Mountain Musings – FoxTales

Mountain Musings – A guest column by Dottie Simmons who lives in eastern Humboldt County describes life at her rural homestead:

Mountain Musings long Dottie Simmons

We have always had a love/hate relationship with our local predators. We honor their presence as a sign of a healthy habitat, and do everything we can to protect our domestic animals from becoming a predators’ meal.

Of the wide array of predators we have, the ones we interact with the most are the foxes.

Since we first had poultry the foxes have made their presence known. Possibly our first encounter, in the days before we understood we had to build an impregnable fortress for our poultry, was when a fox stole a setting hen off a brood of chicks when we lived up Brannan Mountain in Willow Creek. Traumatized days old chicks running everywhere, and the fox goes off to the end of the driveway, out of range and laughs at us. Seriously. We know what the fox says… in this case “Wraaaack, raaaack, raaaack!!”

Geese, ducks, chickens… this fox was relentless. We couldn’t trap it to remove it (preferably to a planet far, far, away), so we borrowed a hound named Shelby from an old timer to track it down. To what end I no longer remember, but we turned Shelby loose right after the latest attack.

We were sitting in the sun in the meadow above our house there listening to Shelby bray as he ran through the woods behind us. Suddenly the fox comes out of the forest below and to the right. Not running, just trotting, and occasionally looking over its shoulder. It sees us and pulls up below us, sits down and licks its paws and washes its face, calm as can be! We can still hear Shelby zigzagging and crashing through the woods, howling as he goes… and when he seems reasonably close the fox gets up and saunters off, stage left. Maybe 30 seconds later Shelby comes barreling out of the woods on the fox’s trail. Ears flapping, tongue hanging out, obviously exhausted, he continues off after his elusive prey.

Fox 1, Shelby 0. 

Our relationship with foxes here at Simmonsville has been more congenial. We have  a secure coop with an automatic door to close at nightfall should we get home after dark from town. We hear or see sign of the fox almost every day/night. They have a way of leaving their ‘calling cards’ in predominant places so there is no missing their presence. They ‘play’ with the dogs by barking near the top of our fenced in area. When the dogs run up excitedly the fox has already gone to the bottom of the area and called them again – repeatedly – driving the poor dogs to distraction.

In the fall when our fruit trees are laden the foxes climb the trees to get the fruit, dropping some for their less talented friends. The grey fox is the only North American canid that can climb trees!

We have a large brooder in an oval cattle trough for raising chicks. We cover it with a relatively heavy steel grate. One year we were losing 6 week old chicks from this set up. Some unknown creature was actually lifting the cover to get at them! We solved the problem by adding weights on top. Later we moved the chicks to a portable chicken tractor that we move around our orchard. The roof of this is hinged for ease in filling the feeders. One night I heard a chicken commotion and go out and a fox is IN the chicken tractor with 30 young meat birds! The birds all huddled to one side of the pen, I lift the other end giving the leaping fox a place to escape… but instead it keeps leaping up! It suddenly dawns on me that the fox lifted the roof to get in the pen with the birds… that THIS is the fox that lifted the lid on the brooder to get the chicks!

[Photo by Dottie Simmons]

One last tale of our foxy friends. Down by a water tank in our orchard my partner saw a fox hanging off the outside of the fence. Somehow the fox had twisted it’s hind leg in the wire and was suspended, forelegs barely touching the ground. 

Though exhausted, the frightened fox was twisting and snapping as he tried to untangle its wounded foot. My wise partner took a stick and held it to the fox’s mouth and it bit that and hung on. Unable to free the foot, he told the fox it’d be OK and went to get pliers and a wire cutter. After cutting the wire and freeing the fox he stayed and the fox also stayed and just watched him a while before finally getting up and walking off. 

We feel they know we are no threat, but also that we have rules. Now and then, when a hen is determined not to go in at night for several nights in a row, we will forgive the fox an occasional, opportunistic, chicken dinner.