The description of the video says this:
The Gray Fox, Urocyon cinereoargenteus, in Buffalo Creek, Colorado. There is gelid turkey fat in that dish; I presume the fox is eating that and not the bird seed. The frogs in the background are barking frogs and striped chorus frogs.
Gray foxes are excellent climbers and, as I’ve said before, are not actually foxes. They are actually very primitive members of dog family that still retain the climbing abilities that the early dogs likely had.
They don’t actually remind me of the red fox at all. Red foxes move like greyhounds. Gray foxes move like cats.
And no, they can’t hybridize.
Every time I read that, I just shake my head.
I think what confuses people is the conflation of gray and silver foxes. This conflation appears in the scientific name of the gray fox. The species name for this animal is “cinereoargenteus,” which means “ash-colored silver.” However, this conflation gets people in trouble.
Silver foxes are a color phase of red foxes. It is a derivative of the melanistic phase that pops up in red foxes every once in a while. It is more common in native North American foxes than European and European-derived red foxes (which is what we have in most of the Eastern US).
i can;t say i ever got the impression that Greys moved like cats, and Reds like dogs – both were common in my home-area, and we saw both; crossing the dirt road, crossing the pasture, hunting mice in the meadow, in a snowy field, etc.
dogs are in general more rectangular than square, but have less length to height than a fox, visually; but foxes don;t to my eye move radically differently from a small or medium dog.
of course they don;t move like a Dane or a Mastiff – but neither does a housecat move like a Siberian tiger. size does matter – elephants move more like cows than cats, but cows and cats can both jump – elephants cannot.
i helped a neighbor put his cows back into his pasture one day…
THREE times, LOL; every time, one of the 6 would find a low-spot, and soar over it like a deer, and the others followed less gracefully. ;) i think the 4th time they were back in the pasture, the cows were simply tired. i know we were! :-)) i would bet that day he wold have been thrilled to have dairy-elephants + not cows. ;)
cheers,
— terry
terry pride, APDT-Aus, apdt#1827, CVA, TDF
” still retain the climbing abilities that the early dogs likely had” That’s interesting. It calls to mind the vague blurbs I’ve read about the Norwegian Lundehund and the adaptations it has got to (sort of) climb around cliffs and catch puffins.
I meant early canids, those that existed millions of years before there were even wolves or members of the Genus Canis.
Some short-legged domestic dogs can climb.
But gray foxes are like cats when they climb.
for many pitbulls, tree-climbing is a part-time hobby –
for some its a full-time obsession, but they are off the scale, LOL.
http://tinyurl.com/28koypw
somewhere on UTube is a pitty who climbs a 30-ft trunk to a high limb, but i could not find it on a first-search.
No, I know you meant much earlier canids and should have been more precise that I just meant vestigially. But, between the extra, functional toe, and what they can scramble up, the little puffin dogs are kind of neat.
I can sort of envision a little jack russell or whatever managing this:
or this:
But the pictures of this little guy pulling himself out of the water onto that rock are kind of fascinating. His legs can just splay out a lot wider than any dog I’ve seen and it looks like he can pull himself somewhat with his toes.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lundeblogg/sets/72157622108835524/
Oh. Sorry. I was a bit confused.
Sun must be getting to me…
Yeah, it would interesting to check into the feet of the Lundehund and the wild dogs.
http://tinyurl.com/36dxw4m
http://tinyurl.com/2wl3e35
The tree climbing pitt bulls are hysterical. That reminds me of a friend’s cattle dog who, in her spry (and OCD) youth would scale 10′ chain link fences.
I think what fascinates me about the puffin dogs is how ordinary looking they are. My office was doing some research on the Arctic a couple months ago, which had us stumble across great notes about dogs every once in a while. So, I was telling one colleague about this super dog I’d read about, whose head bends bazillion degrees back, ears can fold down to keep water out, climb cliffs to catch puffins and so forth. “So”, says my colleague, “what does super dog look like? A husky crossed with Chewbacca?”
To which I had to respond, “Nah. Your basic little brown dog.”
Colleague: “That is *awesome*”.
And he’s kind of right.
That is either a really big bird house or a really small fox, very skilled to get up there thou.