Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes
The Fox Story
You know the saying. It takes a village to raise a child.
Sometimes it’s true. Even in the wild.
Meet a red fox with an incredible story.
In fairness, all fox are pretty incredible.
They’re the most wide-ranging animal in the world and are highly adaptable. Which is why our red fox, having originated in Europe, found two ways to North America: the Bering Land Bridge and on ships with settlers.
What’s more incredible?
This fox has the best hearing of any mammal on the planet – they can hear mice pacing underground from 100 metres away and even hear an eagle flap from a kilometre’s distance.
They combine that evolutionary superpower with cat-like eyes that can see in the near-dark, otter-like whiskers that help them sense the exact location of movement and a GPS-system not unlike a hummingbird, which uses the Earth’s magnetic field to always stay on course and find their way home.
Oh, and did I mention fox have super paws? Fur-covered to quiet their approach and keep them warm, they also come with an extra digit on both front feet – what’s called a dewclaw. It’s located higher than the other toes and acts like ski pole – helping the fox get traction on slippery slopes while chasing prey at high speeds.
Put these skills together and you get a seed-planting, waste cleaning, rodent controlling super species. In fact, no predator kills more tick-carrying mice than the red fox, meaning that this animal helps keep us safe from lime disease.
Which is incredible, but here’s what makes this fox remarkable: It’s doing all of these tasks when, by rights, it should never have survived its first year.
Most animals – red fox included – don’t.
No matter where you’re at on the food chain, someone’s out to get you. And when you then factor in disease, food scarcity and the elements, you begin to understand that to make it to your first birthday, like this fox, you need a bit of luck, one incredible mother and a little help from her friends.
When this fox was a kit, it had six healthy siblings and was raised in an area where wolves had just recently returned. The presence of wolves means fewer coyotes and that means more opportunities for fox. But even without the threat of coyotes, this fox family had other problems: like the highway.
Fox mate for life and when the male or dog fox was stuck by a car, the female or vixen had to mourn the loss of her mate while suddenly having to provide for seven hungry kits on her own. And in the wild? It was a losing battle.
So she went for help.
A now-grown kit from a previous litter was raising her family a few kilometres away. She too had lost her mate on the highway and was also struggling to keep alive her six kits – still tiny and a full month younger.
What happened next was nothing short of amazing.
The two vixens – two single mothers – decided to move in together and hope that by sharing the duties of nursing and hunting and playing, all 13 kits would have a better shot at life.
One-by-one the vixens moved the kits in their mouths to a new, bigger den.
Neither family’s kits seemed shocked to have new siblings – even though some of the new kits were of the cross fox colour phase – a mix of black and red. Big kits welcomed small kits and both families played together to build skills and find fun in the areas surrounding each new den – moves required to avoid disease given the large number of kits living in close quarters.
The vixens were aware each set of kits had different needs. The younger kits still needed to nurse; the older kits needed bigger prey to sustain their diet. The vixens would alternate their duties, but no matter who was hunting and who was kit-sitting, they instinctively knew that when the young kits needed nursing, the older kits couldn’t be allowed to steal the milk and that was the perfect time to distract them with a freshly killed snowshoe hare.
