Monday, January 29, 2007

Is He Limping?

I wrote previously that I was concerned about a possible limp with the fox. If there was a limp, it was less noticeable on Sunday, than the previous day. With still photos it is extremely difficult to determine a limp. Regardless, here are two pairs of photos taken after his first and second run at the squirrels on Sunday morning.
In the first pair, both photos are taken with in a second or two of his hard run at the squirrel, you can see that he has his back, right paw slightly off of the ground. At the time, he was standing still. His coat is fine, just wet.
In the first of the second pair, he had just treed the squirrel and clearly has the back, right paw off of the ground. I am not sure if he was completely at a standstill in this photo.
In the last photo, he was standing perfectly still and surveying the Habitat for another squirrel. In this photo, he appears to give equal weight to all of the paws and shows no sign of favoring the back, right paw.
To give the fox an extra bit of advantage, I raked the leaves off of his normal path to the squirrels (that is, I removed the crunching sound from the dry leaves). And, I moved one of the sunflower feeders about half way closer to where the fox sits in the bush. I also removed the squirrel guard from the feeder – perhaps the fox will have a better advantage if the squirrels are atop the feeder. Within an hour the squirrels were under the newly located feeder. Only question now is, did I interfere with the environment? Will the squirrels now see the fox sitting in the brush and not come? Stay tuned.

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