Wounded Buck and Fox Fight
With a forecast of "heavy" snow and the possibility that my low-mounted camera traps behind the house might be covered with snow, I downloaded the photographs from them late yesterday. The homebrewed cameras had a lot of photographs and the commercial camera had finally captured a video of the wounded buck --
A few days after the video was taken, the commercial camera had been relocated to a spot that the deer seemed to walk past quite often in hope of getting a better video of the buck -- that didn't happen.
But in a fitting tribute to Ah Wang's old adage "Never underestimate luck" both a homebrewed still camera and the commercial infra-red camera captured a fight between two gray foxes.
Gray fox are breeding now, perhaps it can be inferred that the cameras captured a female and two rival males. It's pretty obvious that one fox didn't want to be directly involved in the fight and quickly disappeared.
Combat appears to have begun before either camera turned on and apparently continued after the animals moved out of the cameras' fields of view -- seven minutes and nine seconds later. Midway through the video it's apparent that both animals were tired, but then vigorous fighting resumed.
The "heavy" snow never materialized, we got 6 1/2 inches before it stopped snowing this morning.
Getting that footage was an amazing achievement. The chances of that happening in front of the camera are slim, and they stayed in view!! Wow and congratulations.
ReplyDeleteIt was just luck to have gotten the fight, although the camera gets photos of gray fox every few days; occasionally two animals but never before did it get three. One fox seems to be getting the worst of it from the beginning; interestingly, it appears to assume a submissive posture at one minute and 43 seconds into the video but is not released and the fight goes on.
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