The gray fox has pointed ears, a pointed muzzle and long hooked claws. Range The gray fox can be found from southern Canada to northern Columbia and Venezuela. Habitat The gray fox lives in a wide variety of habitats but prefers areas with lots of brush or woods.
Diet The gray fox is a solitary hunter and eats a wide-variety of foods. A large part of its diet is made up of small mammals like mice, voles and eastern cottontail rabbits. Gray Foxes can live up to 6 to 10 years in the wild. In captivity they live up to 15 years. Where do Gray Foxes live? Adopt me! Click to Learn More. Primarily nocturnal, they have been occasionally observed during daytime. They make their dens in caves, rocky crevices, trees and hollow logs.
Gray foxes will sometimes extend a woodchuck burrow for their den. They usually use dens only during mating season and for raising young. As with other members of the Canidae family, these foxes can communicate through barking and growling. Young foxes commonly play fight. Adults mark food sources and territories with their scent. Gray foxes are omnivorous and mostly eat small mammals such as voles, mice and eastern cottontail rabbits. They also eat birds and insects, as well as plants like corn, apples, berries, nuts and grass.
In summer and autumn, crickets and grasshoppers form an important part of the diet. Gray foxes are typically monogamous, which means they mate with only one partner in a breeding season. In the fall, male-female pairs form, and breeding takes place in the winter, starting in January until late February, and continuing into March. The gestation period is about 53 days, and the young are born in April-May. Litters usually number 4 or 5 kits.
Adults males do the majority of the hunting before the births take place, while females seek out and prepare a den. Weaning starts when kits are about 2 to 3 weeks old, and they begin eating solid food at around 3 weeks old, primarily being provided by the father.
The parents teach their young how to hunt when they are about 4 months old, both parents, until then, hunting for food separately. Kits practice hunting skills by stalking and pouncing, primarily taught by their father. They depend on their parents to protect them until they are about 10 months old. By then they are sexually mature and will leave the family. Habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation are the main threats the gray fox faces, as a result of human numbers increasing rapidly.
Important habitat has been converted for industrial, agricultural, and urban use. Gray foxes are often sold illegally in Mexico as pets. The gray fox may use scent, sight and hearing in hunting. In its search for prey, the gray fox may use its keen sense of smell to identify the presence of prey, which it will stalk and then rush. It can also use its pointed, movable ears to locate small animals moving under snow or matted vegetation.
It will then leap and pounce attempting to pin the prey with its forepaws. It uses sight opportunistically to capture insects in its path. Mated pairs hunt cooperatively. The gray fox is the only North American canid capable of climbing trees. The gray fox uses its semi-retractable front claws to grasp a tree trunk while pushing upward with its back claws.
When descending it can back down like a cat, or jump from branch to branch—a technique it also uses to avoid predators. Like the red fox, the gray fox uses urine and feces to mark its territory, and may leave scat in a conspicuous place in the middle of a trail. The scent of gray fox markings is not as strong as that of the red fox.
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