Foxes are omnivores whose diet centers on small rodents — mice and voles above all — rounded out with rabbits, birds and their eggs, insects, earthworms, carrion, and a genuinely large helping of fruit and berries in season. A typical red fox needs roughly a pound of food a day, hunts alone, and famously buries (caches) whatever it cannot finish for later. Urban foxes add scavenged human food to the menu, and rural ones will absolutely raid an unsecured chicken coop, but the everyday business of being a fox is mousing in a field at dawn.
North America has two widespread foxes — the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and the gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) — plus regional specialists like the kit, swift, and Arctic foxes. Their menus overlap heavily, with the gray fox leaning a bit more on fruit and the red fox a bit more on rodents. This guide covers what foxes actually eat through the year, how their remarkable hunting style works, what changes for city foxes, and where deer fit into the picture — a smaller role than many people assume, but a real one.
The Heart of the Fox Diet: Mice, Voles, and Rabbits
Every serious diet study of red foxes lands in the same place: small rodents are the staple. Meadow voles, deer mice, and cotton rats are available year-round, in every habitat foxes use, and are just the right size for a predator that weighs eight to fifteen pounds. Cottontail rabbits are the biggest routine prey item and matter most in winter, when a single catch can feed a fox for a day or two. Squirrels, chipmunks, shrews, and moles round out the mammal column — though foxes often cache shrews and moles rather than eat them fresh, apparently finding them distasteful.
The red fox’s hunting technique is one of nature’s great showpieces: the mousing pounce. A fox stands stone-still, triangulating a rodent by sound — its hearing is sharp enough to place a vole rustling under grass or snow — then leaps high and dives front-paws-first onto prey it never actually saw. Foxes hunting in snow appear to align many of those leaps roughly north-south, and researchers have seriously proposed they use the Earth’s magnetic field as a targeting aid. Either way, the pounce is deadly: a good mousing session can net a dozen rodents, most of which get cached.
Birds, Eggs, Reptiles, and Invertebrates
Foxes take ground-nesting birds and their eggs wherever they can find them — which is why they loom large in the nightmares of duck, turkey, and quail managers — along with songbirds caught unaware and, notoriously, backyard chickens. Eggs are frequently carried off whole and buried for later. Reptiles and amphibians fill in where seasons allow, and invertebrates are a bigger deal than most people expect: beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, and especially earthworms, which urban red foxes in some studies pull from dewy lawns by the hundreds on damp nights.
The Senses Behind the Menu
What a fox eats is dictated by what a fox can detect, and its sensory kit is superb in specific directions. Hearing leads: a red fox can pick up the low-frequency rustle and gnaw of rodents at remarkable distance, and can pinpoint sounds beneath a foot or more of snow or soil accurately enough to dig or dive straight onto an unseen animal. Smell runs a close second, guiding foxes to buried caches, carrion, ground nests full of eggs, and the earthworms that surface on mild damp nights. Vision is tuned for movement and low light — a fox notices a twitching vole tail across a field at dusk but can walk past a motionless rabbit at thirty feet. This sensory profile explains the diet’s shape: abundant small prey that makes noise and smells strongly gets eaten constantly; alert, fast, or well-hidden larger prey mostly gets left alone.
Fruit, Berries, and the Vegetarian Side of the Fox
From midsummer into fall, plant foods can climb to a third or more of what a fox eats. Blackberries, raspberries, wild cherries, persimmons, apples, grapes, and rose hips all feature heavily, and gray foxes in particular are dedicated fruit-eaters — they will climb trees to get it, a trick no other North American canid can manage. The fox’s scientific reputation as a “vulpine omnivore” is well earned; the fable about the fox and the grapes was at least botanically plausible.
What Foxes Eat Season by Season
| Season | Mainstays | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Winter | Voles and mice under snow, rabbits, carrion | Deer and other carcasses matter most now; caches get raided |
| Spring | Rodents, ground-nesting birds and eggs, worms | Parents provision kits heavily; poultry raids peak |
| Summer | Rodents, insects, worms, early berries | Kits learn to hunt; invertebrates can dominate scats |
| Fall | Fruit, mast, rodents, grasshoppers | Fruit can rival rodents by volume; heavy caching for winter |
Do Foxes Eat Deer?
Mostly only when something else has done the hard work. An adult deer outweighs a red fox by ten to twenty times, so predation on healthy deer is simply off the menu — but deer carrion is a genuine winter staple for foxes across the northern states and Canada, whether the deer died of winter kill, vehicles, or larger predators. Very young fawns in their first days are occasionally taken where foxes are dense and fawns are small, though study after study shows coyotes and bobcats are the fawn predators that matter, with foxes a footnote. We cover this question in detail in do foxes eat deer, and you can see where foxes rank among the full cast of deer predators in what eats deer.
It is worth noting how modest a fox’s needs are compared with the predators it gets lumped with. A whole red fox family — two adults and four kits — runs through less food in a week than a single wolf, which is why a few suburban blocks of voles, rabbits, and fallen fruit can quietly support a den that nobody knows is there until the kits start playing on the lawn at dusk.
Caching: Why Foxes Bury Their Food
Foxes are compulsive savers. Surplus kills get carried to scattered locations, buried a few inches down, tamped with the nose, and disguised with leaves — a strategy called scatter caching that beats putting every egg in one larder, since a raiding raccoon or coyote can only find one stash at a time. Foxes relocate caches they suspect were observed, and they remember dozens of sites with impressive accuracy. Much of the poultry-raid outrage — a fox killing several chickens but carrying off one — is caching instinct: given time, a fox will return trip after trip to bury every bird for leaner nights ahead.
What Urban Foxes Eat
City and suburban foxes still do most of their shopping in the rodent aisle — urban environments are full of mice, rats, and rabbits — but they supplement enthusiastically with what people leave out: garbage, compost, pet food on porches, spilled birdseed, and handouts. Deliberate feeding does foxes no favors; it builds bold animals, concentrates disease like sarcoptic mange, and usually ends badly for the fox. If foxes visit your yard, the right move is to enjoy the mousing show and secure the attractants, not to set out food. And despite the internet’s worries, urban foxes and cats mostly ignore each other — a topic we take on directly in the pet-safety context of the coyote comparison below and in our companion guide on what coyotes eat, since the coyote is the yard visitor that actually warrants pet caution.
Red Fox vs Gray Fox: Same Menu, Different Emphasis
North America’s two common foxes eat from the same list but weight it differently. The red fox is the more dedicated mouser, built for open fields and edges where voles concentrate, and it takes more rabbits and ground birds. The gray fox leans harder on fruit, insects, and woodland prey like woodrats and squirrels — and its tree-climbing opens menus no other canid touches: bird nests well off the ground, grapes on the vine, persimmons at the branch tip. Desert kit foxes and prairie swift foxes, the little cousins, run almost entirely on kangaroo rats, ground squirrels, and insects. The pattern across all of them is the same flexible template scaled to local supply, which is exactly why foxes of one kind or another occupy nearly every landscape on the continent.
What Eats Foxes? The Other Side of the Menu
Foxes sit in the middle of the food web, and what they eat is shaped by what eats them. Coyotes are the big one: they kill foxes as competitors wherever the two overlap, and red foxes respond by hunting the edges of coyote territories and denning close to farms and houses, effectively using people as a shield. Bobcats, golden eagles, and great horned owls take foxes too — the owls mainly kits — and in the North, wolves and lynx add to the list. This pressure explains a lot of fox behavior that puzzles homeowners: why a vixen raises kits under a porch (safety from coyotes), why foxes cache in many scattered spots rather than one larder (insurance against raiders), and why a fox mousing your lawn at dawn keeps checking over its shoulder. The fox is a predator, but it never stops being prey.
Do foxes eat cats or small dogs?
Almost never. Adult cats are close to a fox’s own weight, well-armed, and simply not worth the risk, and dogs are not prey at all — confirmed fox predation on healthy adult cats is vanishingly rare, though tiny kittens left outdoors could be vulnerable. The night predator that genuinely threatens small pets is the coyote, not the fox.
What should I feed a wild fox?
Nothing. Feeding wild foxes habituates them to people, draws them onto roads and into yards where they are not welcome, and can concentrate animals enough to spread mange and other disease. A fox that has learned to approach humans for food is a fox headed for trouble. If you want foxes around, keep a wild corner of the yard and let the voles do the feeding.
How much does a fox eat in a day?
A red fox needs roughly a pound of food per day — call it half a dozen voles, or a rabbit every couple of days — though intake swings widely with season and luck. Whatever exceeds the day’s needs gets cached rather than abandoned, so a fox’s true daily catch often runs well beyond what it eats.
Do foxes hunt during the day?
Foxes are mainly crepuscular and nocturnal, hunting hardest around dawn and dusk, but daytime sightings are normal — especially in winter when food is tight, and in spring when parents hunt around the clock to feed kits. A fox mousing in a meadow at 10 a.m. is not sick; watch for staggering, mangy skin, or fearlessness before worrying.
