Even without the trail cam, I can tell that the foxes are back. I found these two tennis balls cached at the edge of my wild flower bed down by the compost bins this morning.
Tennis Ball Fox Cache
Tag: Red Fox
Night Fox
Caught on my Browning ProXD trail cam last night at 11.30 pm, this fox slinks into view on the path by the veg beds, pauses briefly to take a look at the camera and at something at the opposite side of the garden, then it trots off towards the crab apple.
Fox Cam
The last time we caught the fox on the trail cam was at 10.30, two nights ago, in the back garden.
Last night it didn’t show but wood pigeon, magpie and Boris, a neighbour’s cat, triggered it between six and eight this morning.
Apparently all the action was in our front garden. This morning a cluster of wood pigeon breast feathers and a pile of fox scats were all the evidence left by whatever drama took place under the rowan tree between dusk and dawn.
Browning Trail Camera
We’ve been leaving our new trail cam, the Browning Strike Force Pro XD, at the end of our garden, strapped to the compost bins.
Not much to report from last night apart from the usual dunnocks, house sparrows and a juvenile blackbrd.
Rain seems to be enough to put off foxes from wandering around our garden, but we caught one on camera yesterday at quarter past four in the morning.
What appears to be the same fox had wandered through a few hours earlier, at 11.30 p.m.
Trail Cam Fox
Testing my new Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam yesterday in the back garden: at night in infrared mode on red fox and in daylight on grey squirrel, juvenile blackbird and dunnocks.
We think there may be two foxes; the first, with a bushy tail appears at 10.13 p.m., then ten minutes later there’s a similar-looking fox crossing the screen and finally, at 10.26, a fox with an apparently thinner tail with a lighter tip to it appears to notice the infrared light and it heads off.
The following night we recorded no fox activity, so I hope that we haven’t put them off with the infrared.
The Foxes’ Ball
They brought us:
- one pink-and-yellow cricket practice ball (which I must return to our neighbours’ spaniel, Rogue, two doors up the road)
- three tennis ball in varying degrees of fluffiness and squishiness
- two dead rats
In the veg beds they’ve flattened our seedling Musselburgh leeks, broken into the netting over our dwarf French beans and dug a series of small neat holes.
The fun and games didn’t stop with stolen tennis balls: they also dug up several of our ball-sized Sturton onions and stashed most of them at the bottom of the hedge but one was taken over to the middle of the path by the shed at the other side of the garden.
A single broad bean pod was neatly nipped off and left in the middle of the now flattened leek bed.
Fox
I drew this fox as a rough for my children’s picture book Deep in the Wood in 1987. I prefer this pencil on layout paper version to the pen and watercolour of the finished illustration. Construction lines always add some animation to a drawing. There’s an extra-heavy outline where I traced out the image onto the watercolour paper that I used for my final artwork. I rubbed pencil over the back of the layout paper.
Deep in the Wood is about animal senses and this fox appears towards the end of the story to illustrate the sense of smell. It’s pausing to take in the scents of shrew, humans and blackberries that are wafting through the wood in the evening.