Joined by Reynard for breakfast
It’s time for breakfast in Italy which means more delicious food and breathtaking views are on the way.
Sitting outside in October eating breakfast under blue skies wearing a light jumper is something I could get used to. Perhaps I wouldn’t be appreciating the 40 degree heat for months in the summer though.
To our delight, loping up the path, comes a beautiful Red Fox:
It’s wary and trusting at the same time. It’s in beautiful condition with a clean coat, bushy tail and bright pink tongue. The word fox actually means ‘bushy tail’.
Its ears are spectacularly mobile. Foxes can hear a mouse squeak from 100m away and pinpoint its direction to within 1 degree. That’s clearly in the realms of a superpower. The last time I saw a Fox it could hear my camera clicking from 100m away:
It comes incredibly close to us so we can see what humans interpret as a cunning smile:
In Great Britain Foxes are often seen as vermin and in need of population control. Part of the problem is that we have not just ‘upset’ the balance of nature but utterly destroyed it. We’ve made all the animals that might have been natural predators of Foxes extinct. If we hadn’t hunted and killed all our Wolves, the magnificent pack hunter, then Foxes wouldn’t be so much of an issue. If we hadn’t killed all of our Lynx, the great nocturnal ambush predator of the forest, then Foxes wouldn’t be so much of an issue.
It has long claws on its feet and long whiskers on its nose:
Then it yawns and we get to see it’s got long teeth in its jaws:
It’s got a broken tooth but those jaws are quite impressive; and what a gape!
Ever wary, it trots off. What a place to live, for people and for wildlife:
