We’ve all had one of those neighbors. You know what I mean. The ones that keep offbeat hours. Or they just wander onto your property without asking. Or they disturb your household with their comings and goings.
Welcome to my life with the fox. And I mean that literally, not as a cute nickname for any of my lovely human neighbors.
Truly, I’m a big, big fan of Cape Cod wildlife. I love watching the robins that come to my birdbath or the chipmunks skittering around the garden. I even felt a little bad for the mouse that got fried trying to make a home in my car engine. (I felt less bad after the $600 it cost to clean up after the party he had in the air filter. But I digress….)
So it seemed nice when a red fox moved into the wooded area just beyond my backyard fence sometime last summer. She is beautiful. Healthy red coat. Black stockings. Lovely bushy tail. Seems like a good weight – and to her credit there did seem to be fewer rabbits gnawing on my flowers last summer.
I like to think it’s a vixen, although I don’t know for sure that it’s female. A male fox, by the way, is called a dog or a “tod.” And, a group of foxes is called a “skulk,” which the BBC says is from a Scandinavian term meaning “lurk.” I’ve never seen more than one fox at a time, and Audubon says they are solitary creatures, but maybe there’s a secret skulk hangout somewhere.
Our fox possibly has a den under the old farm buildings behind me. She routinely ambles south from the woods along the outside of my chain link fence, then turns west through the unfenced part of the yard, crosses the street and heads toward the golf course and the pond. I would see her early on summer mornings coming home with breakfast – a rabbit or squirrel in her mouth. She trots right down the middle of the road with her catch – maybe it’s safer than skittering through the wilder areas and meeting a coyote. The grandkids were thrilled.
Foxes are designed to hunt. They are the only animals known to use the earth’s magnetic field to judge the distance and direction of their prey, Audubon says. Czech researchers found that foxes tend to pounce to the northeast, about 20 degrees off from north. If they do that, they have a 73 percent success rate but in other directions it can drop as low as 18 percent.
Right now, it’s mating season, and then we’ll have about six to eight weeks before the kits are born. Then both parents will be out hunting to help feed them.
So, you’re thinking, all this is fascinating and so lovely. Who wouldn’t want a fox for a neighbor?
Well, I’ll tell you who: the hound.
The fox makes the hound nuts. He has a particular bark for whenever his nemesis appears – it’s his big-boy bark accompanied by raised hackles and a total inability to keep all four paws on the ground. The fox, however, doesn’t seem to give two cents about the hound on the opposite side of the fence. It’s like a twisted comedy routine. The fox happily pads along one side of the fence seemingly oblivious as the dog barks and leaps and goes crazy only six feet and a line of chain link away.
This would all just be very amusing if the fox kept reasonable hours. But she likes to hunt at night. Or just before dawn. And the hound, being a hound, senses her even at 2 a.m. and leaps up barking ready to defend the house against her intrusions. Be reassured that thanks to his ongoing efforts, no one in the household has been harmed by the fox. I am, however, always teetering on the edge of major sleep deprivation.
I’m not sure how the hound senses the fox – smell, sound? In a dream? Each of them — members of the same evolutionary family – have their own distinct traits that make them good at their jobs. At least with the hound, we have not yet found a strategy to override his instincts. Sometimes I wonder if we should just stop trying.
So when he goes nuts at night, I bury my head in my pillow, telling him to settle back down and leave it. Eventually he makes some kind of well-I-showed-him hurumpf and goes back to sleep, having succeeded, once again, in keeping that annoying neighbor at bay.
