Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Children’s fairy tales are replete with stories of the fox. Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Aesop’s Fables both give Vulpes vulpes a good amount of attention. A member of the Canidae family along with dogs and wolves, the fox has a separate genus from its larger relatives.
The Red Fox is our version of this highly intelligent, stealthy predator. In our little section of paradise, the fox is a familiar companion.
On a dry sagebrush hill, a few dozen feet in altitude above one of our hayfields is a fox den that is used every spring to raise kits. It’s a great location for a fox family, with water nearby and a much too abundant prairie dog population tearing up a section of the field below.
In the early mornings when I’m setting irrigation water, I’ll sometimes take my Nikon with the 300 mm telephoto lens and shoot photographs of the kits peering over the edge of their den waiting for dinner to arrive.
Foxes have an important role in the ecosystem. Many blame them for the demise of pheasant populations, but that honor goes to skunks and raccoons, who eat the eggs before they hatch. Fox don’t really hunt pheasant, since the pheasant is an intruder brought in by man in the 19th century.
Fox do hunt rabbits, mice, and an occasional squirrel.
One Sunday morning as we were getting ready for church I looked outside and spotted our neighbor’s big gray housecat. This guy was a brute. You could tell by his torn ears that he liked to fight. He also liked to leave little gifts around our haystack.
He was a great mouser, so he was free to hunt in our stackyard anytime he wanted.
That morning he started towards the north after something. That something was a fox with a freshly killed cottontail rabbit in its mouth.
There is another fox den a few hundred yards north of the house on the shore of a pond owned by a neighbor. I suspected this rabbit was breakfast for a litter of hungry young.
I grabbed my camera for a chance to watch this housecat get his tail kicked (literally) by this fox.
As the cat approached the fox, he set the rabbit down and started to bark at the tomcat. The cat was not impressed and closed in a few feet closer. The fox snapped at the cat, receiving a half-dozen well-placed swats to the face in a counter punching motion that would have made Joe Frazier proud. A fierce howl pierced the silence of the morning.
The fox jumped back 10 feet or so and started to bark. The cat calmly walked over, picked up the rabbit, and dragged it on top of one of the haystacks. I couldn’t get a good picture from the upstairs window since the sun was just below the horizon, but I said to myself, “You need to turn your fox card in, you just got whipped by a tabby cat.”
An encounter with a substantially larger feline is a distant memory from a spring afternoon now half a century removed from the present. My friend Cubby Furlong and I had my dad’s 1969 Dodge half-ton pickup and decided to go joy riding in the hills behind Pilot Butte, a few miles from the power plant on the northwest corner of the reservoir after track practice.
There was a sizeable sand dune back there in the 1970s and we proceeded to get my dad’s truck buried.
Not to worry, we were 16, in shape from Coach Sinner’s challenging track practices so we decided to jog down to the powerplant and see if someone would pull us out. We decided to run over the top of the butte just for fun. As we went down the slope towards the lake we heard something kick rocks loose behind us. It was a mangy-looking mountain lion. It wasn’t a big cat, probably less than 100 pounds, and it was shedding its winter fur.
Cubby was an outstanding distance runner, a state champion in the half-mile his senior year. I could beat him for maybe 200 yards tops. I quickly realized if the cat attacked, it would likely get me since Cubby would be long gone.
We sprinted away, looking back over our shoulders. Yes, I know that’s probably the worst thing we could have done, but in glancing back we saw the big cat bounding in the opposite direction. He was as afraid of us as we were of him.
I silently thanked the cougar for taking off and we walked the next mile or so, found a guy, and he pulled us out.
Sometimes I think I’m a bit touched for talking to wildlife, but at other times I think there is an inter-species bond that allows us to communicate on a very basic level.
As a kid, I was picking up hay bales by myself with our pickup one afternoon near a fox den on the north side of my mom and dad’s farm just north of Kinnear.
I took our dog with me for company.
As I loaded bales I watched Rascal start to follow an invisible scent trail. Then I saw the fox a few dozen yards ahead of him in a section of sagebrush next to the alfalfa field. The fox circled around a little hill twice with the dog dutifully sniffing behind, and then it jumped maybe 20 feet and ran up the hill.
As the dog circled the hill, the fox sat on top and watched Rascal take laps. The mutt never caught on. I had to call him back to the truck for the ride home or he would have circled that hill for hours.
Cunning, elusive, quick, agile, and aggressive, are not bad attributes for one of America’s most beautiful mammals.