Foxes in the Vineyard

A little while ago, I mentioned our new neighbors—the fox family who’d moved in next door.  Since then, we’ve gotten glimpses of them a couple times a week.

This morning, they visited my “vineyard”, giving me much better than just a glimpse.

I always look out the window in the morning to see if there are any animals about.  The interesting thing about that is how quickly you can go from nothing to all kinds of action.  It makes you realize how much is going on under the surface out there.  This morning, I’m looking out the window, and one second there’s nothing, and the next, there’s a fox pup playing by the grape vines.  I ran downstairs, grabbed the video camera.  He was nowhere to be seen, but I  quietly pushed up the screen in one of the downstairs windows and waited….  Nothing.  And then, Momma Fox stepped out of the woods.

Having just seen a pup, and now the vigilant-looking Momma Fox, I thought I might be in for a treat.  I wasn’t disappointed. Momma Fox's cautious survey of the situation is interrupted as the pups bounce into view. They play and chase each other for a bit before running off to the woods, where I could still hear them crashing around. With no larger predators around, these guys seem to think of themselves as the young princes of our yard. Which is fine with me. I'm still not sure if there are three or four—they seem to enter and exit my field of view from unrelated, almost random positions, so unless they're all in view at once, I can't tell how many I'm watching. I used to think there were only two.