Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Of foolish fawns and fearless foxes
Outdoorsy folks like us love to get outside and commune with nature. The experience generally puts a smile on our face. Unfortunately, there are also times when nature chooses to commune with us, sometimes with much less smiley consequences.
Case in point: one morning last week my dog Phoebe and I approached our backyard pond aiming to feed hungry schools of bass and bluegills, a cup of fish food in hand. That’s when I noticed something odd -- the brown and white rump of an animal crouched over the bank of the pond in the process of getting a drink. Obscured by the high pile of branches thrown together for a future bonfire, I didn’t glimpse it until the last minute. It was a young deer fawn, still abundantly freckled with those classic white spots against its red summer coat. I had walked right up on it, probably within twenty feet, before catching sight of it.
I immediately grabbed Phoebe’s collar. If she spotted the little deer she’d likely give chase. That action was enough to alert the fawn as it hoisted its head and casually trotted off into a shadowy grove of maples beyond the pond. Now that the problematic little deer had gone, Phoebe and I approached the pond and proceeded to fling handfuls of fish chow to the appreciative bass and bluegills.
But the fawn hadn’t gone far, and moments later I noticed it was cautiously, perhaps foolishly, tiptoeing back toward us. I can’t say if it was motivated by curiosity or thirst, but I reckoned it was time to escort Phoebe back to the house and grab my camera. With my dog secured indoors, I stealthily crept back toward the pond to find the fawn slurping its fill of pond water. I snapped dozens of photos before the deer, seemingly indifferent to my presence, slipped away into the tangle of forest and disappeared.
Over the course of the summer we’ve frequently spotted a doe with her two fawns browsing in the woodlot behind our house. I assumed the little fawn was likely one of these two, but I never glimpsed its twin or their mother that day. In any case, stumbling into that close encounter with the little fawn was a bright happy moment in the great out-of-doors. Cue Bambi with a butterfly on his nose, rainbows, unicorns, and bursts of sunshine.
Unfortunately, sunshine is typically followed by darkness, and later that same day, I found myself confronting one of the darker forces of nature: a brash and bold red fox with a taste for chicken, as in MY free ranging chicken. Okay, I know it’s
a stretch to paint a fox as a “dark force” of nature -- after all, foxes are predators and chicken are prey so foxes are just doing what foxes are programmed to do. Anyway, the “dark force” characterization suits my narrative here so bear with me.
Over the years I’ve lost plenty of chickens to foxes, hawks, raccoons, and even the neighbor’s dog. One time an opossum somehow snuck into the coop, gorged itself on eggs, and fell asleep in one of the nesting boxes. Last summer, even over the roar of my diesel tractor mowing the lawn, I heard the frantic shrieks of panicking chickens and caught a glimpse of a fox in mid-leap as it pursued an airborne chicken, its jaws snapping down on a mouthful of tail feathers. Fortunately, thanks to the intervention of John Deere and me, two of my chickens lost clumps of feathering that day, but not their lives.
By some accounts, fox predation on chickens has been on the rise this year. My neighbors’ flocks have suffered a number of attacks and the folks at the feed mill tell me that stories of foxes terrorizing poultry have been widespread. We’ve glimpsed a few foxes stalking our property this summer more frequently than in the past. The size and build of many of them suggest they’re youngsters, mere apprentices to the predator trade. Perhaps their den is nearby.
The primary diet of foxes consists of rodents, especially voles, but conflicts between foxes and domestic poultry are classic and legendary. They’re well documented in timeless literature from Aesop’s Fables to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and beyond. And as we know, foxes are venerated in our corner of the state, especially in equestrian circles where fox hunting with horses and hounds is cherished as history, heritage, and horsemanship.
Meanwhile, the practice of trapping ol’ Reynard for his fur has markedly dropped off over the past few decades. Back in the 1960s when I was a high school teen trapping muskrats for pocket money, a prime fox pelt might sell on the fur market for as much as $75. Today that same pelt would fetch mere pennies on the dollar, so there’s little incentive to set a trapline for them these days, a fact that might help account for a spike in their numbers of late.
Which brings me back to the morning that foolish little fawn put a smile on my face. That afternoon I decided to let my chickens run free for a few hours. They were restless, having been cooped up for the past few days due to the growing threat posed by Vulpes vulpes, aka Mr. Fox. I released the flock and, as an added safeguard, plopped myself down on the tailgate of my truck to keep a watchful eye on the birds as they free ranged, feeding on insects, seeds, and other wild delicacies.
And speaking of delicacies, if you’re a fox, wouldn’t you rather dine on chicken than rats and rodents? Apparently that’s exactly what the rusty red critter hiding undetected in the brush behind the coop had in mind. I had been manning my tailgate post for about an hour when he made his move. He dashed from the cover barely thirty yards away and, in the blink of an eye, snatched up one of my youngest hens. In the same instant I vaulted from the tailgate and charged toward him, yelling some invectives unsuitable for print in a family newspaper.
Maybe that had something to do with why the fox lost his jowly grip on the hen. In any case the bird somehow freed itself from those jaws of death, squirting from the predator’s mouth in a flurry of feathers. The fox rushed back into the brush empty handed. He may have been sly but he was still hungry. The hen was battered and dazed. It had been a close call, but she would fully recover although it took me some time to usher her back to the coop as we both breathed a sigh of relief.
The lesson learned here? As for wildlife encounters on our property, I’ll take a foolish fawn at the pond over a fearless fox at the henhouse every time.