This is the magical creature who lives at the bottom of our garden. He is a refined gentleman, highly intelligent, and partial to an afternoon nap (but only if it’s not raining). Today I tried to sneak up on the fox to get a picture of him while he was resting his eyes, but I don’t think he really appreciated being woken up by the noise of the camera clicking. This guy is so fast that he managed to lift his head after I pressed the button and before the shutter closed.

So it appears that he may have been more awake than I first thought. But why did he stay “sleeping” while I approached him, only to look up when the camera clicked? I may like to kid myself that my ninja skills are so sharp that I managed to sneak up on him, but I don’t think this is very likely when his hearing is so acute that, to him, the camera shutter is a loud noise. This fox can most probably hear my heart beating. Perhaps he heard me coming and thought “Oh, it’s that nice girl coming to see me again, I’ll just go back to sleep” until he was surprised by the unfamiliar noise of the camera and looked up as I was taking the shot. Even though I didn’t really manage to sneak up on an apex predator and get a photo of him asleep, I’m still pretty chuffed with this photo. I think it means more to me that he carried on slumbering even though he could hear me around him, instead of jumping to his feet and heading for the hills as soon as he heard me come out of the house… maybe he thinks I’m one of the good guys in the world, and that means more to me than any photo ever could.