[Reposted from my Instagram account]
This video began as 15 minutes in length. By cutting and speeding, I’ve reduced it to 2:45 minutes, which I think is manageable on Instagram. The parents are mostly guarding, but Mom messages a dog at 0:50, her mate deals with a dog in some capacity at 1:12, and at 2:02 a dog casually enters their denning area. The end shows what they are guarding.
FIRST DAY
0:00 First Dad does guard duty.
0:09 He leaves
0:12 Mom takes over guard duty
0:50 she messages a dog with a halloween cat scare. This segues into
1:03 kicking dirt angrily and ferociously to enforce her message, and then she charges at the dog on the other side of the railing
1:12 she appears to watch her mate negotiating with a dog — trying to keep him away, but she sees it’s not going well and so she quickly ducks into safety as her mate whizzes past her, probably in fear of the dog’s owner. I’ve stopped the motiion here because it happens so fast that you might otherwise miss it.
1:19 both parents come out to guard together — here I super-speed up the video because it’s repetitious
1:48 Mom leaves leaving Dad in charge of guarding alone
1:54 Mom returns and they both leave together
FOUR DAYS LATER
2:02 a dog ENTERS the denning area but soon leaves. Dad can’t have this, so at
2:14 Dad comes out to guard. He mostly sleeps, but you can be sure he’s ready for the next intruder. Again, I super-speeded up this section of the video.
2:41 He eventually leaves without incident.
2:44: Their pups appeared for the first time in my field camera that evening.
Again, I want to repeat and emphasize what I posted last time. Parents are *extremely* protective. They are extremely suspicious of every dog, no matter its size, and that its purpose is to grab one of their pups. This is why they are so proactively protective when it comes to dogs. In the wild, their pups would make a good and easy meal, even for small mammals like weasels. So please understand their behavior from their perspective and give them a break: walk away from them whenever you see one and keep your dogs away from them.
