I saw this young lad snoozing in the sun on the bank at the bottom of the garden last summer, so I crept out with a camera. He looked up as I went down the steps, thought of moving, then decided to wait to see what I would do.
I moved gradually closer until I was about 15 feet away at which point he decided that I was harmelss and relaxed. So I took a few pictures and retired – and he went back to sleep!
A few years ago we had a whole family who did not actually live in the garden, but somewhere very close and the cubs had great fun chasing each other round our trees. We have not had as many stopping off this year – although we are still a ‘through route’ on their nightly travels.
The cats do not actually get this close but they and the foxes seem to live in reasonable harmony, totally ignoring each other most of the time, although on the whole the cats seem to have the last word when it comes to any territorial disputes. A couple of years ago, a friend who was staying heard a horrendous din in the middle of the night and looked out the window to see our smallest, now defunct, rather pretty and lady-like long haired cat, Raggle, sitting half way down the steps to the garden. She was giving a fox, who was at least four times her size, and had obviously been thinking about coming up the steps, a seriously hard time. After about three minutes of feline abuse, the fox slunk off with his brush between his legs…
