Heading up the stairs for my first cup of coffee in mid-April, I happened to catch an unusual sight in the garden … not the neighbors cat, or the occasional skunk or raccoon, but a fox, complete with bushy tail and pointy face! This was a rare treat!
There he was, prancing around the garden like he owned the place, not bothered by me peering at him through the window.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we got to know not only Mr. Fox, but also Mrs. Fox. They seemed perfectly happy to bask in the sun in the garden, and had evidently taken up residence under the deck – they disappeared down through a tiny hole (a ‘fox hole’, I guess!) into the large space below. They would often be seen late at night, returning from hunting adventures.
It became my daily treat to watch them. I did wonder what might happen if I went down to the garden to water it … whether they would become territorial and chew my legs off … but what the heck, I was enjoying this too much to worry about minor details like that! I figured that if I called the local animal control folks, they’d setup cages, trap them, then put them to sleep – so I decided to just go with the flow for a while and let nature take its course!
Then came … the babies!
In total, I counted SIX furry little balls, though for some reason there were often only five at any one time.
A regular pattern set in; the deck would be silent, not a hair in sight. Then the babies would get anxious or hungry, and start lining up, waiting for the return of the mother. They lined up along some imaginary line beyond which they were trained not to pass. The mother would return, often with a snake, a squirrel, or a bird in her mouth, and feed the babies. Then the babies would play around, chasing each other, fighting each other, having the best time in the world, then all of a sudden, they would all disappear down the fox hole and not be seen again for several hours.
I decided I needed a camera with a good zoom lens, so spent over $1,000 on a Canon Digital SLR and an 18-250mm zoom lens (giving me an effective 350mm zoom due to the magnification factor of the D-SLR sensor). I figured with a 350mm lens I could capture the babies as they grew! We all need excuses to spend money … this was mine!
Over the next few weeks, the babies were a constant factor every day, running around in the garden, flocking to the mother as soon as she returned. The baby here (May 30th) has a rounded face, and dark fur, compared to the parents. This changed dramatically over the course of just a few weeks.
The father disappeared somewhere along the way; not sure if that’s the nature of the fox family structure, or whether perhaps he was trapped, killed by predators, or otherwise killed.
Feeding time – the mother was attacked by the babies as soon as she returned, all of them squeezing underneath, fighting each other for space while the mother patiently waited for them to finish. This lasted for several minutes, and happened a few times a day. Looks painful to me!
After feeding, the mother would hang around for a short time, then disappear – presumably to find more food for herself and the family. The babies would frolic in the garden, play-fighting with each other, chasing each other, rolling in the grass, and so on. But they never went beyond the boundary of the garden – it was as if there was an invisible fence in their mind. After a few weeks, however, they started to go outside the fence, but still never far away.
Here’s a couple of shots of playful foxes, taken with the new 350mm lens:
This one a few days later …
Here’s the mother, checking out the garden (June 17). With the babies getting larger and larger, and their color and facial shape becoming more and more adult, it was harder to tell them apart, but – the mother was still quite a bit bigger, and the tail of the mother is still a lot fuller.
This is one of the last pictures of the babies, taken June 22 – about 2 months since the first appearance of the parents (April 13), and a month after the first appearance of the babies (May 26).
Compare the facial structure and fur color of these babies now to how they were just two or three weeks ago.
Over the course of the next several weeks, the number of babies gradually dropped, with only two babies left after a few weeks. The only reason I could imagine for this is that they are getting picked off by predators – birds, probably. But maybe … just maybe … they rapidly achieve self-sufficiency and go off on their own.
They still continued to feed on the mother, even as they grew. Note the bird lying on the ground, in the foreground … looks like they are transitioning to solid food! At different times, we saw the mother bring snakes, birds, and squirrels.
Several weeks later (July 3rd to be precise), I caught this shot – the first sighting in over a week. A pair of the ‘babies’ returned for one last visit. Perhaps remembering that this was a safe place to hang out for a while…
Click here for a Windows Media Player movie of the same visit, using the movie-mode of my ‘other’ new camera – a Panasonic Lumix with widescreen movie mode. And here’s a direct link to the same movie in Quicktime format, for those who need it – only click this link if you can’t get the WMP version to play, and if you can wait several minutes! I don’t know how to embed the Quicktime player into a web page, so this is a direct link to the movie itself, which means all 4 Megabytes have to download before it will play.
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