The fox kits first starting appearing about twenty years ago. At first glance, I thought they were kittens playing in the unmown grass. They have reappeared off and on in late April ever since, sometimes with their mother, at my barn or a den down the hill from my house near a row of healthy American chestnut trees I had planted. When the foxes didn’t show up for a couple of years, I sprinkled some drops of fox attractant that my son Alec had left. It didn’t take long for a fox family to arrive, but for the first time they were gray foxes, the species native to Maine (red foxes either migrated from Canada during the colonization of New England or were imported by the British for fox hunts in the 1700s). The gray foxes are omnivores and stuck around for the summer (the kits and both parents), first eating cherries that had dropped from my trees and then sunflower seed on the ground at the bird feeders. The red foxes disappear into the woods by early June, but their scat, footprints in winter and diggings for voles are sure signs that they are nearby.