I think that the notion that foxes never hunted in any way other than as individuals is wrong. certainly New foxes have no need to hunt anything other than rats and mice to supplement their urban diet.
Even if we see 4-7 foxes waiting for food it is just taught behaviour: "If we sit here the human feeds us!" It is NOT "pack hunting"!
In the 1954 book The White Foxes of Gorfenletch (a lot of research has ascertained where this place actually is as it is a fake name for the book) Henry Tegner was out on a country walk and made the following observation;
"A light-yellow- coloured vixen came through the rushes on to the frozen surface of the lough. Flanking her were two smaller foxes, which I guessed to be her cubs of the previous spring. Last of all came a big, dark dog fox with a marked white tag at the end of his brush. The party trotted around the open water, but the wild swans seemed to know they were safe just so long as they kept out in the open, on their little piece of water."
Which is interesting and not particularly anything to get excited about until he notes:
"Tiring of this unprofitable prowling, the foxes set off across the moor towards Gorfenletch. Passing a cluster of round rhododendron shrubs, the yellow vixen paused with one front pad raised. with the aid of my binoculars, I could see that she was questing the air with her sensitive nose. As if by an order4 the rest of the pack froze. The two young foxes and the old dog dropped on to their bellies in the frozen snow. I was about to witness a most amazing drama."
At this point I ought to note that Tegner was a very well known (famous) British naturalist/'sportsman' and though I may well hate the type the observations they made were precise and there was no telling of tall tales. If Tegner told you that the following is what he observed then it can be counted on as being genuine.
Tegner continues:
"Searching the ground in front of the vixen with my glasses, I saw the he4ad of a young roe buck against the dark-green underleaf of a rhododendron bush. The little buck's antlers had just started to grow again. The velvet-encased stumps stood straight up out of his head like two tiny candles. The buck lay, sheltered beneath the bush, quite oblivious of the presence of the foxes. What wind there was was blowing from him towards the pack. Seeing the young buck, the vixen now crouched, her brush twitching to and fro in her excitement.l Creeping nearer and nearer towards the buck, the vixen paused whenever the roe turned his head in her direction. She sank into the snow with her head stretched out at full length before her two forelegs. The buck never appeared to see the fox until she was within six feet of him. During the stalk the other foxes, each working on their own, gradually closed in on the roes.
"As if at a given signal, all four foxes suddenly sprang towards the young roe. The buck jumped up untouched. His white rump patch, like a huge snowball, bounced as the deer bounded over the snow-clad moor. I noticed at once that the roe was not going sound. It looked as if he had been wounded in the shoulder, for now and again he would falter in his stride.
"The foxes hunted him like a pack of hounds. The roe made a big circle across the Black burn, up over Wolfhole Rise, to turn back into the burn. He was making straight toward where I was standing in the shadows of the fir strip north of Nellie's Moss. The light began to fail, but against the white background I could still make out the four foxes as they persistently hunted the roe buck towards the shelter of the fir wood.
"The last I saw of the hunt was when the pack disappeared into the black belt of conifers.`"
Absolutely unheard of before, right? Well, no. We know how foxes behaved when they were "covert fed" -or allowed to live in artificial dens built by hunts and take whatever bird was handy (though rabbit was the mainstay). What we do not know a great deal about is how the foxes actually lived in the wild away from the interference of humans. In this case Tegner is describing four hungry foxes in winter (a family pack) scouting for food and it is possible that the deer had been wounded by a shooter and the fox smelt the blood. We can only go by Tegner's observations and if he had not just happened to be in the right place at the right time we would never have known this had happened.
Tegner was writing about New foxes, descendants of foxes imported to supply the hunt with 'sport'. The Old foxes that had been wiped out included the Common or Cur fox which had a more symbiotic relationship with humans. The Mastiff or Bulldog fox is what we believe also constituted the Hill fox which lived on the mountains edge and amongst hills and rock faces. The Greyhound or Mountain fox filled the niche covered by the jackal in its territories and the coyote in their. Basically Wolf, Coyote and Fox in the Americas and in Europe Wolf, Jackal and Fox.l In the UK before they were pushed into extinction, we had Wolf, Greyhound Fox and Fox. from the taxidermy specimens we have we know that the Greyhound fox was taller than a coyote (we also have a coyote taxidermy to compare it with).
Wolf, Coyote and Fox size comparisons (c)2023 respective copyright holder
In the early records it is noted that a dog fox and vixen would work together to take down a sheep ( as noted in the article "Vulpicide Is No Crime" in the Hampshire Telegraph - Saturday 4th May 1889). This was the author looking back at the fun in killing foxes and his "pleasure" as a youth of using an old flintlock to shoot fox cubs as they emerged from a den. By 1889 the true Greyhound fox was gone. However, it does make sense from what we know of them that if they were in a family pack then their size, agility and speed (hence the name Greyhound fox) would have meant hunting small deer would have been no problem in harder times. Rabbits and mountain hares were the staple diet but a small deer would have last 3-4 foxes until the next meal came along.
We are still looking into old literature and discovering more and more away from the modern (20th century) dogma that continues on even today.
White, light yellowish and other lighter shades were not uncommon in foxes although the Old foxes tended to be brown and the greyhound/mountain fox had more white in it. Tegner was describing New foxes and our taxidermy photographic data base has plenty of examples of colour variations.
I would never, before I started the British Fox Study and its long term research back in 1976, have believed in Old foxes. They were never mentioned. They were tall tales similar to the fisherman's "one that got away" despite their being documented in zoological and natural history publications and books by some of the most well known people of the day and existing in taxidermy.
And I am not even going into the fact that it seems that Europe also had its Old foxes.
Yes, under the right circumstances, I believe the Old foxes may have hunted as a small pack and New foxes certainly did it is just that people never observed this behaviour.
the work continues. Unfunded.
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