What foxes eat
Foxes eat an amazing variety of food, as stomach and scat analysis show. It’s a great mistake to imagine that they live on poultry, game birds and rabbits.
Any fox will take all of these as opportunity offers and when the rabbit was more common, it was a favourite item. But the fox really has no staple diet.
Voles, mice, frogs, carrion, worms and insects figure large on his prey list, as they probably always have and will.
Hares are taken, both brown and mountain and any fox will eat stoat when the alternative is stoat or hunger.
Birds of many kinds are killed as opportunity offers, right up to the giant capercaille. Poultry are killed when people are foolish enough to allow access to their henhouse. Foxes don’t carry keys and a closed house will generally keep them out!
A fox eats more worms than is generally realised. Allow access to a food store, a fox will eat cake, poultry pellets, milk powder or fish meal. Fruit is also eaten; gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries and anything else that takes their fancy.
One of the great services that the fox does for the farmer is in killing rats, and it might be true to say that, in arable country and forests, he’s an entirely useful animal. One study saw a vixen carry 63 rats to her cubs in 10 nights of hunting, which were entirely consumed, leaving only the tails.
In many rural areas of the country, the fox is a problem as a predator on lambs. You cannot keep a fox away from lambs as you can from poultry, so they can be problem animals.
Yet we know surprisingly little about fox predation on lambs, and this is something which is worth a lot of investigation. It is no use simply counting lamb carcasses at a fox den; the fox could have picked them up dead.
At some dens, studies have shown that the lambs found had died of natural causes or been stillborn. It is important to know what foxes are eating, although this doesn’t always indicate what a fox has been killing.
An easy way to discover what a fox has been eating is to locate the den and just look at the carcasses scattered outside it. Surprisingly for such a wily creature, foxes have no issue with advertising the entrance to their den by leaving the remains of dead prey.
If prey is in abundance, a range of bits and pieces will be lying about. If food is scarcer, foxes and their cubs are more likely to eat everything so remains will be more difficult to find.
