Country Foxes and City Foxes

A friend of mine wrote this week from her farm near Athens, Georgia, to say she'd had an encounter with a pair of grey foxes. It wasn't her first encounter with grey foxes on her property: "I see one maybe every other year, usually if it takes shelter in the tack room from winter rains." She said that she knew the foxes denned up at a neighbor's house across the creek and through the woods.

The afternoon she wrote she'd been inside the pasture gate giving the donkeys "some pre-dinner old bananas for treats" and then along strolled the pair of foxes less than 10 feet from her.

She surmised it was the female in the lead "because the male had to stop every three feet and mark territory." She watched as they strolled on into a big hedge and disappeared.

But the foxes were not gone after all. "By the time I finished feeding the animals and was back at the gate, the neighbor's dog across the street began to bark so I just stood there. One of them came trotting briskly back the way it had come. It stopped to look at me and then retreated another 15 feet before it turned, I guess to see if its mate was coming along. Then it turned into the woods and headed for home."

I tell this story because my friend's country foxes in Georgia were joined this week in my imagination by two other grey fox stories, both recent encounters within Spartanburg's city limits. Several weeks ago, two friends stopped me at the farmers market to tell me they'd seen a fox the night before on their back steps right in Converse Heights. It was eating cat food from their pet's bowl. "Red or grey?" I asked. They weren't sure, and so I explained how we have two different foxes in the piedmont, and how they are quite different in their habits.

Usually, I explained, when we say "fox" we think of the red fox, the common one foxhunters prefer to chase, but when I described the size and coloration of the grey foxsmaller, darker, more cat-like, shyer than the redmy friends were sure what they'd seen was a grey fox. "A fox eating cat food, right near downtown," they said, marveling at their good luck.

Then when I told the story of the city fox in Converse Heights to another friend he said he'd recently been walking his dogs along the trails in Duncan Park at night. In the woods he heard a sound he hadn't heard in his neighborhood before. "Like a crane in distress," is how he described it. He walked further along the trail, following the sound and he came across a fox hiding under a fallen log holding still while he shined his flashlight its way. "It must have been a young fox, a grey fox," Gerald said. "The dogs just stood there looking at it, and then we walked back home and left it alone."

Country foxes, we tend to believe, are common. City foxes, our good sense tells us, are out of place somehow. We like to draw hard lines between the wild and the tame, the raw and the cooked. But it's not really so. The lines are much thinner than we think.

It could someday get worse if we keep filling the piedmont successional fields and woods with unplanned subdivisions. A few months ago another friend brought me an article explaining how foxes began to enter urban London from the countryside after World War II. It was easier to make a living there. Now foxes have spread all through suburban London. Some estimates place the fox populations as high as 16 foxes for every square mile of the city. In late winter they say in the London suburbs you can often hear the vixens (female foxes) with their eerie screams. Some say it sounds a like a person in distress.

Do a little searching and it's easy to come up with stories of how in this country, Denver already has a healthy population of red foxes living comfortably downtown, and you probably heard about the coyote caught in Central Park a few months back. If there are coyotes in New York, surely foxes are in the neighborhood too. Who knows, maybe the only bobcats in Charlotte aren't in the basketball arena.

But our local grey foxes are much more solitary than those urban red foxes and they probably like the woods more than the suburbs. "A wonderful mouser, rarely invades poultry yards; probably wholly beneficial," one field guide says of grey foxes. Grey foxes climb, unlike their red distant cousins. Cat food in Converse Heights will do if available, but they prefer wild fruit like grapes, blackberries, persimmons, and even paw paws.

So I've been thinking this week about how those in Duncan Park or Converse Heights might feel to know foxes are prowling their neighborhood so close to downtown. I don't think most would approve. It's not that they can't be troublesomeoccasional rabies, digging up flowerbeds, and of course eating all that expensive cat food.

But I still like knowing they're around. "The suburban wilds," that's what one writer calls the territory where most of us live in the early 21st century. Pay attention. Big tomcats aren't the only mammals ranging free through our Spartanburg backyards.