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Red Foxes Were Strongly Nocturnal and Detected Less Often Where Pedestrians Were Active

Red fox in a willow thicket near Olecko, Poland
Research · Ecology

Red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) in Poland’s Tuchola Forest were strongly nocturnal and were recorded less often where pedestrian activity was higher, especially during the night. A camera-trap study published in Diversity and Distributions on 28 August 2026 examined how recolonising wolves and several medium-sized carnivores shared a heavily used forest landscape across two spatial scales.

Researchers used 48 camera traps during a 105-day survey from 19 August to 1 December 2022, producing 4,350 camera-trap nights. The focal carnivores were grey wolves, red foxes, European badgers and martens. Human activity was by far the most frequently recorded category, accounting for 66% of detections, while red foxes accounted for 20%.

The carnivores differed strongly in when they used the landscape. Humans were mainly active during the day, whereas foxes, badgers and martens were predominantly nocturnal. Wolves were the most daytime-active of the carnivores but still shifted their activity away from the main peaks in human presence.

Foxes avoided pedestrian-heavy sites most strongly at night

For red foxes, nighttime activity was strong at both the broader and finer spatial scales. At the broader scale, fox detections were negatively associated with pedestrians, and this relationship was strongest at night. Their association with vehicles was much weaker. Fox detections were also negatively associated with red deer, while at the finer scale foxes, badgers and martens were positively associated with free-ranging domestic cats.

The authors do not interpret the foxes’ nocturnality as something created by local human activity. Red foxes are already strongly nocturnal even in less disturbed landscapes. Instead, their existing nighttime activity may reduce overlap with the busiest human periods, while less predictable encounters with pedestrians can still influence where they use the forest during those hours.

Coexistence depended more on timing than separate spaces

Across the carnivore community, the study found little evidence that wolves or humans forced the medium-sized carnivores into strict spatial separation. After the measured environmental and human factors were accounted for, the remaining tendency of the wild carnivores to occur together or apart was generally weak. The authors therefore argue that coexistence in this human-dominated forest depended more on fine-scale differences in timing and flexible use of shared space than on each species occupying a separate part of the landscape.

Sources and image credit

  1. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Human? Multi-Scale Niche Partitioning Among Wolves and Mesocarnivores in a Human-Dominated LandscapeOpen-access Diversity and Distributions study first published 28 August 2026. Forty-eight camera traps in Tuchola Forest, northern Poland, produced 4,350 camera-trap nights. Red foxes were strongly nocturnal and detections were negatively associated with pedestrians, especially at night; the wider carnivore community showed little evidence of strict spatial segregation.

Image: Red fox in a willow thicket near Olecko, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, Poland, photographed on 6 April 2019. Photo: Artur Sienkiewicz ’85. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Representative image; not an animal from the Tuchola Forest study. · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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