Red fox

 (C) Philip Stephens (shared under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license)

Scientific Name: Vulpes vulpes

Family: Canidae

Appearance: Red foxes are slender dogs with reddish or russet fur and bushy tails. Their bellies are white.

Height: 35-50 cm Body length: 45-90 cm Tail length: 32-53 cm

Weight: 2.2-14 kg

Natural history: Red foxes are omnivorous, eating plants as well as small animals. They dig underground dens to raise their cubs in, but otherwise often sleep in dense vegetation. Red foxes prefer to hunt at dawn and dusk.

They are widespread throughout Europe, Asia and north America, barring some polar and tropical regions. Red foxes are renowned in folklore for their cunning or trickery. They are highly adaptable creatures, becoming a growing feature of urban areas and surviving in deserts and in high mountains.

Like other dogs, red foxes use their tails, ears and many body gestures to communicate. They use up to twelve different sounds in communication, including greeting and alarm calls.

Trivia:Domesticated red foxes have been bred in Russia. Results from this breeding experiment helped inform a recent theory that a number of genetic changes are common to all domesticated species, and these changes are also seen in all humans.