What do foxes really sound like?

   By now, many of you may have been exposed to a YouTube music video asking "What does the fox say?"  Although the video may be mildly entertaining, the answer to the question "What does the fox say?" is much more interesting.  I started to research this question several years ago because of personal experience.
   It was spring-time and, on several evenings when I returned home from campfire programs, I heard a loud and very strange sound in the forest around my house.  It seemed owl-like, but it didn't have the tone of an owl.  With a little Internet searching, I found my answer - and I was amazed at the plethora of sounds that foxes make.  Here is a recording of a call similar to the one that I heard:   http://www.angelfire.com/ar2/thefoxden/fox_mating_call.wav  It sounds a little like an owl, but it is actually a red fox mating call.
   Evidently, the mating call worked, since we heard more red fox calls throughout that spring and summer.  Rarely did these sounds seem like something a fox would sound like.  The cry of a young kit sounded like a squirrel:  http://www.angelfire.com/ar2/thefoxden/cry.wav.  The territorial calls reminded me of a crow:  http://www.angelfire.com/ar2/thefoxden/fox_territory_call.wav.  The most amazing (and frightening) call was one that I heard late one night:  http://www.angelfire.com/ar2/thefoxden/foxsquall.wav.
   I expected foxes to sound like dogs, but they often don't.  In fact, they are different from dogs in other ways, too.  When hunting they jump and pounce more like a cat than a dog.  Much of their late summer and autumn diet is actually berries and other fruit, like apples, grapes, and wild cherries - they are not strict carnivores, as many suspect.

Gray Fox photo by Prestonmayhew
 (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

   The red foxes I'm speaking of, may not even be native to North America.  With genetic studies, scientists have found that the red foxes of Europe are the same species as ours.  In fact, this has led some biologists to believe that red foxes may have been brought to North America by early European settlers in order to continue the tradition of English fox hunting.
   Red foxes are not the only foxes that live in western PA, however.  We have healthy populations of gray foxes, too.  Gray foxes are more wary of people and tend to live in deciduous forests.  In fact, they can climb trees and often spend the daylight hours resting on a tree limb!  They also sound different than red foxes as evidenced by this recording of gray foxes fighting:  http://www.angelfire.com/ar2/thefoxden/greyfox_fight.wav
   Both species of foxes are corpuscular (active at dusk and dawn) and nocturnal, which is why we hear them at night.  Unfortunately, we usually can't see them to identify the source of the sound and, therefore, very few of us know what "the fox says."  Maybe if we all spent a little more time outside we would be more familiar with these sounds.  Perhaps the next time we are tempted to watch a viral YouTube video, we could go outside instead.