A few weeks ago, I posted this about the fox family that has moved into a culvert running next to my garden. I was unable to get decent photos of them.
My family loves me more than I deserve. They bought me an early birthday present: a nice new camera. Now I can bring you many lovely pictures of baby foxes!
There are four kits and two adults. They are adorable and messy, and I am sure there will be many happy tails to tell, even as they make a complete hash of my garden and leave disgusting dead things about for me to find.
The entire family made a Prime Directive Pact of noninterference with regard to our foxy neighbors. This pact lasted about a week. My parents came for a visit, and the next thing I know, they are tossing the foxes prime rib.
My garden is their playground. Everything in it is a chew toy. Here they took off with a flat of cucumber seedlings and dumped them in the driveway.
I wondered why my watering can was leaking. I turned it around, and it is completely covered with bite marks, as you see.
Today I went to the store and bought chew toys and rawhide bones in hopes the teething kits will take to something tastier and more desirable than every item in my garden.
I cannot get angry at my beautiful neighbors. They are just too cute.
You don’t need to be a mother to love this face.
They have very little fear, and I can be among them for an hour or more, at distances of as close as ten feet. They can be a tad nervous, but if I am careful, I can get as many shots of them as I want. I talk to them and they get so comfortable, they go about their kit hunting business.
Then there is a bout of delicious scratching.
Lazing about in a patch of sun.
I am just such a handsome creature, you cannot resist my charms.
Even when I drop the remains of the rabbit I just ate in your driveway. Nothing left but the fuzzy ass!
I am irresistible. I am a total fox.
Foxes have a sweet tooth. You can throw them jelly sandwiches. Also, if there is a local hunt club, they may be willing to trap them, give them their rabies shots, and then let ‘em go for you. I am told that the Maryland and Virginia hunt clubs used to do this for free, just in the interests of preserving the animals, which are non-native.
I’m not sure I understand you. Red Foxes are native to the USA. They are not even remotely endangered.
http://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/red_fox.html
And I am aware of fox hunting, there is a club not five minutes from my home. Rita Mae Brown has been known to ride with this club.
http://www.ritamaebrown.com/content/about_interview.asp
And yes, we know foxes have a sweet tooth which is why we must beware of the foxes, the little foxes, for they spoil the vines and our vines have tender grapes.
They also love Starbucks.
I really don’t intend to go to the trouble of hunting them down and scaring the crap out of them to get shots. I think we’ll let nature take its course. However, if we do change our minds, I think the better option would be to call animal control. I really don’t want a hunt club tearing up my land.
You may be thinking foxes are rare because you have heard of the grey fox? It is rare. We also have those on our land. They are huge.
But red foxes are very common and considered by many to be a pest. I don’t think any of the local vintners would appreciate knowing we harbor a family of them!
No, of course they’re not endangered, but they can carry rabies. Dunno where I got the non-native bit from, since a quick check tells me they’ve been in North America since certain periods of glaciation… anyhoo, my references to the hunts comes from Rita Mae Brown, and the nice wildlife eradication guy who got all the raccoons and flying squirrels out of my attic told me about the jelly sandwiches. We had a vixen living down at the bottom of our gorge, she’d bring her kits up to the back of the property every now and again. Haven’t seen them in a while.
Yeah, we know about the rabies, but I am not sure how realistic it is to just go about capturing and releasing animals that might get rabies. That would be, Oh, I dunno, everything in our yard. Including the bats in the attic. Skunks and raccoons used to live in that culvert before the foxes, and they carry rabies, too.
Foxes have a short life expectancy in the wild, the vaccine would wear off in no time, and by then they’d have moved out.
A hunt on this property would be completely untenable. We only have four acres of land that isn’t heavily wooded.
If I get bit and end up having to go to hospital, I will grumble.
To be frank, I’m more worried about getting pinworm, since the foxes dig in my garden and so do I.
Did not know what pinworm was, so I looked it up. Kinda sorry I did, thanks Colleen.
Sorry, dude. Sad reality of country living!
There’s goop in the animal poop.
And the animal poop is everywhere.