What Was The Diet of the British Mountain Fox?

 

I would GUESS that a pair of Old British foxes would look after young until dispersal but that sort of thing was never noted in anything other than New foxes.

Prey would have been the usual: mountain hares have been present in the UK for a very long time and in Devon and the Thames Valley areas bones were found and dated as between 114,000 and 131,000 years old.

Mountain Hare (c) By H. Zell - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8448452

Brown hares (Lepus europaeus) it is thought were likely introduced to the UK in the Iron Age or Roman times. However, it would be impossible to tell for sure since we know that trade ships from many countries visited the UK regularly and while exotic animals given as gifts such as domesticated North African wild cats and even "Barbary apes", there is no reason why hare or even rabbits might not have been traded.

Brown hare (c) the Mammal Society

Officially (which means that no one knows for sure but some academic decided "this is when" and so it was accepted for convenience) rabbits were not introduced to the UK until after the Norman Conquest in the 12th century. However, very few people know that rabbits were brought here during the Iron Age after the Roman conquest (AD 43-84) which means that rather than 1000+ years rabbits have been in the UK for 2000+ years (again, excluding the possibility of rabbits being brought over before the Romans as trade animals -easy to keep, feed and breeding meant they were a handy food source.

The earliest records show that the western European house mouse was present during the late Bronze Age and would have arrived here via trading ships from Europe which were common.

©Black Rat - British Wildlife Centre

Brown rat © Heiko Kiera/Shutterstock.com

I have little doubt that rats may have also made in to the UK before the official dates; the Black rat supposedly reached Britain (again) on trade ships in Roman times, having spread originally from India. They flourished until the introduction of brown rats in the 1700s which gradually displaced them and numbers declined.

Red squirrel (c) By Peter Trimming - https://www.flickr.com/photos/peter-trimming/6583159839/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29980115

Added to the diet list of the Old fox were squirrels and I have no doubt birds of various sizes since New foxes take seagulls (if lucky) and definitely pigeons. Ducks, geese, etc. etc. etc.. and then there were the usual reptiles and amphibians and wild fruit, etc..

This means that the diet of the Old foxes was a varied diet -we know coastal foxes with scour beaches for fish washed up and crabs. Foxes will also actively "fish" in ponds and streams.

Fox with a fish (c)Arko Vision

Anything edible in swamps, marshland, forests and woodland, hills and mountain areas. If it could chase and catch it then it was food and the Mountain fox was not also known as the "Greyhound fox" for nothing.

We can guess a lot about their diets