Is Climate Affecting Fox Breeding Season?

 

I have already noted the fact that warmer weather is affecting wildlife and how it may also be helping harmful bacteria survive.  The warmer weather is also affecting breeding seasons.

I do not, obviously, just study foxes in Bristol, but also keep an eye on fox groups and posts there and elsewhere. This means that I get to learn and see a lot more than the "average internet surfer".  

I have heard of quite young cubs in November -which was ridiculed and "probably just a quite small fox" but then the same was said about someone who reported fox cubs in January. How ridiculous. Or is it?

Sarah Mills was asked to help remove some foxes that were living under a floor.  She got there and put her camera under the floor to see how many foxes were there -the broken sausage you can see in the video was to lure them out from hiding.  Imagine her surprise in finding tiny fox cubs.

In this case the tenant was not going to have them removed!  Messing around with an active den with cubs is also illegal but the tenant put any such thought aside. There are actually a lot of nice people out there.  By July, of course, traditionally, the year's cubs should be dispersing so this vixen had her cubs late which means breeding season was late.

Hopefully, more people will report late or early litters and photograph and film them. But it seems to be another change in foxes we are seeing in the UK.   

As I have noted previously, town and city foxes have no shortage of food -rats and mice in abundance as well as cat food left out overnight, fast food dumped on pavements and in parks and, of course, feeders.  Mating seasons are based on there being a plentiful supply of prey/food and good weather. Good weather + a good supply of food =No need to regulate breeding.  Despite what people think there is a "balance to nature" and we know that in leaner years some species do not breed because survival of young would be poor to zero.  

If we remember that foxes are good gauges of the environment then this early and late breeding as well as how health issues arise in them shows just how the environment is changing.  I think that, if people keep an eye open and monitor things more closely, we will see far more "out of season" breeding and cubs.

While we still have foxes.