foxes

Cat Dogs

August 27, 2015

The sound is like nothing else on earth.

I was sound asleep, breathing in the fresh, clean air of the Berkshire countryside that drifted into my room through an open window near the bed, when I was jerked into consciousness by what I at first thought was a woman screaming. As I lay there in the dark, asking myself just what it was that I heard, another scream burst through the midnight silence, followed quickly by two more. By that time it was clear to me that it wasn’t a human scream, but for the life of me I couldn’t find anything in my brain to which it might be connected. More mammalian than avian, I finally drifted back off to sleep after some time, puzzling over the just what it might have been.

It was a fox – a Red Fox, Vulpes vulpes to be precise.

RSPB Spotlight: Foxes

July 3, 2015

Difficult as it may be to believe, given all the time I have spent afield over the past decades, I have not yet seen a fox in the wild. Although Red Foxes, Vulpes vulpes, do inhabit the entirety of the northern hemisphere, including the Pacific Northwest where I live, I have never once seen so much as the swish of a tail or the twitch of a ear. Consequently, given the old adage “out of sight, out of mind,” I have never had much of a reason to devote any significant amount of time to learning about them.