Last week, on a dark, late-winter night, one of those all-too-familiar winter nights when the sky is clear and the temperature has fallen well below zero, I heard the call of a red fox – a short run of sharp yips and barks, then a long, emaciated howl, smaller and daintier than the drawn-out voice of a coyote. Our border collie was beside himself with excitement.
I knew the fox – all winter he had been marking the snow near our house. But tonight, as Orion climbed in the southern sky, the fox broadcast his urgent message out loud. Tracking him later, I saw that he had just awoken from his bed, and once his blood began to flow and his leg muscles were loosened, he had wandered into the night. After a few steps, he squirted urine on a withered milkweed stem, then headed for our lower pasture. With his urine, the fox was running a classified advertisement, announcing both his presence and his desire. More drops down the post of our hemlock fence.
Red fox urine is strong stuff that has a faint skunky smell, and he used it like semiprecious fluid – a few drops here, a few drops there. If it is fresh, I can smell it without bending down. But if it’s old, then my border collie – who can read weathered urine – knows that a cunning predator slightly bigger than a tabby has passed through the pasture. As the annual jolt of testosterone coursed through the fox’s body, he was seeking company, attempting to reestablish a pair bond with last year’s vixen or to attract a new mate by peeing everywhere. His trail stained the snow and the air.
When I studied mammals in college, we called the red fox Vulpes fulva, which distinguished it as a separate species from the Eurasian red fox, Vulpes vulpes. Now, however, the relationship between the two species of red fox is clouded, and most authorities agree that red foxes are the same species on both sides of the Atlantic. Since scientists described the Old World fox first, the name Vulpes vulpes has replaced Vulpes fulva.
What complicates the issue is that some biologists suggest that prior to the arrival of Europeans, the red fox was absent or scarce over much of North America. In the middle of the 18th century, European colonists – missing the sport of kings – brought the Eurasian red fox to America, and over the next 50 years, the animals spread throughout southern New England and the mid-Atlantic states. A century later, they had reached Georgia. If red foxes were present prior to these introductions, then the animals here now are mongrels – hybrids with both Old and New World blood.
But pre-Columbian fossils taken from Pennsylvanian caves and archeological digs are all from gray, not red, foxes, and the artist John James Audubon believed that much of America in the 18th century was without red foxes. So where was the true North American red fox at the time the Mayflower dropped anchor? They were apparently only in the far north – in the arctic and subarctic.
Blood typing and DNA studies by biologists indicate that our red fox of today, the one that stains the night with both urine and voice, is probably a flatlander – a descendant of the introduced strain of Eurasian fox.
Our native gray fox, a woodland, tree-climbing fox not often seen in fields and pastures, became scarce in New Hampshire and Vermont as forests yielded to farms. Gray foxes are still found throughout the Connecticut River Valley, but are most common now in the wooded portions of the Champlain Valley.
As I tracked the red fox near our house, I saw that he had crossed the pasture and headed up the wooded hillside, loping across the frozen snow. Halfway up the hill, he must have caught scent of the vixen that had walked down from the ridge. His pace quickened. With ears bent forward, he probably yapped – short, sharp yaps – then pranced like a frisky colt. Alongside a fallen maple, the vixen had left her mark, a few drops of bright red estrus blood amid a splash of golden yellow urine. He knew from the blood’s rich odor that the vixen, too, was ready to breed.
By early morning, he had crossed a second wetland, nearly a mile from the ridge. Her scent grew fresher, almost overpowering. A long line of tracks snaked across the marsh. At the end sat the vixen. The dome of arctic air that had settled over the Connecticut River valley never chilled the fox. The wind picked up, temperatures plunged. Eighteen below zero. But the fox’s blood boiled with a seasonal urgency. And beneath that vaulted March sky, now flush with the rising sun, the two red foxes came together.