Blanfords Fox (Vulpes cana), En Gedi, Israel. This was one of the first photographs of this elusive and rare species of fox in the wild. A tripod mounted camera with five slaved strobes was left overnight. Natural bait (in this case a praying mantis) and frozen chicken chicks were used to lure the fox to the camera set. The fox photographed itself by interrupting an infra-red triggering device. The fox is ear-tagged, part of a Ph.D study to determine the biology of this animal, one of the rarest of all canids.


-- Steve Kaufman (skphoto@xyz.net), February 27, 1999

Answers

Wow, caught in the act.... I'll bet this looks great when it is large enough to get a good view of the mantid. Do you have a link to a larger scan? Does the *hand of man* rule apply to ear tags?

-- Jeff Kelley (thocker@ix.netcom.com), February 27, 1999.

Really nice and waht a great Ph.D. project!!! If you'd print this yourself you should dodge a bit from the top rock to bring out more detail (it is slightly washed out due to the flash, but I bet with some dodging you could bring back the detail). If this rock had the same tonality as the other rocks, your fox would stand out even better!

-- Andreas Carl (andreas@physio.unr.edu), February 27, 1999.

This is a great shot of the fox no matter how it was taken, and the story makes it all the more intriguing.

I'm curious about something though: what's keeping the mantis there right where the camera is aimed? Is it perhaps a plastic mantis or some other sort of mantis stand-in? The reflections off the mantis make it look un-natural to me, but maybe that's just my imagination.

-- John Sullivan (sullivan@spies.com), March 01, 1999.

I wondered when someone would ask about how the mantis stayed in position. It is a real insect, and it was alive. I captured fresh bait for each night's sessions; from scat analysis, the biologist knew that the foxes only ate invertebrates (except for the chicken chicks he gave them for bait to lure them to his study traps).

Now, have you ever tried to figure out how you could get a live invertebrate (I used a number of species of insects, and several scorpions) to stay in place for a few hours? After some brainstorming, we came up with a solution. Superglue. It kept the bait in place (and if it wasn't alive, the fox wouldn't take it).

The real problem was in trying to determine where the fox would come from, so that I got photos of the head end, and not just the tail. We found that they often came up or down near vertical rock walls to enter our set. We attempted to put the set under overhanging rocks, and put other rocks around, blocking all but the entrance to the set, but many photos still only had fox tails, or a foot, or some other body part. All in all, it was a fun project, and turned out fairly successfully.

-- Steve Kaufman (skphoto@xyz.net), March 01, 1999.