The curious case of the foxes of Prices Switch Road

Editor’s note: The Warwick Advertiser has long benefitted from the generosity, talents and contributions of many sorts from its readers. Those contributions make the newspaper better. Among the recent gifts are these photographs from Cindy Krikava of one of the three fox families living on her Grey Dawn Farm, a horse farm with 52 acres with a lot of pasture on Prices Switch Road in Warwick. What follows is her first-person account:

We’ve had a fox family for a couple of years now. But this year it seemed to be three different families. So they are multiplying. In the spring they were out and about quite a bit. Sometimes we would see mom carrying a piece of prey back to the den. Young woodchucks were victims, and rabbits, of which we have many. One chased one of our Burmese cats up the hill toward the back of our house, but my cat was faster. The kits were not shy at all, as you can tell from the photographs. They sat there and posed ... did not run away. We’d often see siblings playing together. At night when I would check the horses before going to bed, I regularly heard a vixen ‘barking.’ My German Shepherd checked things out but foxes are very wily and would not get easily caught. But almost overnight, it seemed, we stopped having any fox activity at all. For about three weeks now we’ve not seen hide nor hair of any of them, nor have we heard the vixen at night. So far they have not been a nuisance, but I was wondering if that would change if they continue to multiply. I know the English farmers hate fox, and were mainly responsible for starting fox hunting from horseback which became a sport for the well-heeled. Now they have banned fox hunting in England because it is cruel. We do wonder where they went and what they’re up to.