Foxes caching behaviour?

Question

My friend's mum recently had all five of her chickens killed by what could only seemingly have been a fox.

She couldn't understand how the birds had ended up an a fairly neat pile in the corner of the run.

I'd heard of foxes killing all the prey it can at one time and then burying it for later,which I have discovered is called caching.

has the fox made a little pile to see what's what before removing them to bury?

(It was either disturbed or couldn't get the chickens out of the pen through the hole it entered by).

Is this common behaviour? and would anyone know of a site which documents this type of behaviour please?

I've looked around and only found general references to caching .

Thanks.

Answer 1

Red Foxes cache food and tend to Scatter Cache, rather than Larder Cache, uneaten food.   Caching is a behavior often observed during periods of high food abundance and, in some species, can be associated with a phenomenon called “Surplus Killing”.   Surplus killing, as the name suggests, is the practice of killing more than you can obviously consume at the time – a good example of this is the damage a fox can do in a chicken pen.   If a fox gets into a chicken pen, it will frequently kill all accessible fowl, and appear to leave them lying around – part of the reason many livestock holders despise foxes.   There have been several theories put forward to explain why foxes do this.   One of the most often cited ideas is that the fox stumbles across a bountiful food source -- in the wild predators rarely know where the next meal is coming from -- and it decides to best exploit this reserve.   As such, the fox kills all the chickens and then begins the task of removing and burying them.   The fox can only carry one chicken at a time, making the caching process slow.   In many cases, the farmer comes out to investigate the commotion before the fox has had chance to clear the hen house.   Surplus Killing -- which is known from a wide variety of carnivores -- is a branch of so-called "Pathological Killing", resulting from the predator being unsure how to react to prey that do not (or cannot) run away.