Foxes communicate with kits largely with body gestures, but also make huffing and coughing noises, and sometimes brief clucks, like a casual, short form of gekkering. Submissive foxes, when greeting dominant foxes, will sometimes emit piercing whines, which can elevate in volume and become shrieks. Still, they sometimes inhabit the same territory, and so have a social hierarchy which requires communication. When kits are young, they and the mother may form a small family unit, but in general, foxes are solitary. Red foxes, unlike other familiar canids like the gray wolf and coyote, do not form packs. There’s also the alarm call, which up close sounds like a cough but from afar sounds like a sharp bark, and is mostly used by fox parents to alert youngsters to danger. Gekkering is heard amongst adults in aggressive encounters (of which there are many red foxes are highly territorial) and also amongst young kits playing (or play-fighting). The most unusual is called “gekkering ” it’s a guttural chattering with occasional yelps and howls, like an ack-ack-ack-ackawoooo-ack-ack-ack. The bark and scream and very loud, so they’re often heard, but most other fox vocalizations are quiet and used for communication between individuals in close proximity. It’s thought that this call is used by vixens (female foxes) to lure male foxes to them for mating, though males have been found to make this sound occasionally as well. A shrill, hoarse scream of anguish, it sounds more than anything like a human baby undergoing some kind of physical torture. The scream-y howl is most often heard during the breeding season, in the springtime. That bark sequence is thought to be an identification system studies indicate that foxes can tell each other apart by this call. It’s commonly mistaken for an owl hooting. The barks are a sort of ow-wow-wow-wow, but very high-pitched, almost yippy. All fox vocalizations are higher-pitched than dog vocalizations, partly because foxes are much smaller.
FOX SOUNDS LIKE SCREAMING SERIES
The most commonly heard red fox vocalizations are a quick series of barks, and a scream-y variation on a howl. In vocalizations, too, foxes aren’t entirely like dogs.
Foxes are canids, like dogs and wolves, but are not closely related to either in fact, they hunt more like cats, with a low-to-the-ground stalking posture, and bite hard with sharp, thin teeth to kill prey (dogs and wolves tend to have duller, larger teeth and use a “clamp and shake” method to kill). The red fox, which is the most common species of fox worldwide (and almost certainly the fox variety Ylvis is talking about there are only about 120 arctic foxes left in Norway), is highly vocal.
Are foxes dogs? They’re certainly related-but their vocalizations aren’t quite as varied. It’s simple to reduce, say, a dog’s vocalizations to “bark,” but as any owner knows, dogs can yelp, whine, howl, growl, and make all kinds of other sounds. All species of fox have a pretty wide variety of vocalizations, just as dogs and cats do. Here in the States, we have a few others, like the gray fox and the kit fox. In Norway, where Ylvis is from, there are two species of fox: the Arctic fox ( Vulpes lagopus) and the red fox ( Vulpes vulpes).
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