|
Red
Fox Journal and Photos
by David J. White |
|
Introduction
1: 2007
2: The Den 3: Night Visits
4: Lady 5: Prince 6: Princess
7: Kits at Play 8: Rivalry 9: Tracking 10: 2009 11: Fox Life 101 12: References and Links |
| 9: Tracking |
| When
Princess disappeared in early
September, fox sightings ended abruptly. I continued to put an egg on
the stump regularly, however, it was not taken very consistently.
Sometimes
it
would sit on the stump untouched for
several days. Or a raven might come by in the morning and take it. By late October, a fox was coming fairly regularly for the egg but only after dark and at very inconsistent times. The few times I did see the fox, I thought it might have been Lady. For about five months of the year (mid-November to mid-April), the local landscape is mostly covered by snow. Although this white material can be very inconvenient for people, it records details of an otherwise hidden world of night-time animal activity. Learning to identify and interpret animal tracks in the snow helps to make up for all the shovelling and snowblowing. A fox sighting in mid-November showed a fox with a different tail pattern than Lady's. Although a fox came regularly for most of the rest of the winter, I never saw it again until early March. Several sightings then and a few grainy photos showed a fox very similar to that seen in mid-November. One of the red fox's important survival tricks is that it caches or hides extra food to recover later when hunting is poorer. While following fox tracks, I observed caching and recovering of eggs many times. As the weather got colder and the eggs began to freeze on the stump, I assumed that the fox would loose interest in them. But even when I also had a deer mouse (trapped in one of the outbuildings) to add to the stump, the egg was always taken first and eaten or cached. Then the fox would return for the mouse. When there is no snow, a fox caches an egg by placing it on bare ground and covering it with leaves and leaf litter. With snow cover, the fox buries the egg a few inches deep in snow and carefully levels the surface to hide the cache. When I followed tracks that led to a cache that had been recovered, the fox went straight to the spot and dug directly and accurately to the food---no hesitation, no wandering around, no trial and error digging. It always knew exactly where to find the cache. This ability of the fox to hide and then relocate food has been well-researched by Henry and Macdonald (see 12: References and Links). But not much has been written about the long delay that can occur sometimes between caching and recovering. Some of the eggs that the fox relocated in January and February, were taken from the ground and leaf litter under nearly 1 m (3 ft) of snow. These eggs could only have been cached 2-3 months previously before the snow came or perhaps when there was only a thin snow layer (in mid-November). The passage of months of time and the addition of all that snow did not seem to affect the recovery of the meal. The fox dug down to the exact spot where the egg was. Of course, who knows how many eggs were cached and totally forgotten by the fox during that time? Continued in 10: 2009. © David J. White 2009 |
  |