Fox Breeding Season

[Farplace]

My vixen is in season. I thought this usually started in winter? Or does a first season sometime happen earlier than normal?
Jan

[Adam Cheeseman]

They start around now and mating (around here anyway) happens over the next couple of months. They can delay pregnancy occurring for a while after mating has taken place.

Cheers,

Adam

[mbaldw]

I always think of the Red fox breeding season as being winter, but there is both early and late breeding in this species. Huw Gwyn Lloyd researched the topic widely. He calculated that vixens come into season from about 94 days after the summer solstice, which means they can come into season from late September. In a study of 610 vixens from Wales, two conceived during early November and one vixen shot on Boxing Day 1962 at Llandudno was near full term, suggesting she must have mated during mid-October. In another sample of vixens from Wales and SE England, Lloyd found that about 8% had sperm in them six weeks prior to the breeding season, suggesting they'd tolerated these early matings. There is some evidence that, very rarely (~1% of animals), Silver foxes on fur farms come into oestrous twice in a single year, but I don't know of any evidence from the wild. Breeding also changes with latitude, being earlier in the south and later in the North.

We've had contact calling quite a bit here in the last week-or-so, so it seems like the local foxes are getting frisky!

Cheers,
Marc.