By Kim Doner
Unforeseen challenges are always part of the wildlife rehabilitation game. This field is never mastered; at best, an understanding arrives that one will be forever learning. It’s especially true when a “new kid” shows up in your care—one that is rare for rehabbers, controversial and surrounded in myth.
I’m talking about foxes.
Here in the Tulsa area, foxes are a common sighting, particularly when Riverside was closed for building the Gathering Place. Displaced Vulpes vulpes (red foxes) were reported all over town; many calls diagnosed mange, which happens, but, for the most part, it was the animal looking rough while shedding a winter coat. Others were afraid for their pets, wanting to know if a fox would carry off their cat or dog.
And here it is, spring again. The calls have begun.
Oklahoma hosts two kinds of foxes: red and gray, with the red fox being far more common. As a species, they’ve really done well to put up with us humans. In fact, their presence has become a source of frustration to many chicken owners as a growing number of urban dwellers have discovered the joys of owning poultry (there is much to be said for how cuddly a chicken can be, which is a statement I never knew I’d make).
Raising chicks can be great fun as they become feathered family members who regularly contribute small, oval gifts to you—at least until a fox gets into the henhouse. Foxes are well-known to be opportunistic little canines, great hunters and quite fond of fowl.
Sadly, this appetite extends to chickens, and Wing It (the network of Tulsa area wildlife rehabilitators) ended up with an orphaned fox when angry chicken-owners extinguished his Mama to protect the remaining flock they had.
Lucky for this little guy, once found, he was placed with a rehabber—his eyes sealed shut, his umbilical cord beginning to shrivel, and his sharp features still blurred with babyhood.
In the wild, had Mama survived, his path would be different. She would have stayed put, nursing the kits then providing them with pre-chewed meals as weaning begins around three weeks.
Their pop would have remained near (a rarity in mammal dads), bringing
dinner home until they were old enough for Mama to leave and hunt. A popular photograph on the internet shows a red fox feeding four or five fuzzy brown babies, and the story beneath will inaccurately claim she was helping kittens or bear cubs or yetis (you know how the internet goes) when that’s not the case.
She was nursing her own brood; they just weren’t red yet. Red fox kits weigh a few ounces when born and soon sport a fuzzy, coarse brown coat. The biggest giveaway is the tip of their tails; the hallmark white patch shows up early to announce their heritage.
As the weeks pass, their eyes open, and they begin to play, pouncing on each other, chattering/trilling/purring and more foxy verbiage, enthusiastically grabbing whatever prey their parents offer and shredding it or, when a little older, practicing catching future meals. This stage portrays a family. Although foxes are usually solitary, they do knit together or form a “skulk,” or group, during these short months.
Once mature enough to feed themselves, the kits would move to a solitary life until their season for family-making commenced. One of the myths about foxes is that of the “vixen scream.” People sometimes hear this eerie sound and assume it’s a sort of mating call, but males (dogs) make it as well. In fact, foxes have several sounds that range from a short, high bark to something that sounds like it is directly from the soundtrack of “The Evil Dead.”
Many of those spooky, weird, demonic woo-hoo-hoohoos aren’t actually avian calls; they’re small red predators out hunting. For all of you readers who are clamoring to ID such sounds while on midnight walks, you can find recordings online.
Another mistake people often make when out in the woods is thinking a particularly noxious smell is that of a skunk. Foxes mark their territory, and they don’t do so halfway. Fox poop is bad, but fox urine is a whole new curse all by itself. It is beyond me why anyone would think they should (illegally) own a pet fox. None of our native species have been bred to domestication; they are nearly impossible to housebreak.
They may adjust to one or two people but no more. And they can leap, from standing, 3 feet upward, whereupon their claws can snag anything to carry them on up. Bear in mind your kitchen countertops are (oh, my, is that right?) about 3 feet high. Prepare for a constant “stream” of homemade gifts from an indoor fox, on your pillow, your recliner, your sink. …
You’ve been claimed. Ack.
And if you happen to have a gray fox, they have SUPER claws on their hind legs that help them climb trees; sometimes they even sleep there. It’s like they’re half canine, half feline and for more reasons than that.
Check out their eyes. Their pupils are slits.
(Hello, fellow nerds! Cool facts alert!)
Animals with slitted pupils (cats, goats and foxes) traditionally get a bad rap as far as folklore, devilry and scary tales go. An evolutionary explanation fits the “why” behind this development.
Goats hang together in a “trip” and are fairly short for hoofed animals. Their pupils are horizontal so they are able to continue grazing and still control the amount of light admitted into their sights. But what about when they raise their heads? There’s an arc to that movement, but their pupils stay horizontal because their eyes rotate to maintain peripheral vision no matter what.
Weird, right?
Photo by Kathy Locker
Cats and foxes, on the other hand, have vertical slits to their pupils since they hunt at night and do so independently. Wolves hunt in packs and don’t need this feature; their pupils are round. The slits also give depth perception and accuracy for pouncing, which is both a cat-n-fox style of predation.
Knowing the solitude of a normal fox will help this rehabber raise the little guy she has, along with recorded fox calls, a secure pen full of hiding places (for stashing food as well as self), space away from human voices and other pet sounds, and a proper diet.
The plan is for a gradual weaning by introducing dead prey (no, the rehabber has no plans to pre-chew it. As much as she loves critters, she does have her limits): frozen rodents of all kinds, road kill, beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, slugs, snails, spiders, earthworms (they are diggers, too), snakes, lizards and other infant mammals (sorry, but it’s true)— if they’d only left the chickens alone!
But alas, they like chicken as much as we do.
So our committed rehabber has plans for the little guy’s release on a large, undeveloped acreage as far from people as possible after preparing him for life in the wild. She hopes he survives, grows, finds a “foxy lady” and furthers the species.
Perhaps, before his release, he’ll share the answer to that question that keeps humming through our heads. …
What DOES the fox say?
