What the Fox Says

Meet the real world canid, star of folklore, children's literature, and our own backyards

The fabled red fox, with a white chest, black ears and feet, and a white-tipped tail, also known as a “brush.” Photo by Gary Bendig on StockSnap.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO on a cold winter night, my friend Theresa and I were walking in our Northampton, Massachusetts neighborhood, looping from street to street and talking. For more than 20 years, we’ve met up after dinner a few times a week, often with one or two of my dogs in tow. Together we’ve learned the calls of screech owls, watched skunks waddle out from under parked cars, and listened for the first spring peepers.

The street that runs parallel to the Mill River was patchy with ice that night, so we had to pick our way along. That’s when we heard it. A scream. Then another scream. We froze. Clearly, someone was in distress. A woman? Or was that a baby? Was someone drowning? The screamer briefly paused, then shrieked again.

Despite protests from Theresa, I handed her the dogs’ leashes, and started down the dark and icy trail to the river to offer help. I had no idea what I’d do if I actually found someone, and didn’t have to find out: the cries stopped as soon as I got close. Theresa was more level-headed. By the time I’d minced my way back up the hill, she was finishing a phone call with the police.

“We’ve been hearing from people every night,” the officer explained. “It’s a vixen scream. A red fox is looking for a mate.”

Theresa and I have heard that specific scream—waaaah! waaaah!—as well as lots of others on many winter nights since, as red foxes continue to settle into our neighborhood. They have a five-octave range and several vocalizations to make themselves understood: howling, barking, whining, and gekkering, a throaty sound used to ward off rivals.

Two red foxes appear to be fighting and gekkering, a throaty, clickety whine. Photo by Prazanthy Ramesh on Unsplash.

OVER THE LAST CENTURY red foxes have been slowly moving into cities. Our Northampton neighborhood is chockablock with houses, many of them rambling Victorians from the late 1800s with small yards, porches, carriage houses, and old barns—plenty of dark spaces for foxes to nest and hunt. My husband and I have lived in three different houses in this neighborhood over 30-odd years, and in the early days, as far as we could tell, there were no foxes anywhere—nor cottontail rabbits. Then, sometime in the aughts, rabbits started popping up, first occasionally, then, as if by conjuring, on every lawn in town. Around that same time, several neighbors started raising backyard chickens. It seems natural to me now that the hungry red fox, a famously good adaptor and hunter, would follow.

A full-grown fox consumes a pound or two of food a day then, if there is any surplus, “caches” the leftovers, burying them nearby. Our yards offer them an all-you-can-eat buffet: birds, earthworms, rabbits, squirrels, and small rodents, as well as eggs, fruits, vegetables, garbage, and compost. (Those backyard chickens are vulnerable as well. Housecats, similar in size to a fox, are much less so.) Foxes deserve their mythical status as hunters. They have keen eyesight, a great sense of smell, and formidable hearing.

As good as a fox’s sense of smell is, it still falls short of a domestic dog’s. It’s another reminder how differently our pets experience a neighborhood walk than we do.

Foxes hear high-pitched sounds, like squeaks, and low frequency ones, too, like a rodent chewing on a stick underground 40 feet away. They will chase down a rabbit or squirrel, but their favorite quarry are small rodents like mice and voles. They stalk them in the grass, dig for them underground, and dive for them in the snow. A Czech scientific study in 2011 attributed their ability to pinpoint prey beneath the snow not just to good hearing, but to the fox’s ability to use the Earth’s magnetic field to calculate the exact distance it needs to jump. Check out this Smithsonian Magazine video of a fox diving for supper in the snow. Many cartoon moments!

Red foxes pounce as high as six feet, coming down with precision on small rodents hidden beneath the snow. Photo by Birger Strahl on Unsplash.

FOXES ARE CANIDS, like dogs and coyotes, and they are the most widespread land mammal in the world, roaming from the Arctic Circle to Central America and from Central Asia to Northern Africa. (They were also introduced for sport in Australia in the 1800s. They are considered a pest there now, because of their appetite for small native animals.) The word fox comes from an old Germanic word for “tail.” Red foxes (vulpes vulpes) are so variable they’ve been divided into 46 subspecies. Vulpes vulpes fulva lives with us here in the Northeast. They’re in fact in communities all through the Commonwealth, with the exception—so far anyway—of the foxless Vineyard and Nantucket. They often get mistaken for coyotes because of their stiff-legged stride and pointy ears, but they’re much smaller, only seven to 15 pounds compared to a coyote’s 30 to 50.

The red fox is the only fox I’ve seen locally, but it’s likely that the less common grey fox (urocyon cinereoargenteus) lives nearby, too. Red foxes are the fabled version of childhood stories—typically red, but also with variations of grey, black, and silver, with a white chest and black ears and feet. Though grey foxes can be reddish too, it’s easy to tell the two types apart: a red fox has a signature white tip on its tail. 

Humans have a long history of hunting red foxes for meat, for sport, and for their beautiful fur. They’re still hunted and trapped in Massachusetts (and most other states) outside of their breeding season. They’re in healthy numbers in the Northeast, thriving both in wilderness areas and beside us in towns and cities, where they excel at keeping the mice and rat population under control.

“Vulpes Fulvus, American Red-Fox. (Male.),” a lithograph by John Woodhouse Audubon, 1812-1862. From the collection of The New York Public Library.

Many people fear foxes. From Aesop’s Fables to Uncle Remus, foxes have been unfairly saddled in literature with a reputation for being cruel and untrustworthy—a sometimes trickster. Ask a child how big a fox is, and they are likely to indicate an animal the size of a wolf. The word shenanigan—meaning a bit of mischief—is even believed to come from the Irish expression sionnachuighim: "I play the fox." The real fox, however, is not menacing at all, and has no interest in tangling with us humans.

Most residents here in Northampton are eager to find ways to cohabitate with foxes. Last summer, a few concerned neighbors circulated photos of a miserable looking red fox with a balding coat running through their yards. Foxes are prone to sarcoptic mange, an aggressive and contagious condition caused by mites. It messes with the fox’s ability to regulate its temperature and, often and unmercifully, leads to starvation. Treatments are possible but difficult, and illegal in Massachusetts. The best thing we can do to help foxes is to make sure we are not creating communal feeding grounds where the mites will spread. That means securing garbage cans and composts and never, ever feeding foxes (despite the cute videos on Instagram).

Foxes are brazen about nesting near humans, including, infamously, under the old Yankee Stadium in New York. A New York Times article from 1950 reported the chaos a fox created before an Army-Navy game:

“The fifty laborers who were preparing the stands and field for the game promptly became fox hunters when at exactly 10:30 A.M. one of them shouted “there’s a fox.” All hands dashed after the animal. But wedges, T formations, and end plays all proved unavailing against the swivel-footed star.”

Since the night Theresa and I first heard the vixen call, I’ve spotted red foxes around the neighborhood a few times each year, usually trotting purposefully through our yards at twilight. In the spring and summer, foxes stay together in small family units called skulks to rear their young. The male is a critical helpmate, but a young vixen from a previous litter will sometimes pitch in, too. Foxes build dens for nesting, occasionally sparing themselves a lot of digging by starting with an abandoned burrow, like a groundhog’s, then adding chambers as needed.

At three months old, the vixen weans her kits. They’re ready then to trail along with both parents and learn to hunt. Photo by Jeremy Hynes on Unsplash.

Fox kits are born blind, deaf, and toothless, so the vixen remains vigilant for the first month, accepting meals delivered by her family. As soon as the kits can move, they start playing and fighting, building their strength and establishing a pecking order. When they’re about a month old, they start to venture out, and the vixen and her mate take turns hunting. The kits who survive to adulthood can expect to live about three to five years.

Last summer a neighbor shared through our street’s listserv a video of three kits rough-housing and play-growling all morning in her garden. They clearly felt at home among our neighborhood’s patio furniture, bird feeders, and swing sets. By fall they had all gone, moving on to another neighborhood to strike out on their own.

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FOX MARGINALIA

The Tale of Mr. Tod, published by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1912, is the 14^th book in Beatrix Potters’ animal series. The word tod, like dog and reynard, describes a male fox.

For a gorgeous non-fiction picture book for children, try How to Find a Fox written by Kate Gardner and photographed by Ossi Saarinen.

Astrid Sheckels, a Western Massachusetts artist of national acclaim, has a beautifully illustrated picture book series for children starring Hector Fox.

If you’re smitten, like I am, by the red fox, try the documentary The Secret Life of Fox by Nat Geo. It’s prone to the usual nature film melodrama (that menacing music!) but has riveting footage of a den of red fox kits in Newfoundland.

Finally, in a bit of fox vocalization arcana, two Norwegian comedians in animal costumes released an electronic dance tune in 2013 called “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say)? The music video has been viewed a billion times.

Author’s Note: The photographs shown here represent red foxes from around the world—not just vulpes vulpes fulva.