Last summer, I watched a fox family all season long. I wasn’t sure if these were red or gray foxes. I think red foxes, but some of them were missing the white tip on their tail. Could it be that a gray fox cross-bred with a red fox?—Wesley Bruce Wallace, Lake Erie, Ont.
No, says Ted Armstrong, the coordinator of the Thunder Bay Field Naturalists’ Gray Fox Project. “Gray foxes and red foxes do not hybridize.” They’re both in the dog family, but they’re not in the same genus. They couldn’t produce viable offspring. (Research suggests that gray foxes have nearly double the amount of chromosomes as red foxes.)
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“Part of the confusion in fox identification stems from the multiple colour phases of the red fox,” says Armstrong. “One colour phase in particular, the cross fox, superficially looks somewhat like a gray fox. And the unfortunate term ‘cross fox’ leads some people to consider it a cross-bred fox.” As for the missing white tail tip, Whit Gibbons, a professor emeritus of ecology with the University of Georgia (who has studied both species), suspects it was just “individual variability” among the kits. “Red foxes can vary from having a really obvious white tail tip to only having a few white hairs,” he says.
12 fantastic facts about foxes
Conclusion? Your cottage visitors were most likely run-of-the-mill red foxes. Red foxes are abundant; gray foxes are not. (They’re a species at risk.) So even if one could successfully pair up with the other, they’d probably never meet. It would be like going to singles night at a bar and encountering Ryan Reynolds instead of…a whole bunch of people who are not Ryan Reynolds. Not that we think about that scenario.
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This article was originally published in the March/April 2024 issue of Cottage Life.
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