Whilst in Tanoumah in October Phil Roberts and I set up Phil’s trail camera and left it overnight to see if we could photograph anything interesting. We were hoping for Indian Porcupine or something rare but only managed a couple of Arabian Red Foxes Vulpes vulpes. One was taken in the daylight and shows and animal with its winter coat, as the temperature was only 22 degrees Celsius much cooler tha the 34 degrees Celsius we left behind in Dhahran where we live. I have not seen Arabian Red Fox in the southwest although we did get photos on a camera trap left overnight near Abha this spring. The Red Fox is currently regarded as a single species and has the widest natural distribution of any terrestrial carnivore, possibly any terrestrial mammal in the world. Its range spans approximately 70 million square kilometres encompassing much of Europe, Asia and North America and extending into North Africa, with an introduced population in Australia. The Red Fox occupies a wide variety of ecosystems, including forests, grasslands, deserts and agricultural and human-dominated environments. They are certainly very different to the Red Fox we get in the United Kingdom of which I am familiar, being much smaller and a very different colour. They also have much bigger ears and more fur between their toes, all things adapted for living in the hot desert conditions.
