With the environmental recovery around Butte, Montana, fox people have become fairly common in the Big Butte/Walkerville/Moulton area. I see fresh tracks most mornings around the house (they don't come TOO close unless it's a hard winter) and we see them in the headlights while driving home some nights:
On a summer morning, this one watched RTD (RolyTheDog) and I walk by, seemingly secure that an old dog person and its clumsy human companion were no threat:
RTD and I hiked out back in the Ryan Road area early Sunday morning instead of skiing. I was exchanging a few quorks with one of the local raven people when an exceptionally large red fox (I thought it was a coyote for an instant) looked over at us from perhaps a hundred yards away. Neither RTD or I showed an agressive posture, which I think counts for a lot in terms of how animal people perceive human people. We walked along and it paralleled us, watchful but curious, for several hundred yards.
In her younger days, RTD was hell on wheels when she came across fox scent (she liked to chase cats too, though if they stopped running so did she). There are some virtues in having a calm, old dog.
Now that quite a picture of Reynard. They are quite rare around here and extremely wary. I've only seen a couple in my life. Too bad.
ReplyDeleteEco - You and I have more than one thing in common- we both refer to animals as people or persons! That, and Dylan and Lucinda. I have a copy of Flogging Molly's Swagger next to me on the desk as I write this...what a riot! That fox in the photo looks somewhat gray as well as red - hybrid?
ReplyDeletetroutbirder, I believe that you can walk the seams of the world in a way that makes you invisible or at least acceptable to wild things.
ReplyDeleteAs anglers, we do this all the time--moving slowly so as not to spook the trout people, taking care not to line them with our casting, keeping our silhouette low, etc.
Deedee, I think she might have been an old girl. I know she had a den nearby and had at least one previous year's litter in that area.
ReplyDeleteBut our western "red" foxes do tend to be much lighter than the eastern Reynards (I like tb's formal name!) I grew up with. Maybe it's because of the abundant sunshine and lack of cover? Also, as Darwin noticed of Reynards (lovely, much nicer than "Vulpes") he saw in South America, they have "rather longer legs."