vulpes vulpes

High: 33°F
Low: 21°F
Conditions: Light snow. Accumulation of 1-3 inches.

Even if the weather forecast doesn’t seem like it, spring is definitely here. We’re starting to see running water on the roads and in the wetter parts of the forest. There are buds on some of our favorite trees. Most noticeably, though, is the light: not only is there more of it, but it’s both more golden and more intense.

The latest animal to respond to this planetary shift is the red fox (vulpes vulpes). We’ve seen their tracks throughout the winter, but they’ve been few and far between. All of a sudden, though, proof of the fox is everywhere.

When I say proof what I really mean is scat. It’s unmistakable: about an inch or two long, with tapered, stringy ends and a greasy sheen.

As many of you know, fox scat is Ari’s very favorite thing. I find it disgusting. She once contracted a nasty parasite getting too intimate with a particularly rank sample. But she doesn’t care about either of these facts. As far as Ari is concerned, fox scat is the most perfect substance on the face of the planet. She lives to eat it and, on the very rare occasion when she’s too full, rolling in the scat offers an acceptable consolation prize for the caninaturalist.

Does it matter that I find this behavior disgusting? No. Or that she might get sick? Nope. Or that my house smells like fox poo this time of year? Uh-uh. Ari is hooked.

We’ve been to a lot of dog school classes. We understand the concept of “leave it.” But we’re also proponents of positive reinforcement training. And there’s the problem: no treat in my pocket could possible equal what Ari is finding on the side of the road. I know this. She knows this. And so, our walks are a crazy serpentining of two stubborn individuals with very different ideas about what constitutes a delicacy.

Clearly, we’re at a cognitive impasse.

But I did come one step closer to understanding Ari’s fascination on a recent trip to Boise, Idaho. There, in a downtown park, I spied this guy enjoying a wholesome breakfast of dead squirrel.

That’s when something clicked. Red squirrels: Ari’s second biggest obsession. When she’s not scolding them for raiding our birdfeeders, Ari spends most of her time trying to catch them. Maybe that’s part of the appeal of the fox scat: even recycled, it still resembles squirrel. Fox + Squirrel = Heaven for Ari, regardless of the form.

This doesn’t really console or appease me. And it’s not exactly the image of spring I had in mind. If digested squirrel is what the approaching season is about, I’ll take the groundhog’s frigid prognosis any day.