2023-03-30 - Fox with captured prey or just moving her own puppies?
2023-03-30 - Coming back for more
This fox came running across my front yard with a small animal in her mouth. She came through a second time with another one several minutes later. I grabbed my camera and went to the front door to wait in case she came back. She came back four more times. Each time with a small, limp animal in her mouth that I assumed were the hapless babies of some other creature living in our neighborhood (I thought they might be the babies of a Fisher Cat that ran across my back yard a few weeks ago).
But taking a closer look at the pictures, I wonder if these are victims or her own pups that she wanted to relocate? The animal in her mouth has a tiny white tip on its tail just like she has.
The fox either cleaned out the nest of some other grieving mother or just moved her own large family to a new home. I’ll never know for sure, but I think she was relocating her family.
I’m referring to the fox as “her,” but I don’t know the gender for sure.
Think about the mental processing for the fox. She had to remember where she made her original den and the location of her new den to make the back-and-forth trips over an extended period of time. She had to engage in forward thinking (planning) after recognizing some inherent risk to her family at the original den. She had to think about where her pups would be safer, then find a location that she felt was better and then begin the extended effort of moving her pups, one at a time, to their new home.
At one point I brought out a tripod to try for some video but she saw it and took a detour through a neighbor’s back yard to get around me. She came back through my front yard after I removed the tripod. Evidently, she wasn’t threatened by me standing alone in my doorway but the tripod looked suspicious.
A lot of nature is going on in my yard all the time. So cool.
Monte