Over the last few weeks, my fox family have been visiting regularly… usually after dark. The vixen has made a few appearances in daylight when she was obviously hungry, but is extremely wary and I have only managed once to get a couple of photographs of her from an upstairs window, as you may have seen in my last fox cub blog post.
Through using a mixture of trail cams and 2 wired cameras that I have on the field where they visit, I know there were 4 cubs….last all seen together in this clip on the 20th….
Recently I have only seen 3 at any one time. There is one much larger cub and the three smaller ones. This clip shows the 3 smaller ones…
and a bit of fighting with the slightly larger cub…
The smaller one often comes on its own, as I think it the only way it can get anything to eat!
Occasionally, these cubs are visiting in daylight… usually very early in the morning, or sometimes just before it gets dark. It is always great to watch them on the monitor from my office, as this area cannot be seen from the house.
This afternoon I was working at my computer and, between 3pm and 4pm, two of the cubs visited. I had been having some issues recording with my new HD cam (my PC and graphics card are struggling to cope with the new high-tech equipment!) so I had missed some earlier recordings. I was delighted to see these cubs appearing in the afternoon sunshine after a foul morning of cold, grey skies and heavy rain.
I knew the icatcher software was recording and I hope the clips would be good. I was able to capture some stills from the recorded footage…
One cub has a distinctive white tip to its tail and it visited at 3pm….
I sprinkled a little more dried dog food out and the, at 4pm the tiny cub appeared….
I have only watched these cubs on my monitors and it is very difficult to gauge the size of them. I do see my cats come through as well, and I knew this cub was smaller than my petite Siamese. I decided to try to creep out, as I wanted to see it with my own eyes, rather than just on the monitor. I crept down the path to the grassy opening in the hedge where I put the food. Slowly creeping up, I peered through the grass, which acted like a screen. There, only a metre in front of me was the tiniest cub!!! I could not believe how small it is! Luckily, it could not see me and I froze, each time it looked my way and held my breath! You can see it looking to the left, where I am hidden, on the clip! I reckon its body is only about 20cm long!! Almost half the size of my cat!
It was a real treat to see this tiny cub … may be next time, I can creep out with my camera!!