Handsome foxes in our garden.

How magical for you , Dorjac !

what wonderful visitors until they start digging the plants up though.

Great photographs Dorjac. Hope they don't do too much damage in your garden.

I feel rather envious of your lovely visitors, Dorjac, they are such a fit looking pair. I wouldn't get anything done if they visited my garden! I haven't even seen the foxes in the woods recently but I suspect they hear Millie and I squelching through the mud and disappear to safety :)
A pleasant sunny day here today but very cold, a welcome change from the rain.

They certainly appear quite at home in your garden Dorjac, only ever seen a fox around here once and that was last winter.

Hi Dorjac ..
well done on those foxy photos !

They certainly look very healthy. I'll bet she's in much need of a rest!!! ;)

how lovely - lol, easy to admire them from a safe distance! but when they keep digging under the shed or wrecking the garden, they're not so welcome. Great pics anyway!

The foxes look very healthy. Hope you don't have too much garden damage Dorjac. We have a large male fox through our little garden now and again. We've taken over their space so I suppose they now take over ours.

lol that's how it usually seems to happen, LIndak: humans move into what had always been wild animal territory, then complain that the animals are in their way.

Or we mess around wtih the animals' normal environment so they have to move elsewhere, or change their habits, usually to our detriment, so the "solution" turns out worse than the original "problem".

do you have any pics of your fox?

No, I'm sorry I don't Fran, I don't have a very good camera either to do night-time shots. Some people seem to switch themselves off to the environment around them and don't seem to care either for the wildlife and the beauty that we have left in our countryside. I say that everything has its purpose like a chain of life but its a pity when plants and animals die out.

I only have a digital point-and-shoot camera, and can't seem to manage to press the shutter gently enough to avoid blurring the pic. It's pretty useless for night shots - I tried to take some pics of the just-past-full moon a while ago and got blurred blobs (even tried pointing it though one half of my binicoulars!) I envy the pics that people have taken of the moon in all its glory, no idea what kind of cameras they have - but of course, it also depends on the skill of the user.

Sad but true - we're the only species in the whole world that wouldn't affect the balance of nature if we became extinct - except to improve the situation! We've put ourelves outside ("above"??) nature and are no longer relevant to it, except for negative impact.

Years ago I had the thought that the earth can only sustain a set amount of life: the more one species increases, the less room there is for all the others. When one species of flower dies out, a whole food chain collapses - maybe only on a very localised micro-scale, but every insect that depended on that flower is also threatened.

I know there are seed banks where seeds are kept to repopulate plants in the future - but can they replicate dhte insect populations that need those plants and that those plants need? and the animals that prey on those insects, and the animals that prey on those? it's the whole chain that's needed, not just one link of it.

lol cheerful, ain't I?!

still, at least we're trying to do something to slow down or maybe even reverse the previous millennia of "we can do what we like cos we're the masters of the universe"

lol better stop before I depress myself even more!

I know where you're coming from......

sorry, Dorjac, didn't mean to divert the convo away from the original source ...

Fine Fran it's nice to see more of a discussion on GOY which occasionally occurs on questions. People have different views on the way gardens are kept that encourages wild creatures to visit. Foxes can be controversial and visiting cats too. Badgers can be too large to visit small gardens but they do. Even a magpie in the Hawthorn clacking noisily as they get bolder too. Never saw them in our garden until the last few years and they are annoyingly....not so shy as they used to be. It's nice to grab the camera when wild creatures pay a visit and get a decent shot to put on GOY.

Your photos of the foxes are lovely Dorjac.

My camera is a tiny Canon IXUS with a viewfinder as well as a backscreen. They have moved on a lot since I bought the IXUS but not so tiny anymore. Mine is handbag sized. Foxes not seen in the garden since their courting activities a few days ago. They were very clean so probably found a clean place to hide up.....not in soil. It does worry me where they will den for the cubs to be born. By the way Fran you press the shutter button lightly to focus and then the rest of the way down to take the picture......or am I telling my gran to suck eggs?

lol Dorjac, it took me a while to work out why it gave a slight click when I pressed the button half-way! and a little box appeared on the screen, showing it had "found" the object. it's pressing it the rest of hte way that I have probs with. I've tried being very gentle, but when I get the "found it" click three times I get a bit irritaed and press harder - too hard!

This is one reason I've been thinking about a remote-control lead with a button on the end; set up the camera, then press the buitton; it won't matter how hard I press then - I hope!

Aaaaw great pictures.
We have foxes visit too but i've never seen them in daylight, the noises they make are quite freaky at night calling their cubs etc but the strangest, that I've only heard once, is gekkering right outside the bedroom window I didn't know at the time what it was but knew the foxes visit nightly so googled fox calls and lo and behold that was it, strangest sound.

what kind of noise do foxes make at this time of year? I've heard that they "bark" normally, but that they have a "weird sort of noise" in the mating season.

I've heard what I took to be dogs from the open ground at the back; is a foxe's bark the same, or could one tell the diference?

Fran I looked up Brian Vesey Fitzgeralds book Town Fox Country Fox published 1965 to check out details re foxes. Cubs are said to be born 2 weeks either side of Lady Day= 25th March. Huntsmen know this for reasons of their own. There are late cubs too. Not all dog foxes know that they are only fecund between December and March!I should think some lady foxes come into season late and Mr is not going to let that one go unexploited. So banshee screams from outraged vixens will be heard in the depth of winter on the whole. Maiden Vixens may yell later. The next is my observation. A high pitched yapping scream is a warning to frolicing cubs to take cover. This would be in April May or June. They scampered off behind our garden shed when they had a jumpy mother. She did a lot of yapping did that one. A foxes bark is higher pitched than a dog's bark.

wow, Dorjac, I'm stunned at your depth of knowledge!!! ok, you got it from a book, but you had the book, and found it, and found hte right pages. That's absolutely fascinating, thanks so much! x