Invisible Super-Fox

More neighbor stories -- can't help it; the weather is fabulous and we spend a lot of time lounging around on the porch drinking wine and talking to them. (Great neighbors!)

Just outside our culdesac, in a house that was build by the same builder who did ours, a very nice older couple from (we think) California moved in. Great house, they spend a ton of time in the yard doing gardening and that sort of thing. They have a little white westie dog, Baxter (and, since we are terrible with people's names, they are "Baxter's People". (This is not unusual, actualy, when we lived in the old house, we used to know everyone on the block by their dogs -- Ginger's humans, 'the people who belong to Yodie', that sort of thing. We remembered every dog's name, but the people? Well, they better have nametags.)

So, Baxter's Mom (and I use that term guardedly, since I hate it when people refer to themselves as their dogs' "parents", but for the sake of brevity I'll use it here) is a very nice worman, but every single time I talk to her, she has a litany of complaints. There is always something wrong -- with the house, the garden, the weather, you name it, and she has a long, sad, rant about how things are not going properly.

About a month ago, the complaint du jour was that there was a "vicious, attack-cat" hanging around her front yard that was preventing her from leaving the house. OOOOkay. We all got a kick out of this, as the cat in question -- a big gray tomcat -- was fairly friendly.

Last night, K reported that Baxter's Mom had spent a lot of time on the neighborhood computer forum trying to figure out what sort of animal was now spraying on her back porch -- the stone pillars and the barbecue grill just REEKED, and she was at a loss as to what to do. Every night, and it was just awful. She didn't think it was cats, since she had put down Serious. Cat. Repellent and hadn't seen a cat in the yard for weeks, but she didn't know what it was and how to make it stop!

I asked what sort of cat repellent she had bought -- and discovered that she had found something called 'SHAKE-AWAY Cat Repellent Urine Granules' which contain ' (Coyote and Fox Powder) ' -- powdered urine granules from coyotes and fox, both of which we have in abundance around here. Can you see where this is heading?

Our theory is that by putting down the urine powder to keep cats out of her yard, she has actually ATTRACTED either the coyotes who have staked out Erie Village as part of their territory, or the red fox we've seen hanging around the neighborhood for the last few weeks. Probably the fox -- which would have no problem getting into their yard and are known to 'spray' to mark territory.

So, Baxter's Mom basically set up her house as "belonging" to some extra-strong, unknown, and invisible super-fox -- so the poor fox has scented an interloper in his territory, found the "den" of the invisible super-fox, and is going to keep marking it over and over and over until the dastardly invisible creature either shows up to contest his marking, or disappears. And fox urine stinks. It's worse than a cat spraying.

No wonder we've seen the fox hanging around the house lately. We usually don't see them, but we've seen this one male fox loping about just behind the house at least twice in two days.

Not quite what Baxter's Humans had in mind, I'm sure.

And the stuff is nearly impossible to get rid of -- it's marketed as being weather resistant and long-lasting. Oops!