Red Fox (20111120) Wild Horse Country

With the mercury firmly destined to stay below the -15C mark and a morning temperature of -20, Russell and I headed out wild horse country. It's a long drive, and hauling butt out of bed @ 4:30 to meet up at 5:45 is tough on a Saturday morning.   There has been a lot of logging in the area and this was my first trip up there in over a year. Things were pretty slow at first; a deer or two, here or there but really nothing special.  Slowly the numbers started to pile up, three horses, then within the hour another 14. While investigating a hillside Muley doe, we ran into a fox(35 yards).  My first for quite a while. While it was "aware of our presence" it was busy hunting. We watched, and sure enough there was the telltale signal that it was about to pounce.  I tried to capture that with the camera, but we were in heavy shade (the kind that you only experience in the mountains), so the photo's are blurry.

Overall a very successful day we managed; 20(+-) deer, 19 wild horses, a fox,  a Ruffed Grouse, quite a few Rough Legged Hawks(6-10), 3 or 4 coyotes, and wrapped the drive up with a herd of 30+ elk within 10 miles of the city limits. I am very unhappy with the shots that I took today, but I thought that I would share a couple of Fox photos with you. It looks like the camera is headed back to the shop to find out what is wrong.