Yonkers Wildlife Sanctuary
Aug. 20th, 2006 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaNo, not our basement.
We live about 1/10th of a mile from a four-lane highway (the Cross-County Parkway). There's an exit ramp off the highway that we take whenever we come home from parts east; in this particular case,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nellorat and I had gone grocery shopping at the nearby Cross County Mall.
(You can see the exit ramp on this Google Map; our house is on Valentine Street by the baseball field in center right; the exit ramp is at center left.)
The exit is noteworthy because the meadow it encloses is the home of a family of groundhogs, and whenever I drive through the exit, I slow down to look for them. I like groundhogs--they're sort of a cross between rats and wombats. So I slowed down, looking for groundhogs and didn't see any.
Instead, I saw a red fox, just sittin' there looking back at me. I cried out "Fox!" but she didn't see it. Then I saw another one, just sittin' about 20 feet north of the first one, and this time nellorat saw it too.
I am fairly certain that I have never seen a red fox in the wild before. It was marvelous.
Oh, and we have three new baby rats. Baaay-bies! Photos soon, I promise.
We live about 1/10th of a mile from a four-lane highway (the Cross-County Parkway). There's an exit ramp off the highway that we take whenever we come home from parts east; in this particular case,
nellorat and I had gone grocery shopping at the nearby Cross County Mall. (You can see the exit ramp on this Google Map; our house is on Valentine Street by the baseball field in center right; the exit ramp is at center left.)
The exit is noteworthy because the meadow it encloses is the home of a family of groundhogs, and whenever I drive through the exit, I slow down to look for them. I like groundhogs--they're sort of a cross between rats and wombats. So I slowed down, looking for groundhogs and didn't see any.
Instead, I saw a red fox, just sittin' there looking back at me. I cried out "Fox!" but she didn't see it. Then I saw another one, just sittin' about 20 feet north of the first one, and this time nellorat saw it too.
I am fairly certain that I have never seen a red fox in the wild before. It was marvelous.
Oh, and we have three new baby rats. Baaay-bies! Photos soon, I promise.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 03:27 pm (UTC)While foxes do sometimes prey on groundhogs, they generally prefer smaller, weaker targets. The adult groundhogs are significantly bigger than the foxes we saw; several web pages I just consulted indicate that groundhogs will fight fiercely against foxes and usually win unless caught completely by surprise. So I think the odds for the groundhogs enduring are pretty good.