Food habits of gray wolves and foxes in a grassland-forest ecotone of the western Daxing'anling Mountains, China

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This study was conducted on the food habits of gray wolves (Canis lupus) and two species of fox, red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and corsac fox (V.corsac), in a grassland-forest ecotone of the western Daxing'anling Mountains, northern Inner Mongolia. We analyzed 298 scats for wolves and 70 scats for foxes between 1999 and 2002. During the first two years of the study, roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and domestic sheep (Ovis aries) occurred in more than 50% of the scats gathered. However, roe deer increased to 85.2% in September 2002, while sheep decreased to 27.2%. Those changes might have been caused by a newly launched conservation policy of the Chinese government that has prohibited the hunting of wildlife, including ungulates and wolves, and removed livestock out of forested areas. Cattle occurred at 23.3% in frequency during the first year, but in the other years it decreased to several percents or none. Since cattle are likely too large for wolves to kill, wolves may have scavenged on the carcasses of the many that died of hunger and/or illness during the hard winter of 1998-99. Although wild boar (Sus scrofa) were common in the study area, they occurred at low frequencies in the scats. In contrast, fox scat contained mostly rodents (68.6%) and insects (65.7%), showing a clear difference in food habits from wolves.
野生生物保護学会の論文