Winter tracking: Red Fox

This winter has been marked by a large amount of snow and long periods of below freezing temperatures. Although the temperature was only about 24F it was sunny and I strapped on the cross

Red fox
(Seneca Falls, NY 2/15)

country skis to retrieve one of my camera traps. Turns out there has been a lot of fox activity at that site, both red and gray. At right, a red fox noses under the snow for food.











Next, a gray fox appears after a fresh snow:

Gray fox
(Seneca Falls, NY 2/15)

Red fox leaving a trail in the snow
(Seneca Falls, NY 2/15)

I have been looking at animal tracks in the snow for years. Tracks and trails in the snow are often easy to identify. Up until recently, I have been focusing exclusively on the track itself. This winter, I have paid attention to the changes to the snow below the track. The weight of the animal compresses the snow, packs it down and makes it harder. If you find a trail that has fresh snow on top of it, you could try to gently brush away the new snow and uncover the harder lumps left behind. you could confirm track size, gait and perhaps even direction of travel.
What I found today was a bit different. Instead of fresh snow covering an old trail, I discovered an

Two red fox trails
(Seneca Falls, NY 2/15)

old trail that had been scoured by strong winds. The hard compressed snow at the bottom of each track remained while all the other snow was whisked away. In the photo at right, the new trail is towards the bottom of the screen and the older trail is above that. Both foxes are travelling to the left. You can see the shadow of my head in the photo for some scale.

Old fox tracks that have been scoured by wind
(Seneca Falls, NY 2/15)

Here is the same scene but a bit closer. I know that photos of tracks can sometimes produce an optical illusion and it is difficult to see what is depressed and what is raised. In this photo as in the one above, the upper most trail is raised and the lower trail is the fresh trail with impressions in the snow. If you look closely at the upper tracks, you can see that they are almost an inch above the rest of the snow.

Here is another view. What is amazing here is that for three steps, this fox matched the old trail perfectly. There is a good chance that this is actually the very same fox taking the very same trail maybe a week apart. I have added some shadow here to provide some depth to the photo. Can you tell the direction of travel? I can.

Compare a fresh and old red fox track in the snow.
(Seneca Falls, NY 2/15)

There are two pieces of evidence that I can see in the photo that tell me the old trail is heading towards the top of the image. First, if you look closely you can see the faint impressions of the toe pads as well as the palm pad. They are faint, but they are there. Secondly, notice that there is a slight uptick to the hard pack at one end. That is the back of the track. It is literally the spot where the leg itself bore some of the weight of the animal as it stepped in the snow

Red fox track
(Seneca Falls, NY 2/15)

I scooped the track up and held it in my hand. I smiled thinking that I was probably the only person in the world that was holding a fox track at that very moment. I turned it in the bright sunlight to catch the shadows along the surface. I scraped off all the excess snow until I was left with the hardened lump. I was pleased with myself. It had been a good walk. I felt the cold track in my bare hand and thought of the animal that had made it. It was time to head home. On an impulse, I took a big bite out of the fox track and dropped the rest. A perfect ending to my lesson in the snow.