My Wild Life
Just before noon my Mother called and asked me to go to her friend’s house because there was injured animal in her bushes and it wouldn’t leave. Why Miss Thelma didn’t call Animal Control is beyond me, but I drove over to her house.
She pointed to low bush in her backyard where I found a red fox vixen lying on her side. The fox appeared to have an injury to her fore legs and was not able to get away. If the vixen had been at all aggressive I would have put her down, suspecting rabies, but she acted defensive so I called Animal Control as she was too large for my carrier.
The laws about animals are really confusing. You have to have the proper license to deal with the specific animal. For alligators and bears you have to call a licensed trapper, migratory waterfowl belong to the Feds, but red foxes are a non-native wild animal so Animal Control will deal with them.
In about 15 minutes a young woman drove up in a white van, and Miss Thelma showed her age: “My goodness, they’ve sent a girl!”
Despite being “a girl”, she made a quick capture with a minimum of force and removed the animal from Miss Thelma’s yard. They are probably going to have to put the vixen down because the forelegs looked broken, but there’s a chance.
So, I go out and am feeding the cats at 5pm and suddenly it’s raining feathers. Just about three feet above my head a sharp shinned hawk has caught a dove. The hawk wasn’t much bigger than the dove and it struggled to fly away with it. Because of the awkward flight I was able to see the distinctive tail banding that confirmed my initial identification.
Wild animals have shown great resilience to the intrusion of man.
