45 Fun Facts About Fox

What is a female fox called?

A vixen: she gives birth in a den, and the father stays to help raise the cubs until they leave home in the autumn.

Which of these is a real collective noun for a group of foxes?

A skulk: red foxes live in small family groups, yet each usually forages alone.

Which German field marshal of World War II was nicknamed 'the Desert Fox'?

Erwin Rommel: linked to the plotters behind the failed July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life, he was forced to take poison to protect his family.

Which English idiom comes from one of Aesop's fables about a fox?

Sour grapes: in the fable, a fox that can't reach some grapes walks away saying they must have been sour anyway.

Flying foxes are actually which kind of animal?

Fruit bats: unlike most bats, flying foxes can't echolocate, so they find their way in the dark by sight.

What is the fox's bushy tail traditionally called?

A brush: a fox also uses it to talk to other foxes, raising it or lashing it back and forth to signal its mood.

A fox's underground den is traditionally called what?

An earth: chasing a fox into its den gave English the idiom 'run to earth', meaning to track something down after a long search.

Which is the smallest of all canid species?

Fennec fox: its huge ears radiate body heat to keep it cool and help it hear prey moving under the sand.

The big-eared desert fox of the Sahara is the national animal of which country?

Algeria: the fox's furry feet grip loose sand and protect it from the scorching desert ground.

What colour does the Arctic fox's 'white morph' coat turn in summer?

Brown: once the snow melts, the darker summer coat helps the fox blend in among the rocks and plants of the tundra.

A young Arctic fox crossed the sea ice from Norway's Svalbard to which island in just 21 days?

Greenland: she kept going to Ellesmere Island, covering 3,506 km in 76 days before her tracker stopped working.

Arctic foxes that live inland on the tundra specialize in hunting which animal?

Lemmings: their numbers boom and crash every three to five years, so the size of a fox family's litter swings widely from year to year.

Which North American fox can climb trees and leap from branch to branch?

Gray fox: it scrambles up trees to escape predators such as coyotes and dogs, and to reach food in the branches.

What does Africa's bat-eared fox mainly eat?

Insects: mostly termites, and the fox gets much of the water it needs from the body fluids of the insects it eats.

In the Sonic the Hedgehog games, what is the name of Sonic's fox sidekick?

Tails: his designer gave him two tails to make him stand out, and named him Miles Prower, a pun on 'miles per hour'.

The swift fox died out in which country in the 20th century, before a reintroduction began in 1983?

Canada: they probably fell victim to the trapping and poisoning campaigns aimed at other predators, such as coyotes and wolves.

A red fox hunting mice under snow appears to align its leap with what?

Earth's magnetic field: the fox first locates the hidden prey by sound, then jumps high so that it drops on it from above.

Which comedy duo's 2013 viral music video asked what sound a fox makes?

Ylvis: the Norwegian brothers made it as a joke meant to flop on their talk show, then watched it become a worldwide hit.

The red fox's tail gland is said to smell of which flower?

Violets: the gland gives off scent compounds also found in flowers, and foxes may use the smell to send signals to one another.

How did much of Western and Central Europe get rid of rabies in its foxes?

Spreading vaccine baits: some of the first baits were chicken heads with a vaccine capsule hidden inside, left out for foxes to eat.

In 2011, a fox was found living near the top of which unfinished London skyscraper?

The Shard: the fox had probably climbed up the central stairwell, and it survived on scraps of food left by the builders.

When an old book's pages are described as 'foxed', what do they have?

Brown spots: no one is sure what causes them, though mould and rusting specks of metal in the paper are both suspects.

Dmitry Belyayev's famous fox-domestication experiment, begun in 1959, took place in which Russian city?

Novosibirsk: under Lysenko, genetics was politically dangerous, so through the 1950s Belyayev passed off his genetics work as animal physiology.

In Belyayev's experiment, which dog-like trait had appeared in a tame fox cub by the tenth generation?

Floppy ears: the foxes were bred only for tameness, yet the trait came along anyway, as it has in many domestic animals.

In Japanese folklore, kitsune are messengers of which Shinto deity?

Inari: fried tofu is said to be the foxes' favourite food, which is why noodles topped with it are called kitsune udon, or fox udon.

In 2022, what happened to Japan's 'killing stone', said to hold the spirit of a nine-tailed fox?

It split in two: the rock had been cracked for years, so nature was the likely culprit, but priests still held a ceremony to calm the fox's spirit.

A sunshower, rain while the sun shines, is called what in Japanese folklore?

The fox's wedding: in Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams, a boy told not to spy on one sneaks into the forest to watch the procession and angers the foxes.

Thanks to the medieval tales of a trickster fox, 'renard' replaced which older French word for fox?

Goupil: the tales were so popular across medieval Europe that the fox hero's own name took over as the word for the animal.

In Disney's Pinocchio, what is the name of the sly fox who leads Pinocchio astray?

Honest John: his cat sidekick Gideon never speaks, so Warner Bros. voice star Mel Blanc ended up supplying nothing but a hiccup.

Which actor voiced the fox Robin Hood in Disney's 1973 film?

Brian Bedford: pop star Tommy Steele was first in line, but Disney staff saw Bedford on stage in Los Angeles and brought him in to test.

In Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, the three farmers are Boggis, Bunce and who?

Bean: the three farmers set an ambush for Mr Fox outside his den, but all they manage is to shoot off his tail.

Who directed the 2009 stop-motion film of Fantastic Mr Fox?

Wes Anderson: his semi-Americanised version gives Mr Fox and the other animals American voices, while the villainous farmers are all British.

In Disney's The Fox and the Hound (1981), what is the young fox's name?

Tod: Chief, the hunting dog hit by a train while chasing him, was meant to die, but the studio's bosses refused to kill him off.

Which animator quit Disney with a group of colleagues in 1979, delaying The Fox and the Hound?

Don Bluth: he and his team left to set up their own studio, whose first feature was The Secret of NIMH.

Oscar Wilde described fox hunting as 'the unspeakable in full pursuit of the' what?

Uneatable: the man who says it, Lord Illingworth, hires a young secretary who turns out to be his own son.

Which English football club is nicknamed 'the Foxes'?

Leicester City: they started the 2015-16 season as 5,000-1 outsiders, a year after nearly being relegated, and won the Premier League.

The earliest known attempt to hunt a fox with hounds took place in 1534 in which English county?

Farmers were after pest control; the oldest formal hunt is probably the Bilsdale in Yorkshire.

The traditional red hunting coats are misleadingly called what?

Theories range from a weathered scarlet shade to the name of a tailor.

Which constellation's name is Latin for 'little fox'?

Vulpecula: in 1967 Jocelyn Bell Burnell found the first known pulsar there, a signal so regular it was jokingly nicknamed LGM-1, for 'little green men'.

Which animal, not a fox at all, is nicknamed the 'firefox'?

Red panda: though classed as a carnivore, it lives mostly on low-nutrition bamboo, so it saves energy by slowing its metabolism in the cold.

In Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, what does the fox ask Jemima to bring to their dinner?

Herbs and onions: the fox says they are for an omelette, but sage and onions are just what you would use to stuff a roast duck.

In the famous typing sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet, what does the quick fox jump over?

The lazy dog: when the Moscow-Washington hotline opened in 1963, the Americans' first test message was a version of this sentence.

In the 1990s, which predator caused a catastrophic decline of island foxes on California's Channel Islands?

Golden eagles: DDT had devastated the rival bald eagles, and feral pigs gave the golden eagles extra prey, so they settled on the islands.

Most of the world's Darwin's foxes live on which island?

Chiloé: Charles Darwin killed one on a nearby island in 1834, sneaking up while it watched the ship's officers at work and hitting it with his geological hammer.

What shape are a red fox's pupils?

Vertical ovals: a 2015 study found upright pupils are most common in ambush predators, especially smaller ones whose eyes sit close to the ground.