I took the girls to the park today, and while I was watching Hayley on the slide and pushing them both on the swings, I was mentally composing an entry about obnoxious teenagers who ruin the park for all the kids. But by the time I got home I decided that I would write about that later or tomorrow because instead I thought I would write about how we left after only half an hour because we were chased by a fox.

Okay, well maybe “chased” is too strong of a term since that’s pretty agressive. It wasn’t actively chasing us but it got way too close for comfort.

There are woods around our park, but they used to be a lot bigger. In recent years they’ve put a fairly busy street through, and they’ve built up a lot of condos. The woods get smaller every year, and the animals are finding less and less space to call home. Which would explain why a fox came out of the woods.

I was at the opposite end of the park, with Hayley on the big girl swing and Breanna in the baby swing, taking turns pushing them. The empty stroller was off to the side, away from the sand. Halfway down the path, a woman had been sitting on a bench with her baby in a stroller. She got up and I guess she was going to go home, but she decided to follow the path all the way around the loop around the park. Once she was directly opposite to us, I glanced over and saw that she was waving at something. I thought it was a cat, but worried that maybe it was a dog.

She turned around and started walking briskly towards us. Once she was within speaking range, she said, “there’s a fox over there!” I looked over and sure enough, near the big slide where Hayley had been playing just five minutes earlier, a fox was wandering around and sniffing. It wasn’t a tiny one either, it was a really big fox.

That was odd enough and it was far enough away that I immediately turned on my camera to try to get a shot. However, it decided that perhaps we had some food or maybe it was just really social, and it started coming towards us. It walked really passively, not charging, but it sort of pranced which meant it was coming too close too fast for my tastes. I’m sure it was just hungry and with so many people living where animals used to live, it’s probably used to the association between humans and food, but it’s still pretty unusual for a fox to willingly approach humans and I really didn’t want to risk taking either of the kids – or myself – to get rabies shots in the event of a bite.

I immediately told Hayley to get down and come with me, then I yanked Breanna straight out the swing. Meanwhile, the other woman was taking her baby out of the stroller and holding him up in her arms. I didn’t even bother with my stroller since I would have had to walk towards the fox to get to it, and the five of us walked calmly towards the gate, keeping a close eye on the fox since it was still following us. Once we were pretty close to the gate, it finally turned and ran off into the woods again. At that point I jogged over and got the stroller but I didn’t stop to put Breanna in it until we were out of the park and on the sidewalk.

The other mother and I both agreed that that was plenty of adrenaline for one visit to the park. Hayley really wanted to go back to play a bit more now that it was gone, but I didn’t want to take any chances in case the fox decided to return.

I’ve seen the paw prints in the snow, and I’ve always known there were foxes living in the woods but even on our hikes, I have never seen one. I certainly wouldn’t have expected to be followed by one on a regular afternoon at the park!