Urban Foxes

i think i heard a coyote on the hill across the street! i'm not sure, it was too much of a pained yelp to be a dog bark.

jbr, you're in silverlake/echo park now - right? (non-crepey, i saw you're posting to the "your building" thread) there are many coyotes around, i have seen several in the area late at night. if you had a car and were driving around, you'd see more i think. urban wilderness is fun.

jbr, you're in silverlake/echo park now - right?

correct. but this is my first l.a. coyote spotting, although i've certainly heard tell of them being around at night. i know a few were roaming around town right after the griffith park fire.

feathers are scattered all over my garden!

We've got one in our back yard now. I think it lives in the shed, which is full of the landlord's junk so impossible to get into. It was up on the shed roof earlier. Our cat was eyeing it disapprovingly from the back window.

I used to see it a lot over the road in the building site, I wonder if it used to have an earth there and has been displaced. Looks v mangy and sore, so my wife emailed a fox protection society to see if they'll send us some mange medicine. Apparently they like peanut butter and jam sandwiches!

This one, a regular visitor to our garden, actually looks quite healthy. Joined by a playmate the other morning, jostling over one of Lulu's plush toys that we left out there after a BBQ (and kinda gave up on after it was rained on a few times)...

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1373/1463081820_586884def8.jpg

we had two of them doing an elaborate (and noisy!) mating ritual in the backcourt about two weeks ago. watched them for about 20 mins (feeling like total voyeurs) before they eventually decided to zoom off up the path somewhere else.

interesting mating ritual: lots of yelping, punctuated by running round in circles. reminds me of my student days.

Great photo Michael, and a very handsome beast it is too.

Grimly, that's what they do. My housemate and I play a game called 'cat, fox or human' when we hear that BAAAAO noise and/or hissing and yelping coming from the back garden.

It took some chasing with my fiver-off-a-geezer-in-Lewisham long lens to get that shot, NickB. Wouldn't cooperate in our garden so I eventually snapped it in next door's garden (we do occasionally mow our lawn!) from our bedroom window. Then I felt a bit creepy for pointing my camera into next door's garden...

Our fox looks in considerably poorer condition to that one. He looks v healthy.

If we call the RSPCA will we get billed if they come out and take care of it (in one way or another)?

We'll have urban fox hunting soon, kids on mini motorbikes and quads with packs of pitbull terriers, the rousing sound of the hunting ring tone.

Col. Poo, no the RSPCA won't bill you, I'm pretty sure of that. I think that if they do come out, they'll either catch it and take it to a wildlife rescue centre, or if it's too poorly, it'll probably be put down.

A couple of foxes are now regularly coming over to me on my allotment early in the morning. They'll sit as close as about 2 or 3 metres away in the long grass at the edge of the plot, watching me digging. They're so tame that someone must be feeding them. Must take some jam sammies along with me for them next time.

my former flatmate managed to feed a fox half a mars bar on the meadows in edinburgh about 10 years ago. if you've got food, they tend to be just tame enough :)

OUR BACK YARD
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2358/2459323113_bfb23cb6ed.jpg?v=0

they're so cute!

Does kinda highlight the fact I've done zero gardening in the last 6 months, but it just won't stop raining.

We've been chucking mince laced with mange medicine out there since we saw the cubs, cos the mum's not looking too great. She made it through the winter at least. Didn't see her at all.

Awww.

http://xs227.xs.to/xs227/08186/wild_and_crazy_guys671.jpg

coyotes is good people

I was at the Trails Cafe in Griffith Park just N of Los Feliz and this guy was watching me the whole time

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3274/2423913309_9f6bd0033d.jpg

i think we should train these guys to maul boris voters

There is a dog run right by my flat and our local urban foxes are so polite, they won't crap anywhere else.

Read this as "Unban Foxes". Thought I missed out on some hilarious troll action.

Oh my, a fox on Walthamstow Central escalators.

http://twitpic.com/sebvd

Woah! lol. I wonder where he was coming from.

probably a magical realm

Bushey?

Vulpes vulpes jus commutin

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kit-fox-20-pictures,0,7823132.photogallery

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2012-02/68224655.jpg

lol I missed the previous revive with the fox on Walthamstow Central escalators - that could even be one of the cubs in my pic above all grown up.

No foxes in my yard now though. Landlord built an extension on the back of our flat which involved digging up the earth to put the foundations in. Never see them round our street any more.

15st man 'mugged by fox'

“The best thing to use is a water pistol.”

OTM, carry one all the time....

god people are such cunts

scapegoating bloodlust levels: nearing apocalypse, next it'll be the squirrels, and then we'll have a city free from undomesticated mammals*, nice clean streets! glorious Man, walking alone

*rats and mice don't count, since when have they killed anyone?

fucking unbelievable cunts, just makes me so fucking mad at the sheer stupidity of it all, the sheer, media-led crassness of mind that produces this sort of outcry

otm they should reintroduce wolves and bears into the cities

imago otm

anyone genuinely sent in a tizzy by the ridiculous media fearmongering should probably be put down themselves

Our friends' little boy was bitten by a fox a couple of years ago. He was playing with a ball that rolled down a hole underneath a hut, put his arm down it to get it back and unfortunately a fox happened to be hiding there and gave him a nip on the arm. This was all in the school grounds right behind our house. Somehow the press found out about it (possibly someone at the hospital tipped them off?) and, as it was a bit of a hot topic at the time, they had reporters from the Sun and the Daily Mail etc lurking outside their house, they were offered money to go on daytime TV, my wife got accosted on her way home from school drop-off and was asked if she knew the mum, lots of stuff like that (and six months ago they were contacted by police investigating phone hacking cos their number came up in files amongst the millions of others). Anyhow their attitude to the whole event was (1) the fox was just being a fox, kid probably shouldn't have put his arm down the hole but he was three, what can you do?, and (2) fuck off and report some real news and stop stalking our family.

This was them: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10363646

rabid gutterpress seeks similar quality in fluffy animal; must be carnivorous and willing to die by strychnine

8am this morning on the way to work a fox casually sauntering across the school field behind my house. looked pretty chill.

There was one preening itself on my parents' front lawn on Street View, but sadly it's been updated away.

In the western USA (and beyond) our version of this is urban coyotes. I see them fairly often. They like to eat the local cats.

we had some media hysteria a while back about foxes getting into people's houses and attacking them but i guess a coyote wd be a slightly more fearsome proposition

Slightly larger, same degree of intelligence, but not usually aggressive unless rabid.