Fox Cross
We got a couple of inches of puffy snow yesterday afternoon and evening, and this morning there was a set of tracks from the drain pipe under Stanwell St. to the rock where we have seen our fox hang out a number of times. We've long suspected that he lives under the street in the corrugated steel pipe (24" diameter) that bridges the drain gullies above and below the street. I took a closer look at the tracks in the snow and yup, those are fox tracks. (I was in the Fox Patrol in Boy Scouts. It's all coming back to me now.)
We photographed the fox this past July while we were tending the plants on our terrace that overlooks the drainage gully. Handsome creature, and relatively unafraid of humans, which (as with most wild animals) is a mixed blessing. Someone might be feeding him, or maybe there's just a lot of local wildlife. I've seen plenty of things here that a fox could bring down, from wild turkeys to rabbits to (alas) house cats. We saw the fox sit on the stones below our kitchen window once and gaze longingly at QBit, who was looking down and yapping. (That's only one reason we're very careful not to let him off leash here. The traffic on Stanwell is the other.)
By sheer chance I caught the fox in the middle of a yawn (see the photo at right) and it's an interesting way to see the inside of a fox's mouth without having to pry the poor thing's mouth open, losing a couple of fingers in the process. It's a very pointed, narrow mouth with a lot of teeth.
Apart from a fleeting glimpse of a fox on a highway embankment in Surrey, UK, this is the first live fox I ever saw outside of a zoo. Back in 1963, when my farm-cousin John Price learned that I had joined the Fox Patrol, he did the unexpected: Went out with his brothers and shot a fox, cut the tail off, and mailed it to me wrapped up in shirt cardboard, with dried blood all over it. (Farmers consider fox harmful predators, and there's no love lost between them.) We tied a string to the last vertebra and hung it from our patrol flag, with a lot of the blood still on it. (My fellow Fox Patrollers thought it was a little cool, though blood never sits well with me.) We haven't seen our fox in winter yet, but if I can I'll catch another photo against the snow, which should show up much better than against a dark background of scrub oak, as here.