I live just outside the Fairfax, VA city limits, and two sides of my lot border a small park. The upside of this (is there a down side? maybe the twelve tons of leaves that fall on my yard every year) is that a lot of animals stroll through or even make a home right in my backyard. I've seen ducks, deer, frogs, snakes, a hawk, many small birds, chipmunks, squirrels, woodpeckers, a groundhog that lived under my front porch for a while, and our current fixation, several foxes.

My girlfriend is blogging about the foxes. There probably will be pictures soon (we have them, just a matter of hosting and posting).

Last year my neighbor pointed out that he could see under my deck, and that a fox had made a home for her kits there. We keep our eyes open, and now it is rare for a day to go by that we don't see a fox. Usually we see the pups at dusk, and sometimes the mother when it gets darker. I'm not totally sure the "juvenile" and the mother are separate foxes, though I've read that sometimes "helper" foxes from one litter stay to help with the next.

The kits are very cute, they look very much like puppies. We look out the rear windows and watch them play. We almost never see them during the day. They come out at dusk and are active at night. But all foxes are very skittish of people. One was hiding in some bushes when my girlfriend went outside, and it ran off in the opposite direction very fast. Sometimes when I'm outside I look underneath the deck to see some eyes glowing at me. They bark and run away if they can. We try not to disturb them when we know they're out there.

Sometimes it's sad though, I recently found a dead pup by our little pond. It looked a little wet and had a little blood coming from its mouth. I don't know how it died. Could it have drowned? If it did, how did it get out? Would the mother have grabbed it from the water? The bigger pups play pretty rough, and the mother frequently isn't around. I put a piece of wood in the water so if they fall in they can climb out easier.

Out of the four pups we saw, two were much larger. Were they separate litters, or did the mother mate twice and have some pups fertilized later? Or were the other two just runts? One of the runts was the dead one I found. The other runt might have something wrong with an eye, it was hard to tell. The two bigger pups ran into the woods at separate times, and we're not totally sure they returned. We only saw one pup last night. One site said that of the 5-6 pups in a litter, usually only 2-3 reach maturity. I hope the others are OK.