Recently my neighbour rang me. He was getting a friend in who was a competent shooter, with a plan to try and catch some of the foxes that have been attacking his chickens. He wanted to ask if he could shoot across our bottom paddock, that I could keep livestock out of the way.

As it turns out I was days away from locking the bottom paddock off anyway. We'll try and cut hay in that paddock this summer, and that requires no grazing from the end of August. I walk my dogs through that paddock most days, but we just follow a track around the perimeter, ( No one is allowed to walk on the grass!) and I don't take them there at night when the shooting would be happening. But in doing that walk in the daytime we had twice in the last week spotted a fox, near the corner of my place and the neighbour's fenceline. So yes, I was all for it, the paddock would be cleared.

As an extra I started putting small samples/snacks in a corner visible from my neighbour's verandah. If the foxes acquired a taste for the snacks and came back each night to collect them, they might present a clear target.

It sort of worked. One fox was shot, but there were two and the other one took off.

To my disappointment, our second last Guinea Fowl was killed by a fox two nights later. Theoretically they are safe from foxes as the roost some 20 metres up in a tree if they can. But the fox grabbed this one when it touched down for breakfast. Guinea Fowl are pretty tribal, and one by itself is a very unhappy bird, so I caught it and took it to my in-laws. Like us they had started with 5 Guinea Fowl and were also down to two. I really wanted the Guinea Fowl around the house as they are on record as deterring snakes. One more thing to cause me to resent foxes. ( At the moment no one has Guinea Fowl for sale, so replacing the herd wasn't an option.)

A week later though, I trapped this fox.
I keep the fox traps operational, but I have a very low success rate. I've caught three in 10 years.

But that was a week ago. A new fox has already moved into the hop farm next door. It watches us when I take the dogs for a walk after dinner. Sometimes the dogs see it and give chase, but it gives them the slip within metres. Sometimes it comes back and watches the dogs running around in circles. I can see the fox because of the way the eyes reflect a torch beam, not because I have better eyesight! Fry the Kelpie is smart enough to follow the torch beam if he hears me and sees me pointing the beam, but often he's so caught up in the chase he thinks he is giving that he selectively can't hear me.

And now, on the other end of our place, we have encountered another fox three times in the last few days. I am pretty sure it is spending time in a wombat hole, and Kobbie thinks so too. I'm not confident of Kobbie's self-preservation standards under those circumstances, so I am wary of letting him go into the hole by himself. Fry won't go in. That fox looks to be a peer of the one we trapped, relatively young, so its possible we might catch this one too. I've got the trap set up not far from the wombat hole, and there's been glowing eyes near it twice now.