Posted By Foxy Lady on June 23, 2010
As the fox cubs have grown up, I’ve started to notice black marks on their tails, about a quarter to a third of the way down from the root of the tail. At first I wondered if they’d rubbed against something dirty, but then when I saw that all the cubs had it, I wondered if it might be something genetic. (You can’t really tell whether Mrs Fox has the same mark; her tail is a lot more variegated in colour, with white, black and red all featuring.)
As it happens it is something genetic, but only in the sense that most foxes have this; the increasingly-useful Urban Foxes book tells me that it shows the location of a scent gland on the tail, with which the foxes mark their territory. Now you know!
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 18, 2010
The evening of 24th May was sunny at Fox Towers, and the foxes themselves were making the most of it. There was the usual complement of rolling around and gnawing on one another (from the cubs) and watching with faint bemusement (the vixen). Mrs Fox also made another attempt on the world record for How Much Cheese Can A Fox Fit In Its Mouth…
As ever, click on any photo to enlarge, click on it again to close it down.
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 17, 2010
Although the cubs have been entirely capable of eating solid food for quite a while now, and indeed of choosing their own food from what’s put out for them to eat… or play with… sometimes, only the Milk Bank of Mum will do. Apparently fox cubs may still suckle up to twelve or fourteen weeks of age (so says Stephen Harris’s Urban Foxes book, which I am currently reading). Given that I saw the first cub above ground on 14th April, I suppose ours are now somewhere around the three month mark…
Doesn’t the vixen look long-suffering? I can’t imagine feeding rambunctious cubs with, by now, plenty of pointy teeth can be much fun.
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 15, 2010
The Aspidistra Blues has an excellent summary of the current urban fox flap, with a well-balanced viewpoint.
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 15, 2010
And no, we’re not talking about children here… have a couple of photos of a fox just trying to get those last few morsels off his/her muzzle…
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 13, 2010
Just catching up with some of the Foxcam archives here. A couple of videos of wrestling cubs, and one of the foxes relaxing in the sun — it’s not high excitement but they’re still quite nice! There are a few more new ones on the YouTube channel.
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 12, 2010
… anyone who heard me on the Stephen Nolan show on Radio Five Live last night. The topic was whether urban foxes should be culled; Peter Oborne, columnist, and Neil Hamilton, former UK MP, were putting the case that they should, and I was acting as counsel for the defence, for the foxes.
I mentioned on the programme that a lot of research has been done on urban foxes; one of the main researchers in the area is Professor Stephen Harris at the University of Bristol. For those with a less academic interest, there’s a useful and informative booklet called Living with Urban Foxes, originally produced by Bristol City Council.
I’ve already heard from people carrying out research into various aspects of the life and times of urban foxes; please do feel free to contact me if you are doing so, as I’m quite happy to help if any of my information can be of use.
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 11, 2010
You remember the sun, don’t you? It was that thing in the sky that we saw at the end of May and which vanished almost immediately we hit June. Ah well — have some photos of foxes in the sun to make up for it. These are from 20th May and, as usual, click on any photo to enlarge, and click anywhere on the resulting photo to close it.
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 11, 2010
… we’re now there as @gardenfoxwatch.
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Posted By Foxy Lady on June 11, 2010
… videos, that is. I promised links to some of the longer HD videos yesterday (well, actually I promised to post them yesterday, but you can’t have everything), and here they are.
The first one is of some very relaxed foxes pottering about on the lawn. The second and third are actually two parts of one longer take which overflowed YouTube’s time limit of ten minutes (… and it would have been longer still had we not also hit the in-camera size limit while recording).
If you’d like to see them in proper HD, you can click on the “360p” in the bottom right-hand corner of each YouTube screen to get a list of available sizes. (They were filmed in 1080, not 720, but I had to scale them down a bit or you’d not have been seeing them until about Christmas, it’d’ve taken me that long to upload them ;))
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