Hi everyone,
Today I’d like to tell you a little about one of the photos in my new collection. The image shows an Ezo red fox, known in Japanese as ezo-kitsune. I took the photograph a few winters ago during a trip to the beautiful Shiretoko Peninsula in far eastern Hokkaido.
Red foxes are found across a vast area of the Northern Hemisphere, from Europe and Russia to northern Asia and Japan. The foxes that live on mainland Japan are red foxes, but the population in Hokkaido belongs to a separate subspecies known as Vulpes vulpes schrencki. In English, this subspecies is commonly called the Ezo red fox.
The word Ezo is actually an old name for Hokkaido. Because of this, many animals and birds from the island have the Ezo prefix in their name to distinguish them from similar species found on the Japanese mainland.
Ezo red foxes are well adapted to Hokkaido’s harsh winters. During the cold months they grow thick winter fur that helps them stay warm in the snow and strong northern winds.
The fox in this photo was sheltering at the bottom of a snow bank, tucked down out of the bitter Arctic wind that was blowing across the open landscape. Another fox was resting only a few metres away, and I suspect the two of them were probably a pair. I spent a couple of hours quietly watching them from a distance, and for most of that time they simply slept, curled up tightly against the cold. Every now and then a car would pass along the nearby road, and whenever that happened the foxes would quickly stand up and move towards it, perhaps hoping to find scraps of food or beg from passing drivers.
The foxes got used to me being there after a while, and I was able to lie down on the ground just a few metres away from them to get this low angle shot. I hope you like it. If you’d like to see more images of Japanese nature, please take a look at the galleries section of the site.
If you are interested in learning more about the differences between wildlife in Hokkaido and mainland Japan, the story of Blakiston’s Line is a fascinating place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blakiston%27s_Line
