Foxes delight New Hamburg family
Captivating kits cavorting about backyard, after taking up residence under garden shed
WILMOT TOWFNSHIP — Seven little fuzzy-faced foxes play wrestle in the backyard and lie in the sun before lining up to eagerly feed on mother’s milk.
It’s a scene that surely rates at the top of cuteness scale.
“Ten,” said 18-year-old Bethany Cressman, whose New Hamburg family gathered five-strong at their Centennial Crescent rear window late last week to watch the foxy furballs emerge from under their garden shed.
“They’re tiny and they’re like little kittens, almost.”
They have lived for two decades just off a shoelace-loop bend in the Nith River and had never seen such a kit and caboodle on the back end of their 200-foot property, before it’s steep decent into the river.
There have been plenty of rabbits and skunks and squirrels, especially with the family’s tempting vegetable garden offering up a hungry critter buffet of peas, carrots and beans.
But a family of red foxes? Not once in 20 years on the block.
“This is pretty rare,” said Bethany’s brother, Curtis, a stone mason who snapped a digital album’s worth of fox family photos on the weekend. “Our neighbours haven’t seen them much. It’s pretty much just been our backyard.”
Back in snowy April, Curtis spied the mother fox in the backyard, around that garden shed. He figures she moved in and hunkered down under the plywood floor of the old shed. She hunts during the day. The kids, just weeks old, play till feeding time.
Curtis, 22, watch two fox siblings bat each other around over a bone. He got within 10 feet of them to take some pictures before they scampered for cover under the shed.
“They kept looking, like really curious,” Curtis said of the staredown. “As long as I was moving real slow, they let it go. But the mother, she’d be out of there in time. She’s more wary.”
The Cressmans don’t have a dog to hound the foxes, who never seem to be out when the neighbour’s pooch is out for a stroll.
Bethany, who works as a dietary aide in a nursing home, says her mom, Jewel, hopes the presence of the young foxes, until they grow up and move on, will keep wild freeloaders out of the family vegetable crop.
So far, the guardians of the garden have not been named.
Curtis figures one should be called Freddie Fox, like the actor. But Bethany can’t settle on any names. No Megan or Michael J. or Vivica or Samantha among these foxes yet. Not even a fox named News.
“We can’t tell them apart enough,” Bethany said.
Just seven cute-scale “tens” tussling in a New Hamburg backyard.
“It’s pretty special,” Curtis said.