Portrait in White

Description

This Beautiful Red Fox has his head slightly cocked to one side, so as to better hear whats going on beneath the snow. Red foxes feed primarily on small rodents, and unlike most mammals, they can hear low-frequency sounds extremely well. When hunting, it listens intently and can pick up on tiny sounds — including the sound of a vole scampering beneath 3 feet of snow & the fox can pinpoint the animal's exact location. It then leaps into the air and dives head first into the snow, a technique known as mousing. Even more fascinating, fox use the earths magnetic field as a "rangefinder." As a fox follows the sound of its unseen prey, it's searching for that sweet spot where the angle of the sound matches the slope of the planet's magnetic field. ( I fucking love science) When the fox finds that spot, it knows its exact distance from its prey and can calculate exactly how far to jump to catch it. The red fox is the first animal known to use a magnetic sense to hunt and the first to use the planet’s magnetic field to estimate distance. Many animals — including birds, sharks, ants and cows — can sense magnetic fields, but they use this ability to determine direction or position.

Taken By

Brian Burnett

Taken On

February 1, 2018

Tagged

red fox haliburton ontario