Gray Fox

About the Gray Fox

The Gray Fox is the cat-like fox of Texas woodlands - grizzled silver-gray with rusty flanks, a black-tipped tail wearing a dark stripe down its length, and a build shorter-legged and stockier than the lanky Red Fox. It is also North America's climbing fox: semi-retractable claws and rotating forearms let it shinny straight up tree trunks, and a Gray Fox denned or sunning in a live oak surprises people every year.

It is an omnivore of the first order - rabbits, rodents, and birds in winter, shifting heavily to persimmons, acorns, insects, and prickly pear fruit in season - and mostly a creature of dusk and darkness, drifting silently along brushlines and creek bottoms. Pairs hold territories and den in hollow trees, rock crevices, and brush piles, raising litters of three to five kits each spring.

The Gray Fox lineage is ancient - it sits at the very base of the dog family tree, more distant from Red Foxes than Red Foxes are from wolves - effectively a living fossil among canids, native to the Americas for millions of years.

In Texas, Gray Foxes range statewide, commonest in the brushy, broken country of the Hill Country, south Texas, and the wooded east, and they adapt readily to ranchland and suburban greenbelts. A flash of silver crossing a ranch road at dusk, tail stripe showing, is usually this fox rather than the introduced Red.