Our gray fox has decided it's better to arrive early rather than late. Perhaps she is competing with the skunk, but regardless, she has started arriving at about 7pm, an hour earlier than her aforementioned usual time.
I'm noticing some likes and dislikes. She likes spaghetti well enough, but only if it has some sort of sauce, preferable Alfredo. Plain pasta is left for the squirrels. Baked beans are also left behind, though any hot dogs or meat are carefully extracted. She'll eat tomato and onion, but not lettuce. She likes bread, cheese and graham crackers.
Tonight she is having a good maow on a small chicken carcass. There are a few smaller bites of meat, along with a few tater tots, and having set the larger carcass aside, she is eating them first. She tends to do that. If there is something big enough to carry, she'll set it aside and eat whatever else is available, then carry the big piece of food away. Sometimes she returns at her more usual time of 8-8:30pm for seconds, or to take away whatever she left behind from her first foray.
She is a beautiful fox.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Just thinking.......
ReplyDeleteShe is a killer, I'd be thinking more along the lines of keeping her away from the house and not getting too comfortable around it. One skipped meal.... and there goes a pet. She may be beautiful, but surely her teeth are sharp. She is much faster and sneakier than that coyote when it comes small hiding places.
Are you filling her out, and plumping her up for stew and a really REALLY nice hat? Or to keep the neighborhood pets safe!
Actually, I think as long as she's fed, she's less likely to go after local chickens or small pets. Mostly fox go for things like voles, mice, chipmunks, rabbits, etc. They'll also eat birds, beetles, crickets/grasshoppers, fish and frogs. They're omnivores, so they eat vegetation as well, and I've seen the gray fox checking out the tomatoes in the garden. The red fox that used to live nearby got some of our chickens, but this gray fox is relatively new to the neighborhood. She doesn't seem at all interested in the cats, though I know for sure the coyotes kill cats regularly. I think the cats are big enough that she'd have to be really hungry to go after them; I'd be concerned if I had kittens here. Little One sits at the corner of the deck, right above her, and the fox knows she's there but doesn't do more than give her a quick look. I make sure Chubba is in the house - she's the old one and less wary than Little One.
ReplyDeleteThe fox is here every night, like clockwork, and she looks like she's got a full belly.
Check out this website from Britain: The Fox Website, they have lots of info about urban foxes.
i gotcha.... thanks for the link...
ReplyDeleteI'm beginning to think we may have a pair of grays. Gray foxes pair bond, so once they find a mate, they generally stay together. 7pm and 8pm, like clockwork, we have a fox here. I wonder if it isn't a pair, coming at separate times.
ReplyDeleteEach time the fox comes, it takes something away, if it's big enough to be carried. Tonight's pile of Swiss cheese was torn into three pieces, and the 7pm fox ate one piece, nibbled at some bacon, and took away a second chunk of cheese. An hour later, the 8pm fox arrived to eat the rest of the bacon, a slice of bread, and carry off the last chunk of cheese.
I suppose short of hitting them with paint, which I don't want to do, I'll never know for sure if it's one fox or two. And that's ok too.
We have a PAIR of grays! Tonight they showed up *together* at 7:45pm. I took a couple quick photos, and although they will be very blurry due to the low light, there will be two foxes visible.
ReplyDeleteI've long thought there might be two, especially once the two distinct but regular visiting times, 7pm and 8pm, were established. Maybe we'll have kits someday! I'm very psyched!!