Earth Almanac: November/December 2008

Red Alert

Red foxes—the most successful and widespread wild canid on earth—are now mating. Listen for their high-pitched love songs, sounding less like barking than screaming. There are few places where you won’t encounter red foxes. Their native range is North Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America’s boreal regions, but in the 17th century, fox hunters, frustrated by our native gray foxes that climb trees instead of running for the hounds, introduced English red foxes to the colonies. Assisted by escapees from fur farms, the species quickly spread to temperate and tropical regions as far south as Central America. In such places as California and Australia, red foxes are a major threat to ground-nesting birds. Still, in most areas they are a beautiful and, at worst, benign part of the wild scene. And while the English race has genetically swamped our natives, the taxonomic difference appears slight. The red fox’s reputation for cunning is well deserved, though intelligence might be a better word. When pursued by dogs or predators it may backtrack or run through water to hide its scent. It’s a resourceful hunter, and in winter it’s adept at locating prey under the snow. Perhaps the best indication of the animal’s intelligence, however, is its passion for play. You can frequently find fox dens by the purloined toys piled around the entrances—dolls, plastic trucks, balls, rattles, etc. And golfers are sometimes amused to see a red fox dash out of the woods and snatch a ball from the green (although their amusement rapidly diminishes as the fox’s game continues). For a video of the red fox hunting in the snow, click here. 

Little Big Bird

The golden-crowned kinglet, named for the yellow crown that flashes open whenever the male is excited, keeps all who notice birds mindful of two cheering thoughts: there is no such thing as “the dead of winter” and much of the living beauty that surrounds us is accreting. This, the world’s smallest perching bird, once nested almost exclusively in the boreal forests of Canada and the northern United States, but with widespread plantings of spruce and fir, it has extended its breeding range as far south as Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In winter you’ll encounter these hardy mites in any of our states, often in the company of brown creepers, nuthatches, chickadees, and downy woodpeckers. Listen for their buzzy zree or zee-zee-zee. And watch as they hang upside down, flicking tails and wings, and gleaning insect eggs and larvae from bark. They will usually let you approach to within a few feet.