Fox Cubs!

 

For the past three or four years we've had a lovely Mrs Fox making a den somewhere in the gardens at the bottom of our garden. We don't see her all year round so it's likely somewhere that she returns to only to have her cubs but she likes to sometimes hang out in our garden and we give her our raw meat scraps to nibble on or the leftover cat food Ziggy has turned his nose up to. She's always very grateful and will come right up to the (closed) patio door to fetch it. Depending how much there is she often takes a big mouthful off to give to the babies and then comes back and finishes up the scraps of the scraps for herself.  

Fox cubs are quite noisy so we are lucky that our garden is quite long so they are mostly away from the house with their noises but they are so lovely to sit and watch playing. This year there were at least four cubs but we saw one that looked a bit poorly last week so we aren't sure if he'll make it. Three other cubs all look big and healthy though so that's good. Sadly not everyone can make it in the wild and that's just the way it is - it would be tricky for us to intervene at this point as we don't actually know which garden the den is in. 

Last week Reece and I were just coming back from our Bluebell wood photoshoot and I heard them playing at the bottom of the garden in our vegetable patch. Luckily I had my camera and zoom lens with me from photographing Stitchscapes and Bluebells so I snuck down a bit closer to watch them. Aren't these guys cute? One arrived crashing through the trees with what I originally thought was a red ball but turned out to be a bright red apple it had acquired from somewhere. The bottom photo on this post shows a slightly blurry image of this little fox being playfully chased around by his littermate with the apple, before he buried it in a little hole he dug next to our rhubarb. 

Although they are very sweet looking they can be a bit of a pain. Dad is always moaning that they are digging holes in the garden and I watched them play with clumps of soil in the vegetable patch, picking it up and kicking it round like a cat would with a catnip toy. 

They are good for keeping rats and mice down though. I really like rodents and they don't bother me when living outside but because we like to feed the birds (I'm starting to sound like David Attenborough here) the seed we throw out attracts the mice and rats. Ziggy, our cat, is good for mice but he won't take on a big rat - far too scary - so the foxes sometimes help us out. 

Amazingly, this time last year, the bottom of our garden was a very neglected space with waist high grasses and old fence panels and dumped soil and concrete from other areas of the garden. We are on the edge of a hill so our garden drops away very sharply and has been previously formed into three terraces with a lawn, patio and flowerbeds on the top terrace out from the kitchen, a patio-ed narrow terrace with pots on and then you follow a steep path down to the 'forgotton garden' at the bottom. 

But, during Lockdown 1.0, Dad took back the forgotten garden!! He dug up all of the grass and weeds, bought masses of soil and compost and, using recycled odds and ends he uncovered built up a slightly raised vegetable patch. As lockdowns continued the patch was extended and other areas cleared to make paths and a small area with a chimenea where we could discreetly burn some of the wood that had been laying down there. Whilst toasting marshmallows of course.

Old fence panels and shelves were used to shore up the edges of the vegetable patch, propped up by metal posts of an old swing we'd had as kids.

There's still work to be done down there but some areas have been left as a haven for wildlife to break down naturally, like the fence panels you can see behind the cub in these photos. The bags are keeping the tops of compost bins warm for our worms and there are still a few bits to be gotten rid of. We need a skip really but it's a tricky area to get things in and out of. (Plus Dad's doing all of the work himself.)

For now though, it's a playground for the fox cubs! They love jumping up and down on the piles of wood and chasing each other under the wheelbarrow and onto a hump of soil. They spent ages kicking clumps of dirt off the top of the soil mound and chasing it down, or leaping on another cub who passed underneath. All good hunting practice for them!

What we found really interesting was the different colours. Most fox cubs are born a dark brown colour and then gradually change to the fantastic orange coat you see in adults, but these little chaps are different colours as one is already much more orange than his siblings. An over achiever maybe!