By 2012, I had already learned quite a bit about the behavior of these gray foxes. I had also expanded my range from down in Fox Hollow, to along the back fence of the water treatment plant, and over to the sand filter on the edge of Embarcadero Road. In that small patch of riparian habitat, I saw how the young foxes were being “taught.” I came to call it The School. There, I saw, both live and on video, how they played, wrestled, climbed, and used a pair of Levis cut off at the knees as both bedding material and a “toy.” One of the young foxes played with those shorts, tossing them, catching them, and shaking them as if he were killing his prey. One of the pups used those pants to take a nap on them in the middle of the night. There, I learned that those gray foxes weren’t driven solely by the need to find food. Even the adults spent significant blocks of time playing with and tending to their pups. It was also a time when my curiosity about these amazing gray foxes began to expand in several ways.

Years earlier, I had heard of the mirror test, which might give me a glimpse into these foxes' minds. If an animal recognizes itself in the mirror, that’s a good indication that they know that they exist as an individual. I thought, “If I set up a mirror and put a couple of trail cameras on it, I could see and record how they respond. Do these foxes have a sense of self?” I decided to set up the mirror on the water treatment plant’s sand filter, an expanse of sand about 30 feet wide and maybe 60 feet in length. For the first test, I decided to mount it just outside the Gray Fox School. That was where the foxes often came up from the brush and onto the filter.

One evening I set it up at about a 45-degree angle to the brushline. I waited. I called, and no sooner had I done so than one of the adults emerged from the brush. Cautiously, slowly, he emerged, his focus on the mirror, this new thing in his environment, something that he’d never before seen. He walked up to it, and the instant – and I do mean the instant – he saw his reflection, he dashed across the sand filter. He stopped, stood for upward of a minute, then walked back toward the mirror. He didn’t walk in front of it; he passed behind it and went down the slope into the brush. I wondered what might be going through that fox’s mind. I decided to wait to see if any of the other foxes would show. I called again, and this time two pups, maybe six months old, came from the brush. They, too, were curious about this thing in their neighborhood. One of them walked right up to the mirror. He moved sideways. The image moved. This startled him, but he did not give up. He pawed at the image, then he did the most remarkable thing I’d ever seen a fox do to date. He walked around behind the mirror, stopped, put his paws on the top edge, and tried to look over and into it. He almost made it, but dropped to the ground and came around to the front again. When he saw himself in the mirror, he must have thought another fox was on the other side.

By then, two other pups of the same age came up from the brush. They too looked into the mirror. They walked behind it, and when they came back around to look at the fox in the mirror, they put their paws on top of the mirror’s frame and toppled it onto the sand. They walked on the mirror, looking down at themselves, but from all indications they didn’t seem to realize that they were looking at themselves. I put the mirror under the tree canopy, back under the gray fox school, and set up a camera facing it. That night the pups had fun with the mirror. Some were highly cautious, but others pushed and pushed until it toppled to the ground. They spent much of the night walking across it and hitting it with their paws,
supposedly trying to get that fox in the mirror to respond. Their activity with the mirror brought some of the adults into the camera’s view, but they didn’t stay long. All-in-all it was instructive to see what these gray foxes did with the mirror. This was the first in a series of encounters with these gray foxes’ minds. This suggests that gray foxes do not have a sense of self- identity as we and other animals such as dolphins, elephants, and the great apes do. They may also have been confused because they had no concept of a mirror.

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