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Red fox (click image to enlarge)
Red foxes live pretty much everywhere in the entire northern hemisphere. Not around here, though. Oh, well. They are not threatened by much, other than fancy-fur-coat-wearing ladies, and the IUCN lists them as a species of “least concern.” They thrive in urban and suburban areas, and the more humans encroach on their habitats, the happier they seem to be.
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bat-eared fox (click image to enlarge)
Well, that’s an apt name! This fox (whose scientific name translates into something like ear-dog big-ear), lives in two separate areas of Africa that are about 1,000 km (621 miles) apart. One is in the eastern part of the continent, ranging from Ethiopia and southern Sudan to Tanzania, and one is in the south, from southern Angola to South Africa. Depending on where they live, bat-eared foxes eat insects, other arthropods, rodents, birds’ eggs, and plants. They’re especially keen on termites and dung beetles.
Besides those extra-large ears (which they use for sending each other visual signals as well as for hearing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they serve a cooling purpose, too, out there in the desert), the bat-eared fox has unusual dentition, which means the arrangement of its teeth. May I throw around some more mammalogist jargon just to impress you? The bat-eared fox has more teeth than any other placental, heterodontal mammal. That means it has a lot of choppers. Okay, specifically, it has the most teeth of all of the non-marsupial mammals that have kinds of teeth that are different from each other. For instance, humans: we’re placental with heterodontal dentition. But our pieholes are not nearly so crowded with the ol’ pearly whites.
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The Arctic fox is Nicola’s favorite mammal, so this one is for her. My own favorite thing about the Arctic fox is that it is Iceland’s only native land mammal; all the other terrestrial mammals there were brought by humans.
Arctic foxes’ coats are generally white in the winter and a lovely gray or gray-and-white in the summer, although this also seems to vary geographically. They like to eat lemmings, fish, birds, and eggs, and sometimes they follow polar bears around to get at their leftovers.
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This fennec fox is for Kelsey, who used to be an absurdly adorable and entertaining young boy, but is now unaccountably a suave and self-possessed teenager. The fennec is his favorite animal at the zoo. I drew one a while back, but I never did like my drawing, so I’m glad I got the chance to redo it.
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0045The fennec fox is one of my favorite mammals; I wish I had done him justice. Someday when I have time for an extra mammal, I’m going to redraw this guy.
If you’re not familiar with fennecs, check out some photographs (these are of someone’s pet fennec fox, and are quite nice). They are the smallest canid, topping out at around 3 pounds. They live in the desert of Africa, where their huge ears help dissipate their body heat. And, of course, they’re nocturnal!
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