A tale of a tail
Posted By Foxy Lady on June 23, 2010
As the fox cubs have grown up, I’ve started to notice black marks on their tails, about a quarter to a third of the way down from the root of the tail. At first I wondered if they’d rubbed against something dirty, but then when I saw that all the cubs had it, I wondered if it might be something genetic. (You can’t really tell whether Mrs Fox has the same mark; her tail is a lot more variegated in colour, with white, black and red all featuring.)
As it happens it is something genetic, but only in the sense that most foxes have this; the increasingly-useful Urban Foxes book tells me that it shows the location of a scent gland on the tail, with which the foxes mark their territory. Now you know!
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