The Little Foxes

My co-workers were practically giddy with excitement when they told me that there was a family of baby foxes living under the deck at our work building.

Was this a good thing?  Why am I always the last person to know when wildlife takes up residence under the deck at work?  But most importantly,  what happened to  the groundhogs?

I remember watching the baby groundhogs from the family - or colony- living under the deck frolicking outside the window while waiting for my first interview three years ago, and they have lived there ever since.  About a year ago, our landlord decided that he wanted to close in the area under the deck, and decided to relocate the family with Hav-a-Heart traps. He caught a raccoon but no groundhogs.

Despite my sincerest effort to steer clear of them, wild animals sometimes insinuate themselves into my life so I know a little something about groundhogs.  There was a family of them living under our house in Canonsburg for many years.  They seem nice enough but you just never know what sort of havoc they are wreaking down there -we believe we had to replace our sewer pipes because of the little beasts.

Somehow, I suspected that foxes might be more overtly threatening to humans than groundhogs.

"Oh, they're babies and they're SOOO cute," one happy co- worker cooed, "Look! I took a picture."

I looked at the photo of the intense looking little fox face, and frankly I was a little freaked out.

"See, they're SOOO cute - I can't believe how close we got to them," she said in wonderment.

"So they won't hurt us?" I asked tentatively.

"Well...maybe the mother would, but we haven't seen her," she said.

Just because we haven't seen the mother doesn't mean she isn't there, I thought.

My co-workers were still all smiles when they assured me that the foxes wouldn't bother us and if we made too much of a racket the mother would just move the family.

Not that I have trust issues, but when I got home I employed some of my highly honed  research skills to explore the subject further.  I typed "Are foxes dangerous  to people?" into the Google search box.  I wasn't the first person to ask Google this question.

It turns out that foxes really aren't dangerous to humans.  They pretty much have no interest in us, and are nocturnal (so are active when we are not).  As a bonus, they will keep a place free of mice.
(http://www.humanesociety.org/animals/foxes/tips/solving_problems_with_foxes.html)  Well, mice had been occasionally terrorizing my co- workers with offices in the basement, and then dying in the walls trying to get upstairs so I couldn't pretend to be sorry about that.

On the down side, foxes will also kill the household pets.  That's what happened to the groundhogs, we surmised when I was sharing my findings with the gang the next day. So much for "having a heart" about it. And those birds that have been hanging around flying into our closed windows better watch out, too.

"Isn't it amazing?" said my boss, an insightful and philosophical woman.  "We have a veritable wildlife reserve back here and meanwhile, we can't get out of the parking lot for all the traffic caused by the construction."

The entrance and exit at the Sunoco staton across the street from our offices are being expanded and the access roads widened to accommodate all the traffic from the busy Route 19 business district it abuts on the other side.

She had a point there.   It was the worst of both worlds - our little intersection where the "city" meets the country.

Whatever, I still think I'm going to steer clear of the deck at work for awhile, just in case these foxes mistake me for a household pet, or a groundhog.