Perfect Entry

A Red Fox performs his classic mousing jump.  Recent research suggests that red fox use not only their acute hearing to pinpoint their prey’s exact location under the snow, but that they also employ the Earth’s magnetic field as a rangefinder to plot their trajectory.  Jaroslav Červený and others studied about 600 mousing jumps over 2 years, and found that Red Fox mousing jumps (where a Fox jumps and drives its paws and face into the snow to capture prey) are most effective when the fox faces northeast while jumping, specifically 20 degrees from magnetic north. The success rate when facing northeast is a stunning 73 percent; while the exact opposite direction yielded a 60 percent kill rate, and all other directions were at about 18 percent.