Wait, What Does the Fox Say?

Over the weekend, my girlfriend sat me down in front of her laptop and said, “Watch this.” Because we are the least with-it millenials around, she’d only just discovered the already-viral-for-a-few-weeks video for “The Fox,” by a pair of Norwegian brothers that call themselves Ylvis. If you’re even less hip than us, you can watch the video now.

The central premise of the song is that, while most everyone learns early on that “dog goes woof/cat goes meow” and so on, Ylvis and a whole lot of other people have no idea what kind of sounds foxes make. When the video was over, I so badly wanted to push up my glasses and say, “Well, duh, everyone knows that foxes vocalize with…”

But I had nothing. I didn’t know what the fox said!

Fortunately, some people do, and they’ve recorded foxes making those sounds. Wired points us to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library, which catalogs audio and video of thousands of species.

So, what does the fox say? Like other animals, foxes have a lot of different calls that they use for different situations.

There’s this:

And this:

And then there’s this:

Also, all these:

...none of which roll off the tongue as easily as “Gering-ding-ding-ding-ringerdingering.”