Dead rat and ghost foxes

When I went out to collect the trail camera and saw this dead rat I thought, 'Great! I'll know who murdered Ratty!'

Just a note: when I saw the rat, I just looked and stared for about five seconds. I realised that I often do this when I see something unexpected. I just look. No thoughts, no reaction, just this sort of pointless soaking up of visual signals. Presumably it's not pointless... but it seems odd... I look for this period before I react. If I saw a tiger in the garden, I'd be breakfast before I did anything.

Evolution did me few favours.

Anyway, I brought the camera inside . I had put it out at 8:10 pm the night before. 8:30 and the cat came and ate the cat food.

At a quarter to ten, a fox appears.

I thought it was the chunky fox who left the large dump recently, but, no, this is a longer-legged fox.

Chunky came after midnight. It looks like he checks out the rat... maybe...

And it seems the long leg fox left a sausage.

Then, at 7:15 in the morning, when I was sitting in the kitchen with the lights on, another fox appears - more long-legged than the first... I think.

This fox, as you'll see, took a leaf from chunky's playbook.

Great.

But no help with the rat, next to whom, as you'll see from the front page photo, there was another shit. Maybe the rat was there already when I put the camera out. It was dark and I wasn't searching around for rodent corpses.

Still, none of the foxes look lame. I hope that means the lame one from a few weeks ago is better, rather than that it's dead.