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Red
Fox Journal and Photos
by David J. White |
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Introduction
1: 2007
2: The Den 3: Night Visits
4: Lady 5: Prince 6: Princess
7: Kits at Play 8: Rivalry 9: Tracking 10: 2009 11: Fox Life 101 12: References and Links |
| 3: Night Visits |
| In
early June, when the kits were about
10 weeks old, they began to show up on the lawn and gardens regularly
after dark to hunt
for food and chase each other around. Most of their hunting
consisted of catching worms, crickets, and other bugs. On damp
evenings, they caught many dew-worms. Perhaps because they were used to seeing and smelling me in the den area, they payed little attention to me when I went out carefully onto one of the decks, watched, and took photos of their nightime antics. Turning on the outside lights didn't seem to bother them in their hunting and playing. Foxes have highly reflective eyes. In photographing them with a flash at night, you have to make sure that the fox is looking away from you when you press the shutter---otherwise, the photo has extreme eyeshine. I had read that fox-fanciers in England often fed the foxes in their area. Chicken eggs seemed to be a common treat that the foxes really liked. Since bird eggs would be a natural food for foxes in the wild in my area, and since eggs are cheap and easily-handled (with gloves so as not to transfer human scent), I started to put out an egg on a convenient low tree stump near the edge of the lawn. Some people will consider feeding foxes to be a bad idea. To me, however, it doesn't seem much different from feeding sunflower seeds to birds (which we do year-round) or putting out sugar-water in the summer for hummingbirds. A single egg satisfies only a small part of a fox's daily needs. Within a few days, the egg was being taken each night. Sometimes it would be eaten right at the stump, while other times it would be cached (hidden) nearby. Initially, I think the vixen was taking the egg and perhaps showing the kits how to eat it. Later, it was the first kit to the stump who got the egg. I had imagined that a fox would eat the egg shell as well as the insides to get the value of the shell's calcium. Actually, they rarely ate any of the shell but would carefully break a hole in the side of the shell and lick out the egg's contents. When foxes cache food for later use, the food is usually buried a couple of inches deep in soil and litter. Eggs, presumably because of their delicate nature, were not buried in soil but were placed on bare ground amongst vegetation and only hidden with leaves and grass. Even a well-hidden white egg, however, is not too hard to find amongst the bright green vegetation of early summer, so I came across quite a few cached eggs in the following weeks and marked their locations. Some of the cached eggs would be eaten within a day or two, while others remained for a week or more. I never knew how many were eventually eaten by the original egg-cacher and how many were found by another fox. In mid- to late-June, the garden strawberries began to ripen and the kits found them to be quite to their liking. If I wanted any berries for myself, I had to pick them early, well before they were ripe. By early July, the kits were comfortable enough around the place to start coming in the morning or early evening. This provided much better light for watching and for taking photos. Then I felt highly rewarded for observing the den earlier from a sufficient distance and not scaring the foxes away. And it revealed how much I had lost when I disturbed the adults and caused them to move the five kits to another den in 2007. The night-time viewing and photos showed that the three young foxes had reasonably-distinct markings and seemed to spend different amounts of time around the house. But it was really when they began playing and hunting near the house during daylight that it was possible, by watching carefully and studying the photos, to figure out who was who and to give them individual names. Continued in 4: Lady. © David J. White 2009 |
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