You only need to hear the scream of a fox in the middle of the night to know foxes communicate with each other and with other animals. Like dogs, red foxes communicate through body language, vocalizations, and scent.
Most body posturing is either aggressive/dominant or fearful/submissive. A curious fox will rotate his ears while sniffing, and when playing, a fox might perk up his ears and rise on his hind legs. When afraid, red foxes grin in submission, arch their backs, curve their bodies, crouch their legs, point their ears backward and pressed against their skulls, and swing their tails back and forth. Submissive foxes maintain a lower posture when approaching a dominant fox. When two evenly- matched foxes square off, they approach each other sideways and display postures suggesting a mixture of fear and aggression, with ears pulled back, tails lashing, and backs arched. When attacking each other, a red fox approaches its opponent head-on instead of sideways. They hold their tails aloft and rotate their ears to the sides.
In addition to body language, red foxes use vocalization to communicate. They have a wide vocal range and produce sounds spanning five octaves. Biologists have divided most of these sounds into contact calls and interaction calls. Contact calls are used when two foxes approach each other or when adults greet their kits. Foxes use interaction calls either during courting or when dominant and submissive foxes interact or during an aggressive encounter. A call that does not fit into either of these categories is a long, monosyllabic “waaaaah” sound made during the mating season, and biologists think this vocalization is a female calling for males.
The red fox has extremely good hearing, and unlike other mammals, it can hear low-frequency sounds well, allowing it to detect small animals moving underground, so it can dig the prey out of the dirt or snow. Although not as acute as its hearing, the red fox has a good sense of smell and binocular vision that reacts mainly to movement.
A fox’s sense of smell allows it to use scent to communicate. A fox urinates to mark its territory and food caches. A male raises one hind leg and sprays urine in front of him, while a female squats and sprays urine between her hind legs. Then, anal and supra-caudal glands, as well as glands around the lips, jaws, and on the pads of the feet, aid another fox in detecting the scents marking the first fox’s territory or food cache.
As with most mammals, foxes have developed an elaborate array of means to communicate with each other. Just because we don’t understand their language, doesn’t mean they don’t have one.
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Robin Barefield is the author of three Alaska wilderness mystery novels, Big Game, Murder Over Kodiak, and The Fisherman’s Daughter. To download a free copy of one of her novels, watch her webinar about how she became an author and why she writes Alaska wilderness mysteries. Also, sign up below to subscribe to her free, monthly newsletter on true murder and mystery in Alaska.