Wildlife Matters adores the red Fox. They are beautiful, intelligent, and family-orientated wild animals that are generally misunderstood. That’s why we wanted to share some fascinating Foxy Facts that show what incredible animals red foxes are.
Few native species divide opinion as profoundly as the red fox. Despite being one of Britain’s most popular mammals, foxes still face widespread demonisation and persecution.
A better understanding of fox ecology and behaviour – and their essential ecological role – can help dispel myths and misconceptions about this iconic British species. For example, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is the planet’s most widely distributed wild carnivore. It naturally occurs across North America, Eurasia, Japan, and even north of the Arctic Circle.
English colonisers deliberately introduced it, and it thrived in other regions, such as Australia, for fox hunting. This widespread global success is due to the fox’s incredible adaptability. It lives in habitats as diverse as tundra, forests, deserts, wetlands, and cities and eats a huge variety of food types.
Foxes are omnivores and eat anything from rabbits, field voles and berries to earthworms, insects, and fruit. In cities, they take advantage of human handouts, compost heaps, bird tables, and preying on rats. However, foxes don’t waste food. If they find or kill more than they can eat, they cache (bury) the food to eat later. This noble trait is responsible for the myth that foxes ‘kill for pleasure’. When confronted with a flock of hens, foxes will kill as many as possible to bury those they can’t eat straight away and store them for leaner times.
Foxes are members of the Canidae family, along with wolves and domestic dogs. Like all canids, their hearing and sense of smell are much better than ours. They can hear a watch ticking 120 feet (36 metres) away and smell food sealed in a bag or buried underground.
But like most mammals outside of the primates, foxes have limited colour vision due to fewer colour-perceiving cone cells in their eyes. They are essentially red-green colour blind, meaning they see objects that we perceive as red or green as a shade of brown or grey instead. By contrast, foxes – like dogs and wolves – see better than we do in low-light conditions due to a higher concentration of light-sensitive rod cells in their eyes.
The red fox varies in size and colour across its wide geographic range. The average fox in Britain is slightly bigger than a domestic cat. They are far too small to tip over a dustbin full of rubbish, as often claimed. Instead, they jump on top and knock the lid off to scavenge from bins. This is easily prevented by using bins with locking lids or securing the lid with a bungee cord.
Foxes sleep and breed in holes called earths, sometimes digging the earth and using old badger setts, hollow trees, and spaces under garden sheds. Although captive foxes can live for up to 14 years, like domestic dogs, wild foxes rarely live more than a few years, and cars are Britain’s biggest killer of foxes.
A female fox is called a vixen, and a male is called a dog. They mate in mid-winter, and vixens give birth between March and May. The 4-5 cubs are born deaf and blind with short black fur and blue eyes.
They do not leave the den for several weeks and depend on their mother’s body for warmth and their father to provide food for the family. Male foxes are attentive dads, playing excitedly with their pups and bringing food home for the whole family. When it’s time for the young foxes to start finding their food, the dad hides food nearby, helping teach the cubs to sniff out a meal. Most cubs leave their parents in early autumn to search for their territory. Unfortunately, few are successful, and most die before reaching ten months old.
The dominant male and female fox form a pair that often lasts for life. Although they hunt and feed separately, they regularly meet to groom each other and play. Some young foxes stay with their parents for a few years and help raise future cubs. Like all families, communication is essential to foxes. They use at least 28 different types of calls to communicate with each other and facial expressions and body posture similar to those of domestic dogs, like wagging their tails when they greet family members.
Breeding foxes hold territories year-round. They mark their territory boundaries with urine and faeces. Foxes learn the smells of their nearest neighbours. When two neighbours meet, the encounters are usually peaceful. When strangers meet, the encounters can be more aggressive.
There are always more foxes around than suitable breeding territories, so some foxes, particularly young ones who are dispersing from their parents’ territory, spend their time on the move looking for vacant territory to occupy. This is why trying to reduce fox numbers by killing them is pointless. A dead animal leaves an empty territory filled by a new fox within 3-4 days. Most local authorities recognised this years ago and abandoned ineffective and costly lethal fox control. Instead, most now provide free advice on deterring or excluding foxes from properties as this is the only long-term solution to human/wildlife conflict.
Annual surveys show that rural fox numbers have remained stable at around 225,000 adults for the past decade. This is good news for farmers feeding on rabbits, the staple diet of rural foxes; they save British crop farmers between £8 10 million in damaged crops every year. One fox is worth up to £1200 in extra revenue to arable farmers in its lifetime.
Foxes also help woodlands grow by feeding on field voles and rabbits, the species that do the most damage in young plantations. They help reduce economic losses to forestry. Yet, despite all the benefits, foxes continue to be used as scapegoats by some livestock farmers. This is unjustified. According to Defra, 95% of lamb losses are due to poor farming practices, with confirmed losses to foxes less than 1%.
Urban fox numbers are holding steady at 33,000, although bad human habits may be causing an increase in fox boldness. In an increasingly urbanised world, adaptable species like foxes provide an essential connection to nature for many people. For example, a survey in Bristol revealed that 10% of residents regularly feed foxes even though each fox territory had at least 150 times more food available than is needed by each fox. In other words, people feed foxes for their benefit, for the pleasure they get from seeing and interacting with this beautiful animal, not to help them survive. As the natural world disappears before our eyes, versatile and adaptable species like foxes provide the only encounters with wildlife many people get.
If you enjoyed this blog, please check out more of our wildlife blogs here, or you may prefer to listen to the Wildlife Matters Podcast here.
If you want to support our work
Please click on the Wildlife Matters Patreon Community.
Please click to join the Wildlife Matters Substack Community.
You can donate here.
Further Reading