In fact, it frequently ends before that stage, because the stress hormones in a lower-ranking vixen make it unlikely that she will carry her cubs to term."

I must confess that I have wished our fox family to disappear mostly because of the fright that the skulk causes to our children and their play friends when the foxes chase each other around our back yard and neighborhood. Or, when we wake up to their freakish howling outside in the middle of the night. The vast majority of foxes do not attack children--it is a rare thing to hear about a fox-human attack. More than anything, or so I read, foxes "bluff-charge" their larger competitors. The sheer audacity of a sprinting animal coming full force in your own personal direction is often enough to make the larger predator sidestep the smaller sprightlier fox. Brand insists instead that it is we, the humans, who have encroached on a fox's primordial world: "In a flash of geological time, we have rewritten the fox's wildwood, in ways both graphic and subtle... And the fox that once played its natural dodgems with the rest of the natural web will inevitably interact with the components of the new urbanised world that we have designed without ecological aforethought.

"The fox is not an intruder into our world.

"We have simply laid our modern ambitions over the landscape it already knew."