Welcome to the Garden Fox Watch blog, detailing the life and times of the family of foxes that are growing up in our back garden.
Posted By Foxy Lady on July 21, 2011
Three Counties Radio have a phone-in this morning (Thursday 21st) on the JVS show on the topic of proposed urban fox culls. Apparently they were struggling to find anyone to speak on the foxes’ behalf; I’ve offered to have a chat to them but if anyone else feels like phoning in, do feel free 😉
Posted By Foxy Lady on July 17, 2011
Any human parent — well, any parent with a child over the age of about two — will be familiar with just how persistent children can be. It turns out that this is a cross-species trait. One May morning, Mrs Fox was sitting in a sunbeam at the bottom of the garden, and peering thoughtfully in the direction of the camera; one of her cubs was quite determined to attract her attention, though…
Posted By Foxy Lady on July 12, 2011
Some more video for you today from early May — 5th May, this time — and the cubs had still not been weaned at that point. (Not too surprising since the previous video was only one day earlier ;).) I just love the bit at about 0:37 in when one of the cubs finishes his meal and wanders off, licking his lips!
Posted By Foxy Lady on July 11, 2011
The cubs are long since weaned by now, but in our continuing catch-up mode, let me point you at a couple of videos from 4th May. The first shows why breastfeeding is just not that much fun if you’re a fox — because your cubs will hang off you as you move around the garden. Er, ouch? That’s really got to hurt. And the second video is more cute wrestling fox cubs, because I’m firmly of the opinion that you just can’t have too many videos of that. Enjoy!
Posted By Foxy Lady on July 10, 2011
One evening back in early May we were eating dinner and occasionally glancing out to the Family Fox, working their way through the delicacies I’d provided for them on the back lawn.
Something wasn’t quite right, though. A head-count suggested… one, two cubs; one, two, three adult foxes? What was going on?
While it hasn’t been unusual to see plenty of different adult foxes wandering through to take advantage of the free buffet outside of the cub season, we certainly didn’t see any adults daring to come near the breeding adults and their cubs this time last year. From the reactions of this year’s adults, and from my memories of last year’s vixen’s appearance, I think the interloper was actually last year’s vixen remembering that there was food here, and coming to nab some for her own cubs from this year (she certainly seemed to be feeding cubs when we saw her coming for food; enlarged nipples etc.). I’d suspected previously that one of this year’s adults might have been one of last year’s cubs, grown up and with his or her own family.
The new (or, perhaps, old) vixen tends to fill up on the more easily portable food (most usually the cheese) and then disappear out through our front garden and behind one of the houses on the other side of the road. She might be living in a garden there, or perhaps on the railway embankment behind the gardens on that side. She was a regular visitor for most of May, didn’t show up much in June (or at least not that I noticed) and then came back again yesterday evening.
Posted By Foxy Lady on July 5, 2011
You may remember that when you last saw the cubs, they were little and really more bear-like than fox-like. These days they are really more lanky teenage foxes than round fluffy fox cubs, but here, cast your mind back a couple of months to early May… this is what they looked like then.
Posted By Foxy Lady on May 26, 2011
Cute (or deranged) though the cubs are in this set of pictures — from April 30th — I think my favourite is the shot of Mrs Fox, the last of the set. She’d come up to lie in the grass (… and the weeds, yes, okay…) near the edge of the patio, which meant she was much nearer the house than usual, and thus nearer the camera. She was asleep when I started taking the photos but woke up and realised I was there fairly soon. I particularly like the light through her ears…
Posted By Foxy Lady on May 25, 2011
April 29th was an especially good day for pictures of fox tongues, it turned out. Baby foxes, mother foxes… sometimes both at once. Also, one of the cubs was practising his stalking skills on one of the local magpies — unsuccessfully, but then they usually are.
Posted By Foxy Lady on May 24, 2011
As you may recall, the cubs start off with comparatively dark fur — almost black, or dark grey at least. They were definitely on the grey side when they first came out into the open. But by the end of April — these photos were taken on the 27th — they were beginning to lose the darker fur and turn the ginger colour you’d more usually associate with foxes. In some of these, they really look a bit piebald!
