A funny thing happened on the way to photograph curlews for a UK magazine article earlier this summer. We were waylaid by a family of fox cubs playing around their den, about a half mile from our home. It was frustrating we hadn’t gone that way for several weeks and stumbled across them sooner, because they were clearly already well grown when we met them. We only had three evenings’ photography in their company before they dispersed, evenings which we had to share with a million ravenous midges that refused to socially-distance from us.

Although we had to contend with low light conditions and the wily cubs’ eventually outfoxing us, they were a surprise highlight of our lockdown summer.

The cubs were fabulous to watch, close enough for us to make a decent picture, full frame, using our 500mm and a 1.4x converter, with the surrounding hills for context, but not so close for us to inhibit their crazy, playful cub behaviour as they practised their pouncing skills; chasing and tormenting each other at lightning speed. Shame they didn’t hang around long enough for our lockdown-slow brains to twig we could have maybe got some tighter shots with our rarely-used 2x extender. Oh well, in photography you live and learn.

The encounter summed up early summer 2020 in Northumberland National Park, before the ‘staycation’ tourists arrived to explore our tranquil beauty spot in larger numbers than usual.  At one point on our foxy stake-out we even had a young brown hare totter right up to us on the lane, on its evening constitutional between meadows, to say ‘hi’.

Now every time we drive past the den site, no matter what the time of day, we always peer in that direction as if by looking hard we could somehow summon them back up. We know full well there’s nobody home now, but there’s no harm just checking…