14 DAY TRIAL // Fox are not exactly renowned as aerial hunters, but they are. When the cold moves in, and the ground is blanketed by a thick layer of snow, the fox can still find food by hunting from the air, even without seeing its target. The video below will reveal just how adept of an aerial hunter the fox really is.
These small animals can forage for food without any problems during three of the seasons, but winter affects them significantly. They do not hibernate like bears do, and cannot hunt larger game, like wolves do. The only source of food for foxes are mice or moles roaming under the snow.
But that is exactly the problem – the snow. The fox cannot see its prey, but it can hear it. It helps to think of this predator as a computer. Its brain analyzes everything from the location of the mouse moving under the snow to the speed of the wind, and the distance it will have to travel by air.
The fox then jumps high in the air, and plunges through the snow paws-first, stunning the mouse and then biting off its head. All calculations about trajectory and the depth of the snow are compiled very quickly, and with stunning precision.
When hunting in this manner, the fox cannot approach the mouse on foot, since the rodent would scurry away. This is why the predator developed the ability to leap over relatively large distances. If their initial calculations are off, foxes can make minute adjustments to their trajectory by moving their Tails.
During a recent monitoring campaign conducted in the Czech Republic, biologists and hunters looked at more than 600 mouse jumps, performed by 84 foxes at numerous locations around the country. One of the most interesting discoveries was that foxes took Earth's magnetic field into account, NPR reports.
In other words, the foxes appeared to prefer jumping towards the northeast, at about 20 degrees off the magnetic north. When this direction was used, foxes killed their prey on 73 percent of their jumps. When attacking in other directions, the predators mostly missed, killing their prey just 18 percent of the time.
Interestingly, this orientation appears to be constant, in the sense that foxes use it regardless of wind speed, direction, cloud cover, time of day, or time of year. One possible explanation is that foxes use a built-in magnetic compass as a point of reference for checking the data produced by its ears.
This capability may be what enables it to measure the distance to its prey so accurately, even if it cannot see it. However, until now, no specialized structures for sensing magnetic fields have been found in foxes, so the question of how exactly they hunt remains open.