Vulpes pallida

Pale Fox (scientific name: Vulpes pallida) is also known as Pale Fox in foreign languages. There are 5 subspecies.

Pale Fox is mainly active at night. It is a social animal, usually living in a small family group consisting of a pair of adult males and females and their children. They like to dig holes on a large scale. The holes are 2-3 meters below the ground. When the tunnel extends to 10-15 meters, a den paved with dry plants is opened. These holes are suitable for them to travel for food and avoid the heat of the day. Gray foxes feed on rodents, small animals, small reptiles, birds, eggs, plants (wild watermelons) and insects. They have well-developed molars to grind plant food. Gray foxes get enough water from their diet to ensure that they can survive the long, dry and hot desert summer.

The gestation period of gray foxes is 51-53 days. Female foxes give birth to 3-4 cubs per litter. The cubs weigh 48-108 grams and are weaned after 6-8 weeks. The life span of farmed gray foxes is 3 years, and in the wild it is more than 6 years.

Although detailed abundance information is not available, the species is relatively common in the ecological belt between the Sahara Desert and the sub-Saharan savannah. There are no major threats that could cause the species to decline. Although they are persecuted locally for killing poultry. There are roads connecting settlements in the Sahel region of Niger and Chad, and the species is often a victim of road traffic. Oil and gas drilling and related disturbances may become local threats in the future.

Listed in the 2012 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, ver 3.1 - Least Concern (LC).

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The gray fox is distributed in the African countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Mali, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Sudan.
Gray foxes usually inhabit very dry sandy and stony-margined deserts and semi-deserts of the Sahara, but their range extends to some extent southwards to the Guinean savannah region. Therefore, they live in an unstable and fluctuating ecological zone between the desert area and the Guinean savannah, and their distribution is very wide. Gray foxes also appear in areas close to human settlements and cultivated land, where food is more readily available than in natural habitats.

The grey fox is 38-45 cm long and weighs 2-3.6 kg. It has a slender, low body and relatively short limbs; a narrow snout, long ears with slightly rounded tips, which appear large relative to its body and thin legs; a long beard; a thickly furred tail that is at least half the length of its body, and in most cases nearly as long; a reddish-brown tail with black fur at the tip and black spots above the tail, indicating the presence of scent glands; the fur on the upper body is gray and light yellow, and the fur on the lower body is pale yellowish-white. The eyes are surrounded by a dark black ring. In strong light at night, the pupils appear oval-shaped and shiny. Its pale, sandy fur blends in with its desert habitat.