Fox Parents Prepare For Birth (Trail Cam Results)

 There is still a layer of hard, icy snow covering the forest. There is a riverbank den in Saxonville which has been occupied by a mated pair of Red Foxes. They have had a litter of baby foxes (called kits) along that riverbank for at least the last two years. I found the family while looking for crayfish in the river around the beginning of the pandemic. 

Based on my brief research, the female fox (called a vixen) should already be in her gestation period as I type, with around 6 fetuses inside her. Neither the male nor vixen sleep inside the den. My imagery suggests that they both spend the day resting, usually being more active the more cloudy and dark the day is. They spend nighttime hunting and wandering around their huge territory. They both will stop around twice a day to sniff around the den entrance, and sometimes slip into and out of the den, probably to add bedding, or excavate. Unfortunately, my camera only captures what happens on the mound and entrance of the den, taking pictures whenever the foxes visit...

                        Vixen (Female)                                                                     Male

                                                                  Vixen                                                        Vixen                                             

As the sun sets, the vixen leaves for the night. She's probably going hunting. The two foxes also showed up at night a few times, one of those times they both showed up at the same time. They definitely plan to give birth here. At night, they tend to go inside the den a lot more often than they do during the day (probably to avoid drawing the attention of coyotes, humans, and predators to the den):

Their Common Raccoon neighbor was brave enough one night to literally walk down into the den. Luckily for the raccoon, the foxes never caught him. He was in-and-out, probably smelling the high concentration of fox piss. Maybe the raccoon was also a pregnant mother, checking to see if the den was empty...

I hope you enjoyed my photos! Let me know if you have any suggestions on where to put my camera at next. Do you guys prefer when I do video based trail cam posts or image based trail cam posts? Does anyone have any specific bird/mammal that I should focus on? Does anyone have recent sightings of herons, eagles, or bobcats? (species im trying to get photos of currently) just leave a comment below. 

Thank you for reading.