This animal is a pampas fox (Lycalopex gymnocercus), which is also known as Azara’s fox or Azara’s dog. Its association with the name Azara comes from Felix de Azara, a Spanish military officer who was in the region to negotiate the border between the Spanish colonies and Portuguese Brazil in the late eighteenth century.
This animal is called a fox only because it superficially looks like one.
Lycalopex is a relatively new name for the genus, which is part of the South American wild dog clade. This clade includes all South American wild dogs, and they are actually within the tribe canini. With the exception of the Urocyon “foxes,” all extant dogs are either in the canini tribe or the vulpini tribe. All true foxes, as well as the raccoon dog and the bat-eared fox, are vulpini.
Thus, all the dogs in South America that are called foxes are actually more closely related to wolves, jackals, and coyotes than they are to the foxes of the Old World and North America. The name Lycalopex is a portmanteau of the Greek words for wolf (lycaon) and fox (alopex).
At one time Lycalopex was called Dusicyon. This genus was based upon the Falkland Islands wolf (Dusicyon australis), which was well-known to British naturalists. However, by the 1970’s, it became clear that the Falkland Islands wolf, which went extinct in the 1870’s, was quite different from the South American “foxes.” Recent genetic studies have since revealed that the Falkland Islands wolf was more closely related to the maned wolf than to these animals. Thus, the Falkland Islands wolf remains in Dusicyon, and these South American foxes are placed in Lycalopex to keep both genera monophyletic.
It’s actually quite difficult to tell the South American “foxes” apart. With the exception of Darwin’s fox (L. fulvipes), these animals are wide-ranging and do have quite a bit of overlap in size and color. The largest species, the culpeo (L. culpaeus) can approach the coyote in size, and early naturalists often conflated coyotes and culpeos in their accounts. But the others are quite a bit smaller.
The pampas fox is found from southern Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia south into Argentina. They can be found in most of Uruguay and to the northern edge of Patagonia.
They haven’t been widely studied– probably because they aren’t particularly endangered.
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yay, I guessed right. The lack of spots under the eyes were the indicators.
Incidentally, a few racoon dogs, it seems, are now present in southern England. My granddaugher nearly ran one over along a road in a wooded area called Burnham Beeches less than twenty miles from London. Not sure yet whether they are breeding rather than just escaping, but I think maybe the former. This a species very much on the move, having long entered Germany from the east after escaping some time ago from I believe Russian fur farms, reportedly that is.
Talking of new creatures around London, the ring necked parakeet is well established in the ‘heat island’of the metropolitan area and is being seen now even here in the Chiltern hills forty miles to the west of the capital city. Actually this species is reported in clusters around several cities in Europe. They descend from escaped cage birds. Originally from India they can eat their way out of almost any cage with those powerful beaks. Go for it, ringneck!