I've been told these blog posts have too much death and dying in them.

Its not meant to be a grim catalogue.

Most of the time our animals are happy and healthy. There will always be a percentage of deaths, and we do have a few animals on the place, so mathematically there will always be a recent death. Also, there are peaks, such as lambing season, where the "normal" death rate for newborn lambs can be as high as 30%. (Most of the time we have a lamb death rate of less than 10%, except for one horrible winter where more than 50% died.)

Anyway, here's another death and dying story.

A few weeks ago we had Erick here for about a week. I better stop this story now and re-assure people who know him...."Erick is fine!" We handed him back, and he's been back for another visit recently.

So, a few weeks ago he was here for a brief holiday. Despite being very old, and missing a back leg, he is a happy, energetic dog, and a relentless hunter. Sometimes it can be difficult to manage him here. For example, this time there was a fox den down on the riverfront, somewhere in the neighbour's place. The fox nightly was coming through our place, leaving a scent trail, and if I wasn't paying attention Erick (and his partner in crime, Cleo) would take off and follow the trail, even if it meant disappearing into the neighbour's for an hour at a time. It wouldn't matter how loud or long I called, they wouldn't come back until they had exhausted themselves and all possible locations of the fox.

I knew it was a fox they were after. As foxes often do, it eluded the dogs by doubling back, and I was standing near the corner of the two properties when it popped up right next to me and took off. They are usually impressive looking animals, and this one was a beauty...huge, for a fox, with a vivid red coat.

I let my neighbours know they were hosting a fox...they have chickens, whose pen was 100 metres from where we saw the fox. From then on I altered the usual walk so we didn't go past that corner, and that way avoided them being tempted to go into my neighbour's place.

As a replacement path for the walk, I started doing a circumnavigation of the goose paddock. If you are familiar with this blog you will know:
- theoretically the goose paddock was designed to be fox-proof
- recently wombats have trashed the fence and it is no longer a safe haven
- we no longer have geese, as we are trying to get grass and trees to grow in this paddock and the geese were cropping those plants to death

Our dogs and the visitors love the goose paddock, and its pretty interesting with the scent-trail of wombats crisscrossing the place. Erick fearlessly dives into each wombat hole. Similar holes outside the goose paddock are often colonized, or at least shared, with rabbits. Erick can disappear down a hole for an hour, and come out muddy from nose to tail with a rabbit. It worries me, but its difficult to get in front of him and head him off. He might disappear for an hour, but he has always come home.

But this time he went down the hole and wouldn't come out. I knew which one it was, I had seen him go in. There was a lot of freshly dug soil at the mouth of the burrow. It was an active burrow, currently being renovated.

I called, got down into the dirt and stuck my head down the tunnel and called...I could hear him sniffling and growling, but no sign of him. We have a park bench sitting overlooking the goose lake. Its on the high side of the dredgehole, so it gives you a good view. So I went and sat there, contemplated the view and waited for Erick. After about 20 minutes Erick emerged from the wombat burrow. I called him, annoyed by now. He looked across to where I was sitting, held my gaze for ten seconds...then went down the hole again.

I gave up, and with the other dogs went home.

About 20 minutes later Erick trudged across the paddock towards the house, I could see him coming. He was walking very slowly, and as he got closer I realized, with horror, he had blood on his face. I went and collected him and brought him home. I cleaned him up, looking for a wound, and freaked out when I found a puncture wound on either side of his snout. Snakes are not uncommon in that paddock, and I have seen a huge red bellied black snake right on that spot two years ago. I calmed down and reasoned it out...it was August, no snakes likely to be awake yet from their winter hibernation. And he walked back by himself. If he'd been bitten by a snake he probably wouldn't have made it back.

In the end I decided it was either a cat, or a fox. Their teeth and bite marks might match Erick's wound. A day later I trapped a cat, and that made me close the topic off and I filed the episode away.

Since then I've seen the big red fox a few times, as recently as last week.

But yesterday we drove past it, dead, in the goose paddock, right next to the wombat hole that Erick had been interested in.

As I said, I only saw it last week, so this must have been a recent death. It was still in pretty good condition. The birds that prey on carrion hadn't seen it yet, indicating it was new. The blowflies had started their work, but the maggots were tiny and just getting started. So, it had only died in the last 24 hours or so. Nothing to do with Erick's visit in August.

The photo doesn't really match my words! Its not very red now...but it was when it was alive! It doesn't look very big in the photo, but it is!

So what killed it? Foxes get shot around here, but none of my neighbours would shoot into that paddock, its too unsafe. And there was no bullet wound. In fact, no wound that I could see, although I didn't handle it or turn it over.

What I did see though was that it had been dragged through sand. It was encrusted in fine yellow sand.

Sand is a rare soil type at my place, but when a wombat digs out a burrow the mining tailings are usually clay that's been finely processed, and looks like sand. The fox, it appears, had been dragged out of the wombat burrow through the soft sand.

So, that's about as far as the detective work goes, the rest is guesswork. It could be that the wombat reacted to the fox entering its burrow. Wombats can crush an intruder against the burrow wall.

It could be that my Kelpie Fry found the crushed fox in the burrow and dragged it out.

It might be more personal than that. Fry hates foxes, and I have seen him catch a fox cub and shake it like a rat. He is big and strong enough to deal with an adult fox. Maybe it was him. ( But the fox would have, at least, some surface wounds.)

Maybe someone poisoned it. Fox baiting happens in the national parks, and State forests, but its publicized. There's never been any baiting really close. But maybe someone local got sick of the fox issue and did their own baiting.

Its for that sort of reason I try really hard to keep my dogs on my property, because if someone is running a rogue baiting program, a wandering dog it at a high risk.

There's a country version of a street party happening in a couple of weeks. The local CFA is putting on a start of fire season "are you ready?" bbq, and locals are invited. I'll ask around about foxes and how people are dealing with them.