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Welcome to The Sitting Fox!

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Welcome to my blog, which is a mainly a diary of my experiences with wildlife in the United Kingdom and Canada :smile: The SittingFox Homepage

Questions, comments and feedback always welcome...
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Don't miss the Blue Star Favourites and the Winter Photo Network! My WPN 2007 album is here :smile:

Project 365 Album

...But Kept the Memory

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She has been a major part of this blog since the beginning, albeit often an unspoken one. Until the last few days, hardly a single non-garden photo I uploaded on here was taken without her by my side; we clocked up hundreds, if not thousands, of miles through woodland and meadow and marshes over the years watching wildlife together, and I learned to trust her in situations where I would fear to take many other dogs.

I just thought I should say a word of thanks to everyone who has expressed a concern for Kelly, my Belgian shepherd, since she suddenly developed cancer back in the spring. She coped with her illness better than anyone had expected, but sadly she finally lost her battle this weekend.

10th July 1993 ~ 20th July 2008



No other words today, really; just a few pictures that I've taken over the past few days.

Sunset



Tina's tracks



Meadow brown



Field bindweed



I lost a friend but kept the memory - John Denver, Rocky Mountain High

Closer to Home

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It seems quite a while since I've written a post on the wild foxes who visit the garden. In truth they haven't been particularly active this week, but I did catch a soaking wet Old Dogfox yesterday evening :smile:





The most intriguing action is taking place well after dusk, which makes life remarkably difficult for me as a photographer - getting shots of fast-moving foxes at 30+ ft at high zoom without flash is never going to be fun after the sun has set :insane: However...

The Chipped Vixen is still a regular visitor, and curiously she is often not alone. Her frequent companion is a tall, long-eared male fox who has a wide-eyed expression similar to her own. He has been on my blog before - he was the one fighting with the Old Dogfox in the noisy cub video - but to date I've never got a still photo of him. I nearly did yesterday. He was sitting quite cooperatively on the mound, but I took too long to get the camera set up :o:

I haven't given him a name as most of these young males don't tend to stay in the territory very long. Perhaps I'll reconsider though, if I can think of something fitting for him.

In the meantime, here's the hard-won photo of the Chipped Vixen. I get pictures of her so rarely that I think almost any quality is worth uploading on here :faint:


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And on a totally different topic, the pond gave me a nice surprise yesterday :smile: Something (or to be exact, a pair of somethings) were apparently clinging to an iris stem! :eyes:





This is the empty shell of a dragonfly nymph that has climbed up out of the water and hatched into an adult. I had no idea that there were nymphs in the pond at all (though its dark depths remain something of a mystery :sherlock:) and where the newly-hatched adults have gone, I do not know. I would love to see them back here!

All Spaced Out

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For every fox observation that finds a place on my blog, I have dozens of "ships passing in the night" type encounters. Footprints in the mud here, a brush vanishing into a hedgerow there; it's usually just a moment, a fleeting glimpse, but nonetheless another clue to aid me in fitting together the fantastically complex jigsaw which is fox territorial arrangement.

I don't know for sure how many foxes actually live in my local area - the village and its surrounding farms and woodlands and meadows. I'd estimate that perhaps there are a few dozen, but not all are reproducing adults. Working out the members of different groups is always going to a headache. We have vagrants. We have immigrants. We have some foxes who seem to live by no rules at all. Sadly, we also have many foxes who are hit by cars and die in the bushes long before natural mortality would have claimed them.

The upshot is that I have a large amount of fairly rough data that are not easy to analyse. With a view to that, I've been stitching google maps together lately...



...so that I can at least consider the bigger picture when I, say, see a fox in a meadow. This one was in the meadow highlighted on the map.



Unlike the foxes who visit my garden, these foxes aren't always easy to distinguish as individuals with confidence, unless they have obvious scars or markings. Which is another reason for me to take as many pictures as possible even when the light is horrible.

I hoped this fox would arise from his slumbers and come a bit closer to my vantage point on the footpath. I waited a little while but to no avail, so wandered back out into the lane around the corner, hoping for a different angle on him. However, from there he wasn't visible at all :confused: so I returned, bemused, to the footpath, only to find him at the top of the ridge, not fifteen feet away, frozen like a cat who has just spied a giant dog. Sure enough, down the footpath suddenly poured a dozen or more school kids and their teachers. It was quite amazing that they all filed past unaware that they were being nervously appraised by a silent but watchful little canid on the other side of the flimsy fence.



Who is really watching whom? I have to ask: for every encounter about foxes that I know about, how many times have I been unaware that they are observing me?

Avian Surprises

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When the leaves are thick on the trees and the grass is tall enough to hide a roe deer, locating wildlife can be slightly tricky. Some days, I feel almost like I'm back in the temperate rainforests of Canada, attempting to locate things that are very good at not showing themselves. Sometimes it's just easier to wait for birds to come and perch on the balcony railings instead!



And at least there's one bird family I can always count on to be on display :wink: Here's a corvid quartet.

Jay



Jackdaw



Carrion Crow



Magpie



Finding four corvids in a morning is quite cool :cool: but pretty much everything else in the way of birdlife seemed elusive. But never say never... :wink:

I was close to home and expecting no more pictures when a mewing buzzard-like call suddenly caught my attention. High up, high, high, high up, almost over my back garden in fact, two stream-lined raptors were wheeling and diving like outsized swifts :eyes:

Hobbies!! I was shocked! :faint: A new species for my local list - and a raptor, which is always special; actually I've never seen a hobby anywhere before. They were so far above me and moving so quickly that photography was, er, difficult :insane: but I got a few rough pictures by using manual focus. Words got a better picture of a hobby about a fortnight ago.



It seems too much to hope that this beautiful and uncommon falcon is actually nesting locally. I will certainly keep a close watch out for this pair, though.

I just never know what I will see when I step outside the front door :D