Читать книгу Wild Animals of North America - Edward William Nelson - Страница 28

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Gray foxes average about the size of common red foxes, but are longer and more slender in body, with longer legs and a longer, thinner tail. They are peculiar to America, where they have a wide range—from New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Oregon south through Mexico and Central America to Colombia. Within this area there are numerous geographic forms closely alike in color and general appearance, but varying much in size; the largest of all, larger than the red fox, occupying the New England States.

Gray foxes inhabit wooded and brush-grown country and are much more numerous in the arid or semiarid regions of the southwestern United States and western Mexico than elsewhere. In parts of California they are far more numerous than red foxes ever become. They do not regularly dig a den, but occupy a hollow tree or cavity in the rocks, where they bring forth from three to five young each spring. As with other foxes, the cubs are born blind and helpless, and are also almost blackish in color, entirely unlike the adults. The parents, as usual with all members of the dog family, are devoted to their young and care for them with the utmost solicitude.

CROSS FOX RED FOX SILVER FOX

The precious black and silver gray foxes are merely color phases occurring in litters of the ordinary red animal (see text, page 416).

ALASKA RED FOX

DESERT FOX GRAY FOX

BADGER

Like other members of the tribe, they are omnivorous and feed upon mice, squirrels, rabbits, birds, and large insects, in addition to acorns or other nuts and fruits of all kinds. In Lower California they are very common about the date-palm orchards, which they visit nightly for fallen fruit. They also make nocturnal visits to poultry yards.

In some parts of the West they are called “tree foxes,” because when pursued by dogs they often climb into the tops of small branching trees.

On one occasion in Arizona I saw a gray fox standing in the top of a large, leaning mesquite tree, about thirty feet from the ground, quietly gazing in various directions, as though he had chosen this as a lookout point. As soon as he saw me he came down at a run and swiftly disappeared.

In the same region I found a den in the hollow base of an old live-oak containing three young only a few days old. The mother was shot as she sprang from the hole on my approach and the young taken to camp. There the skin of the old fox, well wrapped in paper, was placed on the ground at one side of the tent, and an open hunting bag containing the young placed on the opposite side, about ten feet away. On returning an hour later, I was amazed to find that all three of the young, so small they could crawl only with the utmost difficulty, and totally blind, had crossed the tent and managed to work their way through the paper to the skin of their mother, thus showing that the acute sense of smell in these foxes becomes of service to them at a surprisingly early age.