Arkansas’s 234 red fox records concentrate in the northwest, through Sebastian, Washington, Baxter, and Benton counties, with a scatter east across the state. The red fox is an edge and open-country canid, at home in pasture, cropland, and the weedy margins where field meets woods, and it shares the state with the woodland-loving gray fox.
An opportunist with a wide menu
Mice and voles make up the core of its diet, taken with the famous high pouncing leap, but a red fox will eat rabbits, birds, insects, berries, and persimmons as the seasons offer. That flexibility lets it live close to people without depending on them, denning in ground burrows under sheds, banks, and field edges as readily as in wild country. Records touch Hot Springs National Park, Lake Chicot State Park, and Withrow Springs State Park, but most come from the working landscape between.
Winter pairs, spring pups
Breeding begins in midwinter, and pups are born in March or April, which suits the state’s record: reports crest in April, when fox families appear at den mouths, and again in December, when pairs form and the year’s young finish dispersing to territories of their own.
Status in Arkansas
NatureServe ranks the red fox S4, Apparently Secure, in Arkansas, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
