How to Track Gray Foxes

Video Transcript

Hi we’re Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of Expert Village.com. We would like to show you some grey fox tracks and for more information you can check our website www.walnuthilltracking.com. The grey fox urocyon cinereoaugenteus, pardon my Latin, is a member of the wild dog family and a member of the carnivora. Like other wild dogs it shows 4 toes in its tracks and it has claw marks which often times show up in a track and it has an x formed by the negative space between the toes and the heel pad. The heel pad is fairly robust on a grey fox. The grey fox’s foot is not very hairy. One of the things that distinguishes it from other wild canines is that the track is fairly round and the claws are actually semi-retractable so therefore they often times don’t show up in a track. Those two features sometimes confuse people and they think they have a wild cat track. We would like to show you a trail that the grey fox often makes. When a grey fox moves around the landscape it walks rather than trots. So therefore the strides are fairly short. It doesn’t direct register where the hind foot on one side will land directly on top of where the front foot landed. Now in this particular stretch of trail, we’ve put down what we call an average grey fox stride which turns out to be about 12 inches. Now the grey fox has an extremely variable stride in this pattern. It can go anywhere from about 7 ½ inches up to perhaps 16. The average is somewhere around a foot. Compared to its stride the trail width of the red fox is fairly wide which is another reason some people often confuse it with something like a bobcat. We are going to show you how to measure the trail width or the straddle of the trail. In measuring from the outside, we see its just over 3 inches which is fairly wide considering the stride is only 12 inches. Knowing those features if you find a wild animal trail and you are not sure whether it is a grey fox or a bobcat or a red fox, you can usually figure out.

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