What do foxes eat? Voles, beetles and autumn apples

The short answer

Foxes eat almost anything. For most of the year most of that is small mammals, and the rest is whatever the season has put within reach.

The Park Service keeps it short: foxes are omnivorous, and eat a wide variety of things from rodents, to insects, to plants. The specifics shift by month, by region, and by whatever happens to be having a good year nearby.

The detail below is about the red fox.

What is actually on the menu

Start with the bulk of it. Small mammals make up most of a red fox's diet for most of the year: voles, mice, lemmings, arctic ground squirrels, hares.

New York's environmental agency fills in the rest of the list. Mice, squirrels, woodchucks and rabbits carry the mammal side. Grouse, nesting waterfowl and other ground-nesting birds are the important birds, along with their eggs. Below that sit nestling songbirds, amphibians, reptiles, invertebrates such as earthworms, and carrion.

A fox will happily eat something it finds already dead. The glamour of the hunt is somewhat overstated.

The part nobody expects: fruit

Foxes have a sweet tooth. The same agency notes that red foxes consume ripening grapes and apples in the early autumn.

Further north the fruit arrives earlier and matters more. Red foxes eat berries, especially blueberries and crowberries, when they become available in July. They sometimes keep eating them through the winter when other food is hard to come by.

So a fox in October may be eating windfall apples under somebody's tree. That is the animal behaving exactly as designed.

They hunt by ear

A fox standing still in a field with its head tilted is working. Foxes use their hearing to locate prey underground and in the grass, which is why so much of fox footage is a long pause followed by a sudden vertical pounce into snow.

The pounce looks comic. It is a strike aimed at a vole the fox has never seen.

Leftovers get buried

Food comes in bursts, so foxes bank the surplus. Use of food caches is common for red foxes, which means a good night's hunting gets spread across small buried deposits instead of eaten at once.

That same source makes the seasonal point plainly: a fox's diet tracks local prey populations, plus whatever small mammals or birds are available at the time. A fox's menu is whatever that fox's month and territory are offering.

A desert fox eats a different list

Fox is a wide word, and the smallest of them live somewhere the apples never fall.

Fennec foxes live in North Africa, throughout the Sahara and east to Sinai and Arabia. The Smithsonian's National Zoo lists their wild diet as insects, particularly grasshoppers and locusts, plus small rodents, lizards, birds and their eggs.

The water situation is the striking part. A fennec can go long stretches without drinking, because it takes in moisture through what it eats. Those famous ears are equipment as well: the largest of any member of the dog family relative to body size, used to shed heat and to track prey moving under the sand.

A red fox listens for a vole below the snow. A fennec listens for a beetle below the dune. Same trick, different weather.

The fox who lives here

We draw one of these. Her name is Cheeseball, she weighs four pounds, and she arrived at a wildlife sanctuary in Wyoming after years of travelling with an educational wildlife program.

Cheeseball is a fennec first, and that is the rule we write her by. She investigates with her nose and her paws. She treats an obstacle as a problem to solve, then stays entirely unconvinced that being small settles anything. Later in the story she gets considerably larger, learns the guitar, then acquires eyes that turn red and fire lasers. The fennec underneath survives all of it.

Her collection is the shirts she ended up on. The Universe page has the rest of the cast, plus the places they live. Start here opens the graphic novel at the front.

We did this once already for a different animal, in a field note on whether otters really hold hands. The honest answer there also turned out to involve seaweed.

So, what do foxes eat

Small mammals most of the year. Birds and eggs in the nesting season, worms or insects whenever, carrion when it turns up, fruit from late summer through autumn. Whatever is left over gets buried for later.