Fearless foxes stir concern

WAYNESBORO — No longer afraid of outdoor house lights, a family of foxes has become the night fright of a Waynesboro neighborhood along West Main Street near the Waynesboro Landscaping and Garden Center.

Enough neighbors have shared their spottings to spur David Foster, 55, of Mount Vernon Street, to report the foxes to city police and officials.

How the city will respond is not yet determined, Animal Control Officer Dee Price said Friday.

Foster first saw a male and female fox earlier this month as they loped through his backyard near his pond, he said. They returned Wednesday, oblivious to his glaring motion-sensor lights.

“I looked out and it was the male by himself and he was just really taking his time,” Foster said.

Other neighbors have heard yips and clicks and one pointed Foster to a squirrel.

“What was left of it,” he said. “Just the pelt was left and it had been eaten.”

The city does not have traps large enough for foxes, Price said.

“It does bring some concern that they’re that close to a residential area,” she said, adding that foxes are common in the city.

Smaller animals can be trapped, but foxes have never caused great damage but for the killing of ducks, Price said.

Foster worries about rabies and recent reports from Charlottesville of a gray fox that bit two people in one week. A fox caught near Lambeth Field at the University of Virginia did not have rabies, authorities said after the animal’s capture, although they could not link the creature to the bites.

Foster also turned to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. That agency never traps foxes, said District Wildlife Biologist David Kocka.

“The reality is, very few of them become rabid,” he said.

In the past 18 years in the five-county Central Shenandoah Health District, officials have found rabies in 44 foxes. Skunks and raccoons each routinely turn up more than a dozen cases per year and cats fewer than five, according to health district reports.

Foxes are usually caught and killed by licensed trappers, authorities said.

Foster wants the city to pay for a trapper.

“I think we should nip it in the bud now,” he said.