Outfoxed (literally)

I got a kick out of this story, so I thought I'd share.
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So this coworker of mine lives on a rather large spread of land. One of her husband's hobbies is to stand at one end of the property, and whack golf balls down to the other end. The next day he repeats this exercise, only in the opposite direction. Up & down the clearing behind their house. Usually, he just leaves the 30 or so balls laying about, never cleaning them up.

Last week he notices that some of them are missing. Not many, so he figures he just overlooked them and adds more to the pile. Well over the course of a week, every one of the things disappears. He decides that someone's stealing them at night and sets out to catch the thief. Mr. Golfer sets up a motion-sensitive outdoor digital camera. First night, lots of pics, missing balls, no proof. He did get a good shot of a deer though:



He keeps this up for a couple days before finally positioning the camera about a foot off the ground and directly at the ball.

Last night he captured the culprit on film:



He estimates that this fox has gotten around 50 golf balls in the last couple weeks. Tomorrow he plans to go looking for it's den, because for the life of us we can't figure why it's so interested in the darn things.

Probably look like eggs - that's my bet anyway.

haha, great pics! Especially the second one. I'd have to agree with the egg theory. Hope the poor thing isn't swallowing them.

Very cool pic!

coco

Yeah, I guess the egg thing does make sense. Oh, and if he's swallowing them, well, there's like 50 missing. That's gonna be one bloated fox.

LOL thats great, adding to my private stash of stuff to send my pals

I'm wondering if there are more accounts of foxes behaving like this--the egg theory does sound likely to me too.

The egg theory was my first guess too. Foxes are so cute.

Fortunately, nature is kind to such foxes who are generally able to get that which they cannot digest out either in one direction or the other.

I'd seen some amusing and similar photographs from an unattended car-wash where the change dispenser was chronically short of quarters. The owner, suspecting some sort of malfeasance, auto-photographed a nest building bird of the type that has an affinity for shiny objects which had learned how to extract quarters from the change machine. Further investigation showed the roof of the car-wash fairly covered in coins.

Some type of corvid?

Here is a cute story of bird thieves.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/carwash.asp

Thanks for being my "external memory", Neehai; that was indeed where I saw the story.

It's a little-known fact that foxes are avid golfers, but not very good golfers... We go through a lot of golf balls. So scavenging them from others is perfectly understandable.

Weird... not corvids. huhm.

I have indeed heard many accounts of foxes with an affinity for golf balls. Once I even saw footage on TV of a fox running out onto the green and stealing a ball while it was in play.


(painting can be purchased here)

It's all part of the master plan... wait, did I say that out loud?

** runs off, definitely NOT carrying any golf balls... nope, none at all... **