I have been staring at my screen trying to decide where to begin again on this blog. The more I think about it, the less likely I am to write about it. So I went to my stats page for a bit of inspiration... and the top reason people are finding this blog is because they want to identify poop.

Fox poop is the poop of choice today.

Well - if I'm going to write a pile of shit in an effort to be creative, I might as well try to be useful. *grin*

Personally, I think that getting to know poop is a fab passtime. Most wildlife, especially mammals, tend to stay hidden - and who can blame them? - so it adds something to a walk if you can get a sense of the secret life of a deserted path, and who has been sharing the space.

Foxes are quite common in the UK. In towns and cities, their populations are on the increase as they take advantage of our untidy behaviour. Urban foxes are often more visible and daring than their rural counterparts, possibly because there's not the same culture of lamping in gardens and parks as there is in the countryside. (A practise this blogger wholly disagrees with, in case it wasn't obvious.)

In the countryside, you are more likely to see fox droppings than you are to see the fox - but you might have some difficulty differentiating it from all the other poop (especially those left by irresponsible dog owners! don't get me started!), so here's a few tips and a wee sketch I made for you. I may add new photos for your viewing pleasure at a later date, but there is a blurry fox dropping here.

The general rule of thumb is that a carnivore dropping is usually sausage shaped with one rounded end and one pointed end. In the case of the Red Fox, their dropping are used to mark territory and they are often found in the middle of a path or - even better - on a raised place such as a step, a rock, a tussock, or even a handy mole hill.

Foxes have a varied diet and they scavenge as well as hunt. This means the colour and content of their droppings can vary a great deal, especially in Autumn when there are lots of berries to gorge on. Fox droppings may contain bones, feathers, fur, insect chitin and recycled Chinese takeways. Fox droppings are usually 8-10cm long but foxes will often spread their droppings out which makes it harder to see the pointy end, or the full size. Over time, your powers of observation will get to know the poops in a given spot and hopefully you will get the best confirmation of all - a fox sighting.

Have you found any interesting tracks and signs recently?

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Beginning With Fox Droppings originally appeared on Taexalia on January 15, 2012.

Mountain Hare moves first

Chooses direction later

Move and see what's coming...

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Haiku ~ Mountain Hare originally appeared on Taexalia on September 14, 2011.

It finally snowed last night. All week I have been seeing pictures, news reports, status updates and chatter about snow. All week I have been trying to big up the slivers of frost caught in the gaps between paving stones, willing them to expand.

Last night we took the hound for his bedtime walk. I wore a fleece and a singular pair of trousers. It was cold, but yet again - no snow. As we rounded the corner and looked out over the Firth, we could see the weather front that was dropping white stuff on Edinburgh. But it wasn't snowing here. Again.

Then I caught sight of something happening in the orange glow of a streetlight at the end of the road.

"Is that snow?"

"No," he says.

Then we both got stinging dots on our cheeks and grinned as the first snowflakes hit us.

The Hound pondered about, sniffing more, dancing a bit, wheechin about like a loony. We commented again about that weather front now crossing the Firth.

Within minutes we realised it wasn't crossing the Firth, it was already here - and now delivering horizontal snow all over us.

"Hurry up and poop!"

A more pointless cry I've never made as my fleecy frontage became snowboobs.

This morning we have a covering of snow that is, in terms of much of the rest of these islands, pathetic. But it is good enough for me, crisp enough and thick enough to let me know that my Roe Deer theory has been correct these last few weeks.

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Snow Shoes originally appeared on Taexalia on November 27, 2010.

If you are not one of the many people who arrives on this blog looking for photos of fox droppings, feel free to look at my old photo of an urban foxie and then move on... You have been warned.

I could tell that there was a fox about this morning  before we crossed the road and entered the less used path to the Crow Tree. I can't tell you how I knew, I just knew. When the Hound began to get animated about Sniffs, I knew my hunch was on the money. First we found very interesting, to the Hound, frosty remains of a rabbit, then we found a territory marking at the bottom of the steps:

This is a classic place to find fox droppings - foxes like to leave their mark in obvious places. Foxes especially like a raised platform, like a molehill, to deposit their message. This fox dropping is a day or two old, but further up the path we came upon another dropping that was so fresh it was steaming in the cold air.

I never saw it, but I wondered if the fox had seen us and, as it was heading for cover, left us a message. The Hound was all over the path investigating and his behaviour suggested that he knew what I was guessing - that fox had been just ahead of us. The Hound would have zoomed off down an animal trail into the gorse, if I had let him, and I'd put money on it that we weren't too far from those piercing eyes, and that brushy tail...

The pictures, if you can stomach them, show that fox droppings are not as uniform as the droppings of some other beasties. The fox's diet is varied and can sometimes be very white with bones, or very dark with berries. Fox droppings will usually have the tapering associated with predator droppings.

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Red Fox Droppings originally appeared on Taexalia on October 20, 2010.

We went for a walk yesterday morning and one of the differences between the greyhound and the humans was highlighted as we climbed the steps to the high field. His nose engaged and his body language hinted at the traces of something interesting that happened earlier, he sees first with his nose, then his eyes. With us, our eyes engaged first with him and then with the changes in the landscape we noticed... a small area of flattened grasses suggesting something, perhaps a deer, had sheltered there overnight... then feathers and blood and traces of a bird which told of a kill to sustain a life.

I have no idea what killed the bird, but foxes have been on my mind recently and I remembered the day I watched a red fox kill a bird... back in the days when fox sightings were easier - and they practically wrote this blog for me.

These days I see signs of foxes - droppings, leftovers of kills, holes leading off into the undergrowth too big for a rabbit. I see the patch of grass in the field that grows stronger and greener than the grass around it. The fertile patch marks the place where the landowner's henchmen outed the fox with a bright light at night and then shot it dead - not thirty paces from a row of houses - and left it to decompose. In their eyes a warning to other foxes, in mine a symbol of their disconnection from the Circle.

I've seen other foxes a couple of times, but I've seen plastic leftovers of shotgun cartridges littering the path near where they were living - and I wonder at their fate.

Farmers and landowners claim to be the stewards of the coutryside, to know it better than those of us in towns and cities - but they are often the destroyers and litterlouts themselves, motivated only by money.

We returned home and I thought about all of these things as I read a post by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés on her Facebook page, the part that spoke to me most was this:

"Some think all we tribal people made up our dances from scratch. Not so, we were taught by the animals. If you've ever wondered what your far back people's dances looked like, all you need do is know the animals of the land they lived on."

I know how foxes dance because they shared their secret lives with me once, but can I learn their dance? I wonder... and if I learn their dance, will I call in sightings of more than their deaths and their leftover prey?

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Dance of the Red Fox originally appeared on Taexalia on August 30, 2010.

A few photographs I had the pleasure of taking on the Isle of May yesterday...

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Isle of May originally appeared on Taexalia on June 13, 2010.

Some of my photographs of foxes collected into one gallery...

Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes)

Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes ~ Leaping Fence

Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes)

Red Fox Vixen (Vulpes vulpes) in snow

Red Fox Vixen (Vulpes vulpes) in snow

Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes) mating in snow

Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes)

Red Fox Jumping (Vulpes vulpes)

Red Fox Scratching (Vulpes vulpes)

Red Fox Mating Ritual (Vulpes vulpes)

Red Fox (vulpes vulpes) Scratching

Red Fox and Crow

Red Fox Mating Ritual (vulpes vulpes)

Red Fox (vulpes vulpes) Leaping

Red Fox (vulpes vulpes) Stalking

Red Fox (vulpes vulpes) Watching

Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes Scratching

Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes Catching Bird

Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes Catching Bird

Blurry Red Fox Kit Vulpes Vulpes

Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes ~ Leaping Fence

Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes

Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes Rearing

Skinny Tail ~ Last Photo

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Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes) originally appeared on Taexalia on February 21, 2010.

Red Fox Vulpes Vulpes

Standing on the fence
Sniffing possibilities
Blink and fox is gone!

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Fox Haiku originally appeared on Taexalia on July 9, 2007.

Misssy M aka She Who Numbers Snails has nominated me as a Rocking Girl Blogger. See - I have a sparkling pink button!

I am so touched and shocked and over-flowing with emotion about this (is that out there enough? ;-p) I will be back with my own nominations later. It's late and I'm all moused out ~ last night I was on my way to bed. I rounded the corner in the hall and became aware of a blob where no blob has been before. See there's this piece of hardboard that is part of the kitchen floor that hasn't been replaced yet, and it is leaning against the wall in the hall. It's about 4 feet tall. Well, there was this blob on top of it and when I kept moving it made a kamikaze leap to the floor.

I actually exclaimed "Holy Shit."

Mostly because I could not believe that a mouse that measures an inch tops would make such a dive and survive. Survive it did. I sighed and wondered why I always seem to be naked when I'm catching mice and grabbed the plastic pint glass that currently lives on the hall radiator for this very purpose. I did some re-arranging of clutter to limit the places the inch ball could go and got down on my hands and knees.

I have read that mice can dislocate their shoulders to allow them to get through tiny spaces. I have no proof of this, but I can tell you that a mouse can make itself so flat when it crawls under a carpet that you would not know it was there - unless you saw it go there in the first place.

Now this mouse was not as docile as my previous loo roll tube beastie, Number Four was a wee bit more feisty... more fiesty even than Number Two and Number Three. This little poppet required me to rouse Allan from his sleep and it took two people to get one inch of fluff into a pint glass. It's all Wahey in our nocturnal lives!

It was re-homed today and skittered off into the wilderness. I am not going to say that's the last one because I keep doing that and then I have to go back on my word. I look at the humane traps we have set and wonder just how redundant a piece of plastic filled with cheese really can be. Sometimes the lid clatters shut when there is no-one there and I begin to wonder if I am on candid camera.

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I Rock, Apparently originally appeared on Taexalia on July 7, 2007.

I decided to have a late afternoon shower, as those of us who are self-employed can choose to do. So I did the whole naked and soap thing and once I was nice and shiny I pushed the shower curtain back and as I reached for the towel to wrap my hair, I caught sight of a small brown mark on the floor. It was about an inch in diameter. I thought "What is that, I'm sure that wasn't there before..." (it should be noted that I do not wear my glasses in the shower).

As I wrapped my hair in a towel, it slowly dawned on me that the brown blob mark on the carpet had a tail. But it continued to sit there stock still as I dripped all over the place.

The bathroom door was closed and it seemed to be patiently waiting for it to open.

I looked around the bathroom for *something* and the only thing I could come up with was the empty loo roll tube sitting on the bin. Hooray for the person who didn't bother to take it to the recycling box!

I picked it up and plopped it over the wee moose and then stood there thinking "OK what do I do now?"

I am still dripping with only my hair in a towel but I go out into the hall and locate a plastic storage box that has been waiting for a purpose. I shoogled the wee thing and the tube into the box and as the moose came to life and started jumping I slapped the lid on.

I am not an experienced mouser - the last one we had didn't bother us much, ignored the humane traps and was eventually found dead on my kitchen floor. I imagine it was the same mouse just as I imagine that someone else in the building put down the poison that got her. So with a box with a baby mouse measuring little more than an inch, I wondered what to do next.

I phoned Allan.

He was not far from home on a bus and arrived soon after to hold the lid whilst I took a photo:

Baby House Mouse

We decided to take it to the park a little later in the evening and let it go. I popped some breadcrumbs into the box and chattered to it a bit.

About 10 minutes later, Allan yelled from the lounge that he saw another one go under his desk. I offered various implements but the hero decided to catch it with his BARE HANDS! He caught it like you would catch a kitten, by the scruff of it's neck, and carried it through to the box in the hall - it screamed blue murder, quite a tantrum for such a tiny beastie.

They seemed to know each other and huddled up together for a while before they started to go inside the tube and roll it about - at this point I considered getting a cage!

Allan later saw another mouse but wasn't quick enough to catch it, so it seems we have a nest of tiny babies. Hopefully we will catch them all!

We took the intrepid two up to the park and at first, when I opened the box, they hid inside the tube and didn't want to go anywhere. It was so cute! Then they realised they were free and skittered off into the undergrowth.

I did think of Misssy M and her snails and wondered if I should number the mice, but I decided that the idea of *knowing* they were homing wouldn't really placate me in a situation where I was feeling over run.

A situation which is not going to arise, you understand, oh Universe.

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What Is That Mark On The Carpet? originally appeared on Taexalia on July 4, 2007.