Fox facts

●    The red fox is found on every continent except Antarctica
●    Wild foxes can attack humans, but they can also be bred to be tame
●    Foxes have partially retractable claws
●    Vixens make a blood-curdling screaming sound to attract mates

The red fox (Vulpes vulpes), is the largest species of true fox and weighs up to 7kg.¹ Its bright red coat is very distinctive, but in colder climates, they can also appear in other colours, such as silver.

Of the 11 other species of true fox, the Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) is the next biggest.² This species is most distinguishable by its brilliant-white coat, which is ideal for camouflage. The Arctic fox lives exclusively above the tree line, meaning it spends all its life in snow.

Foxes are considered a fast-living species. They reach sexual maturity quickly, and on average live just 18 months.³ However, they can live for up to 10 years in the wild, and there is some evidence that urban foxes live for longer than countryside ones.⁴

Some fox species are more specialised to hotter, drier environments. The fennec fox (Vulpes zerda) is native to the Sahara and digs its burrows into the sand.⁵ This slender species has a sandy coat that helps to camouflage it from predators and large eyes and ears to help in the hunt for rodents at night.

Other desert specialists include the pale fox (Vulpes pallida), which lives in the Sahel, a band of savannah south of the Sahara, and the kit fox in western North America, which has adapted to the dry climate by not requiring water to drink.⁶ Instead, it gets enough fluids from the beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, mice and rats it preys on.⁷

By contrast to foxes in warmer climates, the Arctic fox has tiny ears to reduce heat loss.⁸ This species primarily hunts lemmings – a small rodent that lives in the Arctic and that is not dissimilar to a vole – and will follow polar bears to scavenge off the remains of their kills. The population of Arctic foxes – which numbers in the hundreds of thousands – is closely linked to the amount of available prey animals, particularly lemmings.⁹

All foxes have claws that partially retract, a point of difference with their closest relatives: wolves, jackals and coyotes. This feature helps to keep the foxes' claws sharp for catching prey.

The red fox is the most widely distributed animal from the order Carnivora. It can be found almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere, from Alaska to Japan, and from the Arctic to North Africa.¹⁰ It was introduced by Europeans to Australia in the 1800s for the purpose of fox-hunting, and now runs wild as an invasive alien species. Since the 1980s, authorities in Australia have been taking steps, including poisoning, to curb their numbers and prevent red foxes from killing native wildlife.¹¹

Red foxes are adaptable: they have been found in icy tundras and arid deserts, and are equally at home on farmland as they are on moors and mountains.¹² However, their preferred habitats are agricultural, scrub and woodland, where there is a mixture of vegetation and food sources can be found. They seem particularly at home where these environments overlap.

But perhaps unlike any other mammal, red foxes are as at home in urban areas as they are in forests and woodland. Foxes in the UK are now most commonly found in residential suburbs and prefer to be around people, where litter and food waste form a significant part of their diet.

As urban specialists, foxes can live in very high densities. As many as 30 foxes can be found per square kilometre in urban areas in the UK. In more rural areas of Britain, such as farmland, woodland and mountains, there can be as few as one fox per 40km sq (15.4 sq miles).

Yet, while red foxes are highly abundant, they have been hunted to extinction in some countries. such as South Korea, and are near threatened in other countries, such as Mongolia.¹³

Red foxes are notably unfussy eaters. In the countryside they might eat the carcasses of dead animals, small mammals like mice, birds, birds’ eggs, invertebrates like frogs and fruits.

In cities, they will eat almost anything they come across – from food humans have thrown away to roadkill. Foxes have evolved strong immune systems to handle eating rotten food.

Foxes are highly sociable and live in family groups of around two to six adults.¹⁴ Largely they scavenge for food alone, but they regularly communicate with their family members while doing so to keep an eye out for rivals.

Each family group will guard a home territory from trespassers.¹⁵ When foxes encounter each other, it almost always results in a fight. Bite wounds are most common during winter and spring when it is the breeding season.

Foxes mostly mate with individuals within their social group, but the biggest and most successful males will drift away to mate with vixens from nearby social groups.¹⁶ Females are only in heat once a year, so must find a mate within a short window. This is when foxes are at their most vocal and make their distinctive mating sounds.

Red foxes are the most vocal species of fox and make a wide range of sounds from dog-like barks to blood-curdling screams.

In fact, they can make up to 20 distinctive sounds and are able to identify family members, resolve disagreements and communicate information about food through their cackles and whimpers.¹⁷ Fights can be stopped before they come to blows by intimidating rivals with their barks, for example.

Perhaps the strangest urban sound is the scream some vixens make during mating season. Although it sounds like they are in pain, they do this to attract the attention of mates.

Foxes make most of their noises after sunset and before midnight, which is when they are highly active in their search for food.¹⁸

Their bushy tails, fluffy faces and pointy ears give foxes an undeniably cute appearance. But wild foxes have been known to attack humans. While this might not make them good pets, one curious study from the 1950s and 1960s attempted to prove pet-like qualities could be bred into wild foxes.¹⁹

Soviet zoologist Dmitry Belyayev spent decades selective-breeding silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes) in the harsh Siberian wilderness. His aim was to cross-breed those individuals who showed the least aggression, fear of humans, and the most tame qualities. By doing so, he thought he could show that tameness was intentionally bred into dogs, the fox's distant cousin, by our ancient ancestors.

Belyayev started to measure the tameness of new cubs by noticing their reaction to being hand-fed, and how they socialised with their fellow cubs. In only six generations of selective breeding, Belyayev’s foxes were wagging their tails, panting and licking their handlers like dogs.

Belyayev noticed a few unexpected qualities in the tamest foxes he bred. Their appearance started to change, they began to wag their tails when he greeted them and their fur changed colour and became wavy. Rather than silver, their fur was now mottled, or piebald.

He also observed that instead of pointy ears, one or both would flop over, much like a dog’s ears. This is curious, because wild animals’ ears are almost always erect to help them detect predators or prey. But a domesticated animal bred not to be scared of humans might not need such good hearing.

These results were completely unintentional as Belyayev only ever selected foxes for their eagerness to be fed by humans, not their appearance. However, it seems that certain qualities are a by-product of being domesticated and are shared by other domesticated animals too. Domesticated pigs' ears flop forward, unlike their wild boar relatives. Horses coats are patchy, unlike what we know of wild horse species.

Belyayev's study, which is still running today under the stewardship of Russian geneticist Lyudmila Trut, is now hundreds of generations further on, but it showed that domestication could happen within just a few generations of selective breeding.

Featured image © Goutham Ganesh | Instagram

Fun fact image © Mindaugas Vitkus | Unsplash

1. Iossa, Graziella, Carl D. Soulsbury, Philip J. Baker, and Stephen Harris. 2008. “Body Mass, Territory Size, and Life-History Tactics in a Socially Monogamous Canid, the Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes.” Journal of Mammalogy 89 (6): 1481–90. https://doi.org/10.1644/07-mamm-a-405.1; Lariviere, Serge, and Maria Pasitschniak-Arts. 1996. “Vulpes Vulpes.” Mammalian Species, no. 537 (December): 1. https://doi.org/10.2307/3504236.

‌2. “The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.” 2019. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2019. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/899/57549321.

3. Younes, Mahmoud I., and Ali E. Basuony. 2015. “Age Structure of a Red Fox ( Vulpes Vulpes ) Sample from Egypt.” The Egyptian Journal of Hospital Medicine 60 (July): 347–53. https://doi.org/10.12816/0013793.

4. Lieury, Nicolas, Nolwenn Drouet-Hoguet, Sandrine Ruette, Sébastien Devillard, Michel Albaret, and Alexandre Millon. 2017. “Rural Populations of the Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes Show Little Evidence of Reproductive Senescence.” Mammalian Biology 87 (November): 146–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mambio.2017.08.008.

5. Sillero-Zubiri, Claudio, and Tim Wacher. 2012. “IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Vulpes Pallida.” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. May 17, 2012. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/23052/16813736#:~:text=AVAILABLE%20FILES-.

6. Sillero-Zubiri, Claudio, and Tim Wacher. 2012. “IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Vulpes Pallida.” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. May 17, 2012. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/23052/16813736#:~:text=AVAILABLE%20FILES-.

7. List, Rurik, and Brian Cypher. 2014. “IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Vulpes Macrotis.” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. July 22, 2014. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/41587/62259374#:~:text=AVAILABLE%20FILES-.

8. “The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.” 2019. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2019. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/899/57549321.

9. Lieury, Nicolas, Nolwenn Drouet-Hoguet, Sandrine Ruette, Sébastien Devillard, Michel Albaret, and Alexandre Millon. 2017. “Rural Populations of the Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes Show Little Evidence of Reproductive Senescence.” Mammalian Biology 87 (November): 146–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mambio.2017.08.008.

10. Sillero-Zubiri, Claudio, and Michael Hoffmann. 2016. “IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Vulpes Vulpes.” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. March 2016. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/23062/193903628#:~:text=AVAILABLE%20FILES-.

11. Marlow, Nicola J., Neil D. Thomas, Andrew A. E. Williams, Brian Macmahon, John Lawson, Yvette Hitchen, John Angus, and Oliver Berry. 2015. “Lethal 1080 Baiting Continues to Reduce European Red Fox (Vulpes Vulpes) Abundance after More than 25 Years of Continuous Use in South-West Western Australia.” Ecological Management & Restoration 16 (2): 131–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/emr.12162.

12. Sillero-Zubiri, Claudio, and Michael Hoffmann. 2016. “IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Vulpes Vulpes.” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. March 2016. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/23062/193903628#:~:text=AVAILABLE%20FILES-.

‌13. Sillero-Zubiri, Claudio, and Michael Hoffmann. 2016. “IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Vulpes Vulpes.” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. March 2016. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/23062/193903628#:~:text=AVAILABLE%20FILES-.

14. Soulsbury, Carl D., Philip J. Baker, Graziella Iossa, and Stephen Harris. 2008. “Fitness Costs of Dispersal in Red Foxes (Vulpes Vulpes).” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 62 (8): 1289–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-008-0557-9.

15. White, Piran C.L., and Stephen Harris. 1994. “Encounters between Red Foxes (Vulpes Vulpes): Implications for Territory Maintenance, Social Cohesion and Dispersal.” The Journal of Animal Ecology 63 (2): 315. https://doi.org/10.2307/5550.

16. Iossa, Graziella, Carl D. Soulsbury, Philip J. Baker, and Stephen Harris. 2008. “Body Mass, Territory Size, and Life-History Tactics in a Socially Monogamous Canid, the Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes.” Journal of Mammalogy 89 (6): 1481–90. https://doi.org/10.1644/07-mamm-a-405.1.

17. Newton-Fisher, Nick, Stephen Harris, Piran White, and Gareth Jones. 1993. “Structure and Function of Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes Vocalisations.” Bioacoustics 5 (1-2): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/09524622.1993.9753228.

18. Andreychev, Alexey. 2023. “Vocalizations by Red Fox (Vulpes Vulpes) in Natural and Climatic Conditions of Mordovia (Middle Volga Region).” Edited by A. Muratov and O. Lygina. E3S Web of Conferences 462: 01004. https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202346201004.

19. Trut, Lyudmila N. 1999. “Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment: Foxes Bred for Tamability in a 40-Year Experiment Exhibit Remarkable Transformations That Suggest an Interplay between Behavioral Genetics and Development.” American Scientist 87 (2): 160–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27857815.