Since early January this year my evenings have been busy with filming and photographing a wild urban vixen. We’ve had plenty of foxes visiting the garden since I moved to Birmingham in 2006, two of which were relatively tolerant of humans. Both were dog foxes; the first would allow me to take photographs remotely from 20 feet away, and the second would let me film him from a meter away, but neither could be described as being tame.
The second dog fox stopped coming at the end of 2017 and one frosty morning in January I saw two new foxes, a dog and a vixen, wandering around the lawn as I made my first coffee of the day. I grabbed a quick handheld video shot before they moved on, but within a few days the vixen started to visit at night and a remarkable relationship began.
By February she was staying in the garden while I put out food for her and was accepting a remotely controlled GoPro camera beside her as she fed. In April she tentatively took food, a raw sausage, from me for the first time and let me lie on the grass in front of her as I filmed her feeding. By the middle of that month she was scratching on the conservatory door to announce her arrival, much to the annoyance of Barney the dog, and by the end – with Barney safely shut in the adjoining kitchen – she was coming into the conservatory to feed and have a good sniff of things human and dog, and to dry off on particularly rainy evenings.
At the time of writing this in July the vixen and I have got to a stage in our “friendship” where we regularly play games ( rope tug of war is a favourite ) and I recently set up three interactive dog games in the garden for a filmed test of who – the vixen or Barney – is quickest at solving problems and finding the hidden treats.
Below are a series of 4K video frame captures from Panasonic GH4 and GoPro Hero 5 cameras of my foxy adventures during the past six months.
Steve Downer Wildlife Cinematographer 