What Does the Fox Say? The Viral Music Video Isn’t Totally Wrong

Prepare yourself: The latest viral music hit has arrived. It’s called “The Fox,” a hilarious and maddeningly infectious song by Ylvis, a pair of Norwegian variety show brothers. The video, which involves people dressed up as animals dancing around in the woods while Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker croon ”dog goes woof/ cat goes meow/ bird goes tweet/ mouse goes squeak,” has acquired nearly 3 million hits on YouTube in three days. If you’ve already seen “The Fox,” it’s probably left you with plenty of questions of your own. Like, “Why am I still hopelessly stuck on the insanely catchy clutches of a song about animal noises?” and “Should I be reevaluating my own understanding of animal noises? Do elephants really go … “toot”? And of course, the most important question of all: “Wait, seriously, what sound does a fox make?”

The song proposes a number of different possible fox vocalizations:

– “Gering-ding-ding-ding-ringerdingering”
– “Wa-po-po-po-po-po-pow”
– “Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho”
– “Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff”
– “Chacha-chacha-chacha-chow”
– “Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow”
– “A-hee-ahee ha-hee”
– “A-oo-oo-oo-ooo”

Yes, they’re funny — spit-take funny, even, especially when they drop right when you’re expecting a big musical breakdown (and “sung” by a Santa type telling his grandson a bedtime story), but could they actually be accurate? While Popular Science has already consulted with some experts, we went digging and found some field recordings from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, an audio archive that contains over 9,000 different species, which may definitively answer the question that burns at the heart of the Ylvis song (at least for a few varieties of fox).

While we were tragically unable find any evidence of foxes with the ability to funky scat, like the CGI fox that appears at the finale of the song, it turns out the “The Fox” may actually be more on-point than its mindblowingly shrill breakdowns suggest.

Consider the red fox, a.k.a. vulpes vulpes. This Ontario red fox, recorded by William W. H. Gunn in 1966, is clearly employing a low-key version of Chacha-chacha-chacha-chow: