Difficult as it may be to believe, given all the time I have spent afield over the past decades, I have not yet seen a fox in the wild. Although Red Foxes, Vulpes vulpes, do inhabit the entirety of the northern hemisphere, including the Pacific Northwest where I live, I have never once seen so much as the swish of a tail or the twitch of a ear. Consequently, given the old adage “out of sight, out of mind,” I have never had much of a reason to devote any significant amount of time to learning about them.
However with the recent publication by Bloomsbury of Mike Unwin’s volume Foxes in the RSPB Spotlight series, I now have not only what looks to be an excellent introduction to these elusive creatures, I have a new reason to devote a bit of time and effort to becoming more familiar with them so that should I someday actually encounter one in the field I might be better prepared to make more meaningful observations of it.