Rare Sighting - Silver Fox

F

fishballer06

New member
I was speaking with my mother about fox hunting and she mentioned to me something she saw last week while driving into town. She described it as a "fox sized, with pointed ears, but it was black with greyish/silver highlights, and a white tipped tail, and it was carrying an adult house cat in its mouth".

So after dong some research and showing her pictures, it looks like it was a Silver fox. I had never even heard of these and apparently they aren't even supposed to be found in PA anymore.

Has anyone else ever came across one of these before?

Silberfuchs_08.jpg
 
Funny this came up, my sister in central WI told me that they had a pair of silver fox come in their rural yard and catch a rabbit. I've caught a number of reds over the years and heard reports of them when I lived in WI. The area I lived in was a fox farming area in the 1930's and you could still see a number of old farms when I was a kid in the 1950's.
 
Yes I harvested one, skinned and stretched it.
A friend sold it for me to a fur buyer for a very good price.
Couple years ago an acquaintance got one locally.
 
I worked on a mink farm here and we used to raise them. There were a couple other farms that had them. They are a beautiful animal.
 
That is very cool.
We have them here in Michigan as well. Few and far between. Two years ago, I decided I needed a camping trip so I went to middle of Manistee State Forest here in Michigan. I was there for 8 days over the span of Thanksgiving , Tent camping in 15 degree weather. I was sitting around camp fire at 1am first night and I heard a branch crack right behind me, it was a silver fox. It was 5 feet away! I knew no one would believe me so I whipped out my phone and took piks! It came back to camp 3 nights in a row at 1am each night. It was very neat to see.

True story. Piks to prove it. But I can’t figure out how to post them.
 
I am pretty certain I saw one here in Va. about twenty years ago. I was sitting up against a tree while deer hunting. I had fallen asleep and something woke me up. I looked towards the noise and it was a darker version of the fox in your pic. He was going down to a pond and only saw it briefly but never forgot it.
 
Cool, kinda thought you meant the PM member though. Pretty sure he had a real nasty fall a year or 2 ago.

We see a fair bit of variations on our island as fox farming was common. Plenty of x foxes but the silver foxes are more rare. I saw one with all black legs up to the shoulders last week.

Interesting thing I read lately that had to do with foxes. There is a famous Russian animal behaviour study that was called something like the Siberia project. Basically it showed how quickly and in how many generations a wild fox could be turned completely tame.

The new news is that those foxes were not “wild fox” as 50 or some breeding pairs were bought from farms on Prince Edward Island or New Brunswick in the 1920’s I believe. So they would have already been heavily line bred before the Siberia project began.
 
Here is a video of me missing a platinum grey fox here in AZ. The first fox is a pretty good size male, but the female that arrives, is a pure platinum, no red on her whatsoever.

 
I under the impression that it is a color phase just like a cross fox. It was said that there could be a red, cross, platinum, and silver all out of the same litter.
 
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