How to Track Red Foxes

Video Transcript

"Hi we’re Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of Expert Village.com. We are going to talk to you about red fox track patterns and for more information you can visit our website at www.walnuthilltracking.com. The red fox is a member of the carnivore and a member of the dog family and like other dog families, it usually shows 4 toes in its track; both on the hind foot and on the front foot. It also shows fairly robust nails which often times register in the track as well. Like other members of the dog family, it has an x that is made by the negative space. In addition, there is a large pyramid shape in the middle that shows up. What distinguishes red fox from other wild dog tracks is that it is very hairy and also in the heel pad there is a bar or a chevron shape which is often found. The general shape of the red fox track is oval round and it is not quite as tightly held as a coyote track. We would like to show you a fairly common pattern that the red fox makes. Actually its most common pattern was called a direct register trot. What happens in a direct register trot is as the animal is moving where the front foot lands, the hind foot will actually land in exactly the same spot leaving one track on the ground. Now the red fox has a very narrow trail and its strides are anywhere from 13 to 18 3/4. Usually somewhere between 14 and 16 inches and Valerie is going to show you how to measure the stride from the leading edge of one track to the leading edge of the next. This is about 15 inches here which is an average stride for a red fox in this particular gait. We would also like to show you how to measure its trail width and trail width is how narrow or wide the trail is. Some people refer to it as a straddle and when measuring the straddle, what you do is take a straight edge and put it on one side of the trail and measure how far over the other track is going. As you can see there, there is a fairly narrow trail which will tell us that it is a red fox. "