36 thoughts on “This fox encounters a bedsheet, and you won’t believe what happened next!”

  1. Interesting. The film described the success rate of foxes is much increased when they are facing North. “Guaranteed a meal more than 75% of the time.”

    Looks like they make use of the Earth’s magnetic field. Who would have guessed?

    2. Yeah, well, IIRC I checked that and the source is the same group that claims all cows the world over prefer to stand S/N from plane photos.

      It may be real, but my feeling is selection bias.

      1. I’d agree. I’d want to see some evidence of the mechanism by which the fox could sense the field and how it could locate the hidden prey with reference to it.

        I would have thought an ordinary sense of direction (and remarkable hearing to precisely locate the prey with reference to the fox) would have been more applicable.

        cr

    3. Looks like they make use of the Earth’s magnetic field. Who would have guessed?

      TTBOMK, there are few Southern-hemisphere snow-dwelling foxes. So, if the putative successful foxes are between, say 50 north and 70 north, and the behaviour is being observed by daylight, then the north-facing fox will be casting it’s shadow onto the target patch of snow.
      I wouldn’t bet one way or the other which if those effects – lighting or magnetism – is more important. I’d have to experiment.
      An appropriate experiment would be to study the orientation vs success rate as closely as possible to the North Magnetic pole, so that a small geographic range would have a large range of alignments to “North Magnetic flux lines).

      1. Your suggested experiment gave me an idea for another arrangement. Place a set of wires along the ground such as to set up a magnetic field under the snow and see if the foxes are able to use that in hunting. If they do, then reverse the polarity to provide further confirmation.

        1. Yes, that technique has been used as well. It’s particularly good because you can invert the magnetic field without changing the visual cues that the subject animal is exposed to.

          1. Of course. All experiments must be controlled experiments. That’s why you’ll always see numerous toggle switches and blinking lights on the front panel.

  2. I am glad that none of my canids would do that to roust me from bed. But we had one that would stand on my chest and stare intently at my face. Any movement and I would get licked.

  3. Wish I had one hanging around here to get the moles. And he wouldn’t have to dive through 2 or 3 feet of snow.

    1. One is so tempted to make a drive-by comment:
      “You’re right, I don’t believe it!” and move on.

      (Some would say, in my case, that would be a good thing…)

      cr

    2. Another side effect of these click-bait titles is that my mail service provider has started to dump some notifications from WEIT into the spam bucket, despite WEIT being on my contact list.

    4. It’s satire, of course, and infrequent, and it is amusing to think these things up. Yesterday I had a BuzzFeed bug, and so put two up for fun. But thank you for telling me what you don’t like about the website (not a blog).

    1. It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears
      It’s a world of hopes and a world of fears…
      ‘      .
      Ear-worm planted. Now i run away.

  7. But what is it trying to catch?
    Presumably they only do this when they sense something underneath.

  8. It’s a good reminder that instincts are “programming”, and don’t depend on any kind of individual decision-making. I’ve read that if you knock the pollen off a worker honeybee’s legs before it enters the hive, it will go to a partially-filled cell and go through the motions of packing the now-nonexistent pollen into the cell.

  10. Yea, my siberian husky had the same reaction as the fox did when encountering white sheets and had the exact same confused look. First time it happened it was 3am, I was asleep beneath a new white comforter… At least he hit my body pillow otherwise we both would have been hurting.

    Went with patterned not-white sheets on my bed after that to prevent a repeat.

    1. That’s really interesting! I’d have thought there’d need to be additional cues beyond just a soft white surface to elicit such behavior from both species.

      1. It may be a behavior that can be ‘practiced’ via play or, given that the fox is zeroing in on a specific spot, it is smelling some minuscule lump of food (unnoticeable to humans) beneath the sheets.

        But, both my husky and my friend’s would use their thick/fluffy bedding blankets similar to how they use the wood shavings & hay in the outdoor kennel: hide/bury excess food in the folds, push it around and bunch up a ring to form a nest, even pull it over themselves to make a ‘cave’ when we lose electricity for multiple days due to winter weather. Mine even would even hide some treats & toys in between and under the seat cushions of ‘his’ couch.
        There are times where you cannot wonder why they do things because you are laughing too hard to concentrate.

        1. Aw, that’s so sweet! 🙂

          We’ve had a couple of mutts that loved to make “nests” of their blankets, and sometimes ended up beneath them…no food sequestering, though!

          (In our opinion the “nesters” were going a step beyond the usual circle-and-scratch behaviors a lot of dogs exhibit.)

  11. There must have been something under the bed sheet that made a noise akin to the movements of a rodent, which the fox detected. Otherwise, it would never have dived like that.

Comments are closed.