A West Virginia gray fox in a tree. Source for photo.
For those of you who have never seen one of these animals, a gray fox is a pretty bizarre species.
It superficially looks like a fox, but it behaves unlike any other.
Its ancestors also split off from the rest of the dog family 9 to 10 million years ago, which means that it is as distantly related to a domestic dog that an animal can be and still be part of the dog family.
And yes, they do climb trees, and when they move, they move like cats.
I think a lot of cougar sightings in the Eastern US are actually just misidentified gray foxes.
But although this animal is clearly a dog, it’s a sort of dog that has evolved to be somewhat like a cat.
It’s not actually clear if its cat-like morphology is a primitive canid feature that this species retains or if it’s something the animal has evolved in parallel with certain small cat species.
And this has led more than one or two people to speculate about gray foxes actually being some sort of bizarre species of cat.
In her extensive interviews with New Jersey foxchasers, Mary Hufford found two who claimed that “the red fox is in the dog family, and the gray fox is in the cat family.”
Of course, this folk taxonomy is crap, but New Jersey isn’t the only place where gray foxes have been called cats.
It’s certainly true that the gray fox is not closely related to the red fox– or the other foxes of North America, the swift, the kit, and the arctic fox. The swift, the kit, and arctic fox are all closely related to each other. Swifts and kits produce fertile offspring when crossed, and it’s likely they do the same with arctic foxes. Red foxes produce sterile hybrids with arctic foxes.
But no one has ever crossed a red fox with a gray.
And that’s not because the gray fox isn’t a canid.
It’s because the two aren’t closely related to each other– the exact same reason why there are no dog and red fox hybrids. (No matter how many times people claim they exist.)
I think the term gray fox is too banal for this animal.
I have thought about the necessity of renaming it to fit its uniqueness as a distinct American animal. Not only is it not closely related to other foxes in the northern hemisphere, it’s not closely related to all those endemic South American wild dogs, which are actually more closely related to wolves and dogs than they are to the true foxes.
I have perused the historical literature on this species, and I am making several proposals.
For right now, I suggest that we just call it the feline fox– the real cat dog.
The Grey Fox was once quite rare in my area of Vermont, while Red Fox were very common. But it seems like that in (more or less) recent years, the number of Red Fox has gone down, while the number of Grey Fox has grown, so now close to 50% of the fox I see are Greys. This might be because of the growth of the coyote population. Coyotes do kill foxes, but a Grey Fox could climb a tree and escape them, and maybe even have their litter in a hollow tree off the ground where coyotes can’t dig them out.
Though Grey Fox do have a number of cat-like characteristics, I’ve found what works best for me to identify an animal that I only get a brief glance of, is to look back at what kind of first impression it made in those first few seconds when I see one. In the case of Grey Foxes, my first impression is always “Fox!” when one bounds away in the woods, or crosses the road in front of me. A few second more and I am then (usually) able to actually identify what I just saw. It is definitely a different impression than I get when a species of cat (house cat or Bobcat) crosses my path briefly. I also have never had the feeling I was examining a cat when I handled a dead Grey Fox, but always felt it was definitely a member of the dog family.
An interesting thing I noticed in the Red (Silver) Fox I used to raise as pets is that they had elliptical (maybe semi) pupils much like a cats. I don’t know if Grey Fox have round or elliptical pupils since I’ve never thought to check when examining a carcass.
All in all, both of these two species of fox are much more cat-like than the average canid; my Red Fox kits would even hunch their backs with hair erect and bound sideways towards each other in play like kittens. So while a Grey Fox is more cat-like than a Red, a Red is more cat-like than a coyote, and a coyote is more cat-like than a wolf, and (I believe) a wolf is more cat-like than a domestic dog. I would assume the original ancestor of all members of the dog family was a much more cat-like animal than we would think of when thinking “Dog”, and the members of the family today that are more like what we consider dog-like, are simply species that have evolved further away from that original phenotype.
There is a very good paper on gray foxes and their colonization and retreats from the Northeast:
http://si-pddr.si.edu/jspui/bitstream/10088/16136/1/vz_Bozarth_et_al_2011.pdf
Grays tend to dominate reds whenever they encounter each other.
My grandpa was in the fox business in the 1970’s. He trapped them to subsidize his union activities. One thing you need to trap foxes is fox urine, which you use as a kind of bait. He kept a cage full of “piss foxes,” which were all reds that he had either collected or bought from trappers in West Virginia or Ohio. The cage had a mesh bottom, that collected all their urine into a funnel.
One day he caught a gray decided to put it in with the reds just to see what they’d do. He had to separate them because within 5 minutes the gray already had one of the reds down.
Red foxes are like little endurance greyhounds, like salukis, they can run hard and long. When they get worn out they go to ground, which is why it’s almost impossible to kill them with hounds unless you have a terrier. Grays almost invariably will tree.
One major consideration has to be reforestation. Red Foxes do well in open and disturbed habitat, Grays in wooded habitats. As the old east coast farmlands reforest themselves they provide prime habitat for the tree climbing Gray.
When we first moved into our home in 1976, the whole area was old, used-up farm land–we would even see Red Foxes and even Bobcats, but nary a trace of Grays. Since then nature and people have planted an enormous number of trees and both Gray and Red numbers have responded, increasing and decreasing, respectively.
I say make a name with roots stemming from indigenous languages, much as Lydekker named the Ethiopian wolf “cuberow” from the Amharic “ky kebero”, or how “coyote” came from the Nahuatl “cojotl”.
The question now is, which Native American language should be used? What tribes had the most contact with the species?
Good question :)
I nominate Lenape.
Taylor had the taxonomy wrong, but is it true that a cat would nurse a grey, but not a red fox?
I once had a cat nurse a litter of raccoon kits that one of my employees found in a hay mow. She nursed them as readily as she did her own kittens. The only problem with the mixed litter was that I had to routinely remove the raccoons so the kittens could get their fair share of milk, since the coons would just shove them out of the way.
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