Brick Moltz, the education director at The Fells Historic Estate on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, shared this wonderful series of images of a fox settling down in front of a game camera with us and the following story:
We’ve known about two openings to a fox den near the Rock Garden at The Fells for many years. Last year, I placed a game camera facing one of the openings and I got a few pictures of a fox, one of a deer, a few human bottoms as people bent over to look into the hole, and one very happy black lab digging in the mound. One day, near the opening, we found a scattered pile of white chicken feathers. The ends of most of the wing feathers had been neatly cut. I guess someone was making sure those chickens couldn’t fly, which probably made it a bit easier for the fox to catch them.
We got no more pictures last spring; I wonder if they failed to produce a litter. But this fall, I noticed more activity near the second opening, which is more hidden by the lower boughs of a hemlock. Fresh tracks and fresh digging gave me hope that we would have another chance to capture some images. Sure enough, we began to see the comings and goings of red fox.
The series of nap pictures was a surprise. The morning light was perfect for capturing color images of the smaller of the two fox. The dark, moist stain around the neck of this sleepy fox worries me a bit. Sue Morse wondered if it might be a wound.
In other fox news, check out this really cool live camera feed that’s set up over a fox den at the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center.
