Fox Party

There was a fox party at our house last night. Up until then, over the course of the past 3 years I only spotted one red fox in our backyard. But last night we had a half dozen of them running all over the place all evening long. They would come darting out of the woods, run around, and then go back into the woods in the same spot. You could hear them ‘barking’ (for a lack of a better term) all night. There was one baby fox and a few more adults and we marveled as we watched them romping about.

Lisa was over (with her camera) and my camera was not more than 15 feet away most of the evening and yet neither of us took any pictures. My excuse was that I didn’t have a long enough lens to get any good pictures. Lisa's dog Molly was on alert. She sat and stared toward the backyard for hours just waiting for another sighting so she could bark at them. Peanut couldn't be bothered with the racket, but Cooper got all excited and ran around our deck trying to figure out what the commotion was about. I'm not sure what was more amusing, watching the foxes or watching the dogs watch the foxes.

This morning, as I was getting dressed, I happened to look out the window and there were the foxes again. Baby and mommy . . . running all over the yard. They jumped into one of the horseshoe pit sand boxes, rolled on their backs and had a grand ole time. They went from one sand box to the next. That was it, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I ran downstairs to get my camera, ran back up, shot a picture . . . and the stupid flash went off completely wrecking the picture. Then the foxes ran onto the slope near the gallery, making it impossible to get a good shot. That combined with the facts that I still didn’t have the right lens on the camera and I was in danger of being late for work made me give up. What I should have had was a video camera. Oh well. Maybe they will be back tonight.

Footnote: The photo above is not my own. It's borrowed from the internet.