A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words 1469 entries

kit fox

KIT FOKS
The kit fox is the smallest fox in North America, weighing around five pounds, with very large ears, a slender build, and a long bushy black-tipped tail. It lives in the deserts and dry basins of the Southwest and northern Mexico, hunts kangaroo rats and insects at night, and digs extensive dens with several entrances that it moves between. It rarely needs to drink, taking its water from prey.
Etymology
Kit is the ordinary English word for the young of a fox, a shortening of kitten, and the animal is named for looking permanently like a cub: small, big-eared, and lightly built. The closely related swift fox of the plains carries a different kind of name, describing what it does rather than what it resembles, and the two interbreed where their ranges meet in New Mexico and Texas.
Notes
The ears do the same work they do on a fennec, radiating heat and locating prey moving under sand, and the two animals are a good example of unrelated desert foxes arriving at the same design on opposite sides of the world.
animals desert grassland tracking
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