Today, we discovered that we had an intruder sometime in the last 24 hours. We found a reel of wire flung across our Great Room and badly chewed. It was our double insulated 4mm cable for our Solar Panels which is very annoying.
Chewed-cable
But, we also discovered that lots of our windows have been clawed and ripped as well, the plastic showing plenty of damaged. Boxes of things shredded and strewn around.
Window-bottoms-clawed-to-bits-1
Window-bottoms-clawed-to-bits-2
Window-bottoms-clawed-to-bits-3
Window-bottoms-clawed-to-bits-4
And a bin bag full of scrap cloth and the contents scattered too.
Rags-strewn-around
It seems that we had the company of a fox, probably a youngster who was just exploring. We had taken to opening the Conservatory door wide open during the day while we worked on the roof installing the metal brackets etc. and this fox took the opportunity to sneak in and have a play. We know that it must have been either yesterday afternoon when the reel of wire was chewed because we had moved those reels of wires that very morning and of course, they were fine.
Then, we were working upstairs and discovered more evidence, this time a patch of water right in the corner of the floor and at first, we thought that we had a leak but we didn’t have any rain for days! But, the smell gave it away, it was urine! O Boy! This was the afternoon and it was quite hot so we were surprised that it hadn’t all evaporated away by now, if the intruder was only around during the previous afternoon. But, now, perhaps we accidentally trapped the fox indoors when we locked up the place last evening and it couldn’t escape. We had a look around everywhere and even lifted up the hallway hatches to look underneath but there was no signs of it, no paw prints in the dust. No signs of it upstairs, hiding in the corner etc.
At the end of the day we left out a bowl of water and a plate with a slice of ham on it, and put it in the middle of our Great Room and went home.
Lo and behold the food was gone in the morning, so the intruder was still inside…
We had another search and still could find no sign of it. We left the doors open whilst searching and saw a fox trot past a windows and thought it had left! But to be certain we put some more food down after closing the doors again.
We came back later and the food was gone again. So we decided to leave the conservatory door ajar in the evening and we smoothed the sand outside the door to show tracks.
We checked the sand about 9pm and saw a lovely set of tracks leaving the house! So we shut the door and sighed in relief that the poor ‘Fox’ had escaped.
We will be closing the doors when we are not in the house in the future….