Meet Fiona, as we called her, drinking from our frog pond.
We've always had foxes visit our garden but she would come in every day at the beginning of 2017, stand on the patio and watch us through the French windows for a bit. I guess she was seeing if we posed a threat. Which we didn't. We then hardly saw her until late April.
This was our first sighting of her and the six cubs she'd had under our tea-house. "There's three! No! it's Four!" ......and so on.
She got under there through the gap at the back where there was no "skirt" like the other three sides. I left it open for ventilation when I built it.
The cubs were brought up on Motown, as I play my jukeboxes if I'm gardening and we didn't know they were under there or see the cubs until she brought them out.
We never went into the garden when the cubs were out, which was late evenings. I took all the photos and videos through our French windows on "zoom."
She was an excellent mum, even stole soft toys and balls from neighbouring gardens and brought them back for them to play "chase" with.
I supplimented their diet with a can of cat food left in a dish next to the tea-house every night.
All say Ahh!
"What have I told you about coming into the garden when I'm out shopping?"
They liked to pinch the dried mealworms I left out for the birds in a feeder.
So I gave them their own dish.
"Is it OK for me to eat these?"
#
I gave them this sturdy upturned box to practice their "pouncing" from, rather than from the ceramic pots.
Yes they made a bit of a mess of the tea-house varanda, chasing round up the steps and jumping off the side and running round again. Muddy paw prints moved steadily up the windows of the tea-house as they rapidly grew. They dug a few holes in the rear bed and a few small ones in the lawn, but nothing serious. Once they'd gone the garden was back to normal after a couple of weeks.
The wife of the couple who live in the house behind ours came round and complained that a fox kept coming over the back fence from our garden. She was quite sniffy about it. I said, "We don't mind, we've got another six," which didn't go down too well. I don't know what she expected us to do. Once you've got foxes you just have to wait until they leave, which they always will.
Fiona had the two ways of getting out, jumping up onto the lamp near the koi pool and then scrabling over the fence, or up onto the pagada and over the back fence. There's an eight foot fence with a lockable door in it between the corner of the garage and the cirner of the house, so it was her only way in or out.
Towards the end of July the cubs had grown tall enough for her to teach them how to jump up onto the top of the lamp. A week later she took them out two at a time over the fence over three days. They never came back. But we heard that they were making a bit of a nuisance of themselves in the gardens of other houses in our road!
We didn't see Fiona again until the beginning of 2019. She made a brief visit to suss out her den which I caught on camera. I checked later and she'd done a bit of scrabbling around the side of the tea-house but there was no way she could get under. As once the cubs had left, I fixed a sturdy wood and wire mesh screen to block any further access under the tea house.
Here's she's making her way out over the lamp, they way she gets in..
We've not seen her since. Foxes have a very short life for many reasons.
Here's the video. I think the music I chose from the YouTube library really suited the mood.
