I was chatting to a few friends online last night when someone mentioned that they had only ever seen a fox in real life once, I expressed surprise at this and others also stated that they had either never seen a fox in real life or only once or twice. And the same with sheep.
I was surprised at this as around here you’re practically brushing foxes and sheep off your desk to sit down and use your PC.
They’re a pretty widespread bunch with some from America, Russia and Europe.
I don’t think they were pulling my leg, is it really that unusual to see these two pretty-widespread animals?
On a sidenote I once saw a pitch-black fox when out for a walk on a summers evening, now that was an unusual sighting (I’m from Northern Ireland btw).
I grew up in New Zealand so I have seen a lot of sheep, however NZ doesn’t have foxes so I had not seen a fox until I moved to Australia. Unlike sheep, foxes don’t spend a lot of time munching grass in a paddock so I have not seen many foxes but every few months I’ll see one trotting along the side of the road.
I’ve seen foxes a few times, here in Maryland and one on the streets of Rye in Kent very early one morning.
Sheep, plenty of times. The UK is knee-deep in them.
A couple of weeks ago, I was on a train going out of Manchester to the Cheshire countryside; there was a little girl, not more than 3, who kept pointing out all the sheep she saw out the train windows. I thought that this must be her first trip outside of the city, if sheep were still that amazing a sight to her.
Foxes used to be quite shy here in southern Finland but lately they’ve gotten a lot bolder and I see a fox at least once per month. Broke up an impending fox vs cat fight once by bicycling past.
Not many sheep here in the city but I’ve seen plenty of them when travelling, both here and in Sweden, UK and Ireland at the very least. My cousin has a bunch of them at his farm too.
Foxes all the time; we had a family of them living in the field behind the house when I lived in the US, and I see them all the time in the fields when I take the train to school here in Southern England.
See sheep on a daily basis in the fields; I used to raise them. There’s also a huge alpaca farm between Eastleigh and Winchester that runs alongside the railway if you want to see long-necked, spitting sheep.
I have seen plenty of both over my lifetime here in Australia. Only lately it seems to me that every road trip I go on I see several dead foxes that have been hit by cars. Dead animals have always been a common sight but generally not foxes. Mind you there are supposedly over 6 million red foxes in Australia so they aren’t rare.
I’m trying to get my mind around the idea that to some people, sheep are rare.
Foxes, okay - they aren’t rare, but they’re inclined to be stealthy and definitely don’t hang in herds munching grass. But to find sheep rare in a temperate climate you’d have to act as if huge swaths of territory are off limits to you.
Yes. There are fox in my neighborhood. Not many, but one or two. No sheep wander in the neighborhood, but I have seen them in farmer’s fields in England. The farmers here by me all grow corn and soybeans, or they have cows in their fields.
Sheep are not hard to find if I drive out of the city into areas where there are farms, or go visit my friend, who has a couple of pet sheep on her little hobby farm. Foxes are far more elusive, though I have seen a few - maybe one every few years. I’m more likely to see coyotes, here in southern Ontario.
When I lived in a very rural area for a couple of years, I often heard them, and one summer I would see a couple of very young and puppy like ones playing by the side of the road when I drove home from work. I also managed to see one run off with the hen he’d grabbed right off my back deck. That was the end of free range chickens at my house.
There were sheep on a farm across the street from our high school. When the wind blew from there, ooh-boy.:o
Still younger, we lived in a small town and from time to time the Basque sheep herders would drive their flocks thru town. Sheep everywhere for an hour or two. Then all gone. Just a few men and several dogs.
I have never seen a fox in the wild despite spending a lot of time outdoors. Those areas just aren’t fox country. Coyotes are the dominate animal in that general category. So, lots of those. (And now they live around our neighborhood so we get their howling a lot.)
It would be helpful in threads like this if you told us where “around here” is.
Here in Colorado Springs, I’ve seen foxes several times – one fox was carrying a rabbit in its mouth!
I’ve seen a bear once. I may have seen a mountain lion, but it was too far away to be certain.
I personally have never seen a moose, but they wander into town once in a while. No sheep though–it’s all cattle ranching around here. I’ve also seen a coyote within city limits.
I being in the UK (where sheep are almost ubiquitous) – I need to remind myself that they are not all that often found in the US; and you folk there don’t eat their meat all that much, whereas here it is consumed in great quantity.
That said – in my childhood 60+ years ago, we lived in a small town in a very flat and low-lying area in the east of England. There and then (I gather that things farming-wise are more “mixed-up” now), livestock farming was about cattle: nobody in the area kept sheep. The only times I saw a sheep, were on family holidays to hillier parts of the country; and for the couple of weeks in summer, when a flock of sheep were brought in to spend time in the churchyard, and graze it down to a short-grass situation.
Foxes in great abundance in present-day UK, rural and urban: have seen the latter several times (and heard, more frequently), around my dwelling in the suburbs of the city of Birmingham.