kingofthepines said:
I watched a fox do something I had never seen before a few weeks back. The vehicle I was in was parallelling a very large open field and a fox was running flat out across the field busting the flocks of feeding geese. As each group of geese would take to the sky he wouldn't slow down at all. Just kept running at top speed. It occured to me that he was probably hoping to come across an older or younger goose who couldn't move fast enough. In any event, it was a far cry from how I always imagined a fox would hunt ie, slow and stealthy. I was amazed at his stamina. Must have covered at least a half mile.
That's neat! In 1975 I saw the identical behavior by a red fox and, independently, by a grey fox at the DeSoto Bend Wildlife Refuge along the Missouri River between Iowa and Nebraska. The "Bend" is a big cut-off horseshoe bend of the river and the associated refuge serves incredible numbers of migrating snow geese as a mid-latitude stop-over during migration. The geese glean the extensive corn and soybean fields that surround the refuge. The red fox behaved exactly as theone you described. He'd run into a mass of geese on the ground and try for a weak or injured one before it could get off the ground. Saw several repeated unsuccessful efforts by this fox before he finally got one. The grey fox we saw only once and that time his strategy was to dash from a dense cottonwood hedgerow in amongst a flock that was just settling - maybe 500 or 1000 were on the ground and that many or more were still in the process of landing - and he (she?) would leap up into the confused mass of birds that, at that moment, didn't know if they were coming or going! Saw him "help" one goose the last couple of feet to the ground amongst the corn stubble, then lost sight of him in the subsequent melee of frantic departing geese.
It sure sounds from these posts that the NJ fox population is waxing. It would be interesing to note as winter comes on and settles in how many of the foxes you see start to show mangy fur and rat-like bare tails. Reason I mention it is that as the population increases there's greater opportunity for direct and indirect inter-individual contact and transmission of the sarcoptic mange mite (and, incidentally, the virus of rabies, as well...) It is during such popuation peaks that both those diseases, as well as canine distemper and canine hepatitis (which causes encephalitis in foxes) can occur with far greater than normal frequency. Actually, my comments on the last two diseases may be only of historical significance, since almost all dogs - except for feral ones and coyotes - are vaccinated against both distemper and hepatitis. Rabies, of course, persists in such wildlife reservoirs as the raccoon (especially in the north-east) and the skunk.
Keep us posted on the fox situation.
Dave
