Mountain Fox -the UK Coyote?

 

My thoughts (I had a bath the other day so something was about to happen).

Cur foxes had a symbiotic relationship with humans and always remained near human habitats -waste food etc.

Hill foxes tended to get by on the slopes of mountains and high hills until there was a bitter winter and low prey and then moved down into valleys/villages for whatever they could get.

The Greyhound/Mountain fox appears to have been, I have written this before, filling in the niche that the coyote and jackal did in their countries. That the fox was taller than a coyote should not be a surprise. The British wolf was large and did not, as some suspected, suffer from island dwarfism. So why should the largest fox.

The Greyhound seems to have moved through woods/forest, swamps and marshes, over hills and mountains, ventured down into the lowland areas and appears to have almost been coyote-like in behaviour -though wolves, foxes, coyotes etc all share similar behaviour.

I think that any DNA results would show that the Greyhound fox was sp. vulpes as were the other types just, as stated at the time, local variations. We can always wish for a new species identification but I think all we will get is recognition of a sub-species.

Hey -you never know!

Hayley de ronde of Black Foxes UK has a theory:

"I think it is possible both the NARF (North American Red fox: a species that spanned the icy Northern Hemisphere from North America to Russia - adapted for mountain living and extreme cold temperatures, the colour adaptation a part of that) and the arctic were native here because the glaciation created a land bridge.

"That the greyhound fox was actually the NARF (if it wasn't a jackal/coyote type canid lost) and why we never mention the north American silver foxes, even though they were here from mid 1800's and even earlier as pelts. That these are the mountain foxes, with the other two species being the lowland and urban lineages?

"My interest in the old foxes has always been because I wondered if they were NARFs."

As I wrote, I hope that some lab can be persuaded to carry out DNA testing on the taxidermy fox specimens we have. The same applies to the early 1800s wildcats we have from Scotland and we have at least two museums interested in donating samples.

The books (Red Paper 2022: Felids and Red Paper 2022: Canids) are comprehensive in the research but there is only so far we can go with documentation; hard science is needed and it seems that certain factions are already at work to "counter" work they have not seen. However, it is hard to "counter" fully referenced historical documents and records.