Ray’s midnight meeting with friendly fox

A Mullingar man who went to his yard late on Tuesday night of last week was stunned when he turned around to find he wasn’t alone: just yards from him stood a beautiful fox.

“I was amazed that he did not just take off straight away,” said Ray Sheerin, who had never been so close to a fox before.

Little expecting that he would ever manage to capture a shot of the animal on his camera, Ray gingerly pulled out his phone as the fox looked on, and for five magical minutes he did a Facebook Live broadcast as the fox explored the yard, entirely untroubled by Ray’s presence.

As it happens Ray’s wife witnessed the whole episode via their CCTV system, and Ray was later able to view that footage and marvel at how close such a normally-shy creature had come to where he was standing.

“It was around a quarter to midnight on Tuesday, and I have a small gym in the yard and I wanted to fit in a 20-minute workout,” says Ray, an electrical contractor who is also the Irish franchisee for the ‘Hotworx’ gym network, which is about to re-open in Galway after the long lockdown.

“I then spotted the fox – and he didn’t seem too perturbed that I was there.

“I walked over to the shed that has the gym in it, and he didn’t seem to run away, so I squatted and turned on the video and thought: ‘this is incredible’.”

Ray admits he doesn’t know enough about foxes to estimate how old it was, but says that size-wise it was about the same as a collie dog.

“It felt like as though if I put my hand out to him he’d have come over, but I didn’t do that because I didn’t know if he might bite.

“It really was one of those moments you didn’t want to end.”

There was a great reaction on Facebook, but Ray admits that he won’t be doing anything to encourage the fox to return to his yard, which is beside the Andean Alpacas farm run by Paul O’Brennan at Cullionbeg.

“Last year for the three children we got some hatched eggs and so we have hens, ducks and quails, and so we don’t really want the fox to be coming around the fowl,” says Ray, explaining that Thomas (6), Ciara (8) and Edel (13) treat the poultry as a small enterprise.

“The cages are even pine marten proof so I knew they were safe,” he adds.