We were all born into a dying world. One of my first memories of an actual conversation with my mother was about the foxes. In my neighborhood in a Miami suburb where I grew up, occasionally at night we would catch a glimpse of something dark and swift in the night. A shadow, barely larger than a cat, would dart from shrub to shrub across the manicured lawns of the neighborhood. If you startled it on an evening walk, the shadow would turn to you, eyes glowing like gems before darting off into the darkness.
These shadows were the grey foxes native to Miami. “Look! A fox!” My mom would whisper. Desperately I would search, but as a child I was often too slow to pick their silhouettes out from the backdrop of night. I was desperate to see this magical creature, the fox. And while I did on occasion catch sight of them, as I grew older they became noticeably more rare. “The foxes are going away,” she told me. “People don’t like them and they are driving them out.”
My first memory of a conversation with my mother was to learn that magic was being driven out of the world. What a sad place to be born into.
A Ferret Called Wilson 
July 18, 2014 at 12:54 AM
Strangely, the opposite re:wildlife in my environ has occured. I grew-up for 1957 to 1968 on a 6 acre suburban lot near Detroit which was mostly a wooded river valley. We saw a fox very rarely, mostly when we were riding our tractor around. The fox was not afraid when the motor was on. . . I moved back when my parents died in 1998. Now, there are foxes, coyotes, deer, rabbits, hawks, crows, etc.. . . for some reason the pheasants that used to be there are gone.
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July 21, 2014 at 5:58 PM
That’s awesome! I think I remember you saying something about frogs once…
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August 1, 2014 at 10:59 PM
Well, the valley is very wet and the frogs very loud at various times during the year. My parents built the house on a hill, all glass looking down into the wooded valley–almost like a nature observatory. A few years ago we got too involved with the deer. They become pets almost in response to corn which they pursue like candy. But you can’t protect them from cars, coyotes, fighting amongst themselves, etc. The fawn are particularly vulnerable.
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July 25, 2014 at 8:09 PM
Coyotes, wolves, bear, fox, all important creatures in the food chain are being destroyed by people who don’t ‘like’ them because they just do what is natural, ie eat prey. It just happens that because of deforestation, climate change, and factory farms, these predators have lost their natural food sources and have turned to eating what we consider ‘ours’, so they are labelled pests and eliminated. We are messing with the food chain and we will suffer the consequences.
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August 1, 2014 at 11:03 PM
The destruction of which you speak is much less than it was a few decades ago. However, bears and mountain lions don’t mix well with people. At some point, people should stop moving further and further into wild areas. Kind of tragic that those with the greatest love for nature move into it and, then, help destroy it.
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August 19, 2014 at 12:54 PM
One little contrary note about living with nature. When I was a kid everyone let their dogs and cats run free in the wooded suburban neighborhood. Now dogs, except the largest, and all cats are quickly killed by coyotes and foxes if let out on their own. We adopted a wild cat a few years ago when he almost foze on a zero degree F. night. We let him roam as he wished until one day he was corned under our porch furniture by a fox. . .
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