We saw her last spring. A red fox, slightly underweight, picking her way along the back fence at maybe 5:40 in the morning. She didn't stay long — she crossed the back of the yard, paused near the brush pile we hadn't gotten around to clearing, and then was gone through the gap into the neighbor's overgrown bramble. We thought maybe we wouldn't see her again.
This morning she came back. And she had a kit with her.
The kit is small, gray-brown, fluffier than its mother. It moved like a kit moves — bouncing, distracted, stopping every few feet to investigate something invisible in the leaf litter. The mother walked a measured ten feet ahead, occasionally turning to look back. The two of them passed through the same path the mother used last year, the brush pile to the bramble gap to the neighbor's yard. The whole transit took maybe ninety seconds. We watched from the kitchen window.
Here's the thing we want to write about, which is not the fox. It's what the fox tells us about the rest of the place.
A red fox in a suburban backyard is not, by itself, a sign of high biodiversity — foxes are highly adaptable and live perfectly well in cities and suburbs, eating rodents and discarded fast food. But a red fox raising young here, in mid-April, on what is a small suburban yard, means something different. It means there is enough cover for them to feel safe. It means there's enough small-mammal activity in the underbrush to feed a nursing mother and a growing kit. It means the food web below the fox — the voles, the mice, the chipmunks, and below them the seeds and insects those small mammals eat — is functioning at a level that supports a top-tier suburban predator.
We didn't plant the fox. We didn't put up a fox-attracting feature. What we did do, two years ago, was decide to stop manicuring the back third of the yard. We left the fallen branches where they fell. We let the bramble at the back grow into the fence line. We stopped raking the back ten feet in the fall, leaving the leaf litter for whatever wanted to overwinter in it.
That decision was about insects, mostly — we'd read enough Tallamy to know that leaves are where moths and butterflies sleep. But the leaves also feed the seeds, and the seeds feed the voles, and the voles feed the fox. The fox showed up three years after we stopped raking.
The connection is real. You don't get to plan it; you just create the conditions and wait. The conditions, in this case, were "stop being so tidy in one corner." A pile of branches is not a tragedy. It is a habitat.
The kit will grow up over the next few months. We'll see her again, probably, through summer. By next spring she'll be on her own, looking for her own territory, possibly with her own kit. The brush pile, if we leave it, will continue to support whatever shows up.
It's worth saying: not every observation has to be a lesson. Sometimes a fox is just a fox, and the fact that you got to see one, with her child, in your backyard, on a Wednesday morning in April, is the whole point.
— The editors