What do we have here? Is it possible it is responsible for this from a few years ago?

Mount Pleasant, Winter 2010 and 2008

RED ALERT! Spotted by Darrow Montgomery at Hains Point yesterday! Vulpes vulpes at the District's extremis! That's right, I'm talking about foxes! Not the kind that make you look over your sunglasses like Baby Eddie Van Halen in the "Hot for Teacher" video (appendix 1, below), the kind that have bushy tails, used to get hunted in Chevy Chase, eat squirrels, and often star as villains in Beatrix Potter books! RED FOXES! IN HAINS POINT!

"They're more common than you might think," says John Hadidian, director of urban wildlife programs at the Humane Society of the United States. When he worked for the National Park Service 15 years ago, Hadidian says, he'd occasionally get phone calls from reporters all...worked up because they'd seen foxes in D.C.

"They can live in a lot of different places," Hadidian says. "In London, they live under people's sheds. People like them."

Indeed, the U.K. has a thriving urban fox program, as evidenced by this page from the Trafford council, which in addition to a nice history of fox life in British cities, gives reasons why an American-style response to garden pests won't be undertaken in the North of England anytime soon: "Shooting is obviously not acceptable in urban areas, nor is snaring, and so only live trapping is left." (Shooting not acceptable in urban areas! You're so cute, England.)

Foxes in the District tend to stay in wooded areas, like Rock Creek Park, Hadidian says. But golf courses have their advantages, fox-wise, as well. "They're not changing all the time," he says, "and human presence is kind of limited, too." Also: "They have great sightlines."

You mean for PREY? "They're not just carnivores," says Hadidian, who seems determined to let the air out of the sensationalism I'm trying to pump up here. "Squirrels are a good part of their diet," he says, but they also eat vegetation.

This may be a fox print. It could also be a dog's. "Interesting that it looks like a cat track is next to them," says Hadidian in an e-mail.

How about Canada geese? "They could," Hadidian says, "but the thing people don't realize about foxes is even a big adult male will weigh about 15 pounds." A full-size Canada goose will weigh that much or more. (Though: Wouldn't it be Internet gold if they fought?) Foxes could go after goslings or goose eggs, Hadidian allows when pressed on the subject.

OK, so the geese are probably safe. But what about people? Surely someone blasting through Hains Point on a bike at 30 mph could fall and get eaten?

Attacks on humans are "extremely rare," Hadidian says. "They almost always involve an animal that is sick or compromised." Or fed by a human. Do not feed foxes. They might bite you.

Don't listen to overblown media reports, either. "This is mating season," Hadidian says. "So you're gonna see and hear about fox activity."

Photographs by Darrow Montgomery (except VH screengrab, which is by me)

appendix 1

Zoo, 1991

Fish Count, 1987

Full gallery after the jump

Winner after the jump

Today I leave the best job I ever had, and that counts a brief stint at Trader Joe's where I tried to get health care after knocking over several cases of Two Buck Chuck with my ass. As asst. managing editor at Washington City Paper for the past two and half years, my job has been mostly plumbing, behind the walls, keeping things running without a nasty backup. But one cannot be merely a plumber and still be employed at an award-winning alternative weekly decimated by its ownership in the digital age. One has to blog.

I know all of you loyal City Desk readers have been following my posts with great vigor. And, so, as my parting gift to you, I give you the highlights of my tenure here (critters, baking, dudes living in their basements, Michael Phelps, D.C. brunch culture [FYI: It still sucks], and did I mention Michael Phelps?), as well as a super sappy goodbye.

First, I want to thank all of the commenters who agree with me regarding Sarah Palin and her inferiority to owls. Because do you know what? Owls are awesome and Sarah Palin is not. I stand by my original post. If you like that one—and so many of you did—I would encourage you to please check out my ongoing reportage on critters, including the saga of Lucy the Ninja Dog, ways coyote piss can rid this city of rats, and the adorable cuteness of this bedbug-sniffing beagle.

There were also a number of you who could not hold back the love when it came to my take on brunch. For the record: I am not leaving D.C. because of my hatred of its brunch culture. But it never entered the plus column. And, although I continue to believe what I wrote, I recently discovered that the city I am moving to has a "jazz brunch." So it seems this paticular sort of suck is not limited to the D.C. metropolitan area. I plan to take down brunch culture in greater Missoula, Mont., in the next incarnation of my career, so stay tuned.

And, unlike this guy, I do plan to have a career that takes me very far away from both my parents' basement and Brazillian "game." Thanks, Roosh V, for the memories.

But if my life as a brunch-taker-downer falls flat, I can always fall back on my many successes as a baker. I just don't know if the Marcello Goldberger Brown Sugar Chocolate Chunk Cookie will have a wider audience.

I do know that I have had the opportunity at City Paper to work with amazing, talented, tough people who make me laugh and challenge me as a journalist and who made me love my job. Among them are the above gentlemen, pictured hanging out in my old cube: Joe Eaton, Jason Cherkis, and Darrow Montgomery. I especially want to thank my bosses, Andrew Beaujon and Erik Wemple. I have never worked for finer people. I now join a cast of alumni who've left reluctantly, realizing it probably doesn't get any better than this.

Looking back on my work here, it's possible that blogging may not have been the strong suit for an old gal who started in newsrooms that didn't have Internet, but I didn't come here to become a great blogger.

I came here to be a part of something great. And I was. Thank you, colleagues and readers, for all of it.

In a posh hotel in downtown D.C., Dixie, a beagle mix, is sniffing out bed bugs. She can find them in walls, under carpets, and mixed up with cockroaches inside a spinning training device. Mattresses, the most common hiding place for these seed-size suckers of human blood, pose little challenge.

“She only gets fed if she finds a bed bug,” says her trainer and handler, Blaine Lessard, as he reaches into his belted pouch for a piece of kibble.

She seems kinda skinny, I say, and wonder if this incentive-based feeding is providing all of Dixie’s nutritional needs. “Well, these kinds of dogs do run lean,” he counters. And, in truth, Dixie’s perfectly energetic and beagle-like as she follows Lessard’s command—Seek!—to sniff the room’s perimeter.

The hotel room is clean. The bug Dixie keeps hitting on is inside the big wheel sitting on the floor. It spans about four feet in diameter with spokes that end in plastic containers, each of which holds either a bed bug or some other scent-giving item designed to throw Dixie off.

Since she’s trained exclusively on bed bugs her entire life—about nine months—she is rarely, if ever, thrown off. “I have complete confidence in her,” says Lessard, who once witnessed Dixie pointing him to a hotel closet, even though he could find no evidence of a bug. She did the same thing in the room directly above and in another room directly above that one. A technician finally found a relatively small infestation inside the wall.

Dixie’s training began at the Florida Canine Academy before she moved in with Lessard and his family on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Both Lessard and his beagle-mix are in the employ of Western Pest Services, an extermination outfit with 24 offices, mostly in the eastern U.S. The dog is part of Western’s preventive market: If she finds a bug or two, the company’s pitch is that you can nip that problem before it becomes a full-on infestation. If she doesn’t find anything, well, go ahead and go to sleep without waking up with that creepy feeling you’ve got bugs in your sheets.

Her territory covers D.C. and Baltimore, but she’ll go as far as Virginia Beach and Philadelphia. She does need to get fed, after all. Prices start at $300 and go up from there depending on the type of building, how many rooms it has, and how long it takes Dixie’s nose to cover the premises. According to Lessard, she can cover 120 hotel rooms in one day of work.

He says he knows of "maybe one" other bug-sniffing dog in the D.C. region; an Internet search only pulled up Western's dog service. In NYC NY BedBug Dogs says it's been in business for 40 years.

According to Western Pest Services, the customer base here, which also includes hospitals, nursing homes, college dorms, apartment houses, and single-family homes, is starting to pick up. The other uptick comes from the bed bugs themselves. There are simply more of them.

The National Pest Management Association says that since 2000, bed-bug complaint calls have increased 71 percent. Every state and the District has had an outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control, although the CDC doesn’t have an accurate accounting; every municipality handles the problem differently.

In D.C., anecdotal evidence—including the creepy-crawly cover story we ran about bed bugs in Logan Circle and elsewhere—suggests the problem’s getting more serious. In March, the local Dept. of Health organized its first bed bug summit. There's also a Web site to register local infestations.

So what’s happened? Why does this pest now need specially-trained dogs and DOH summits? It’s actually a fairly recent problem. After World War II, the bed bug in the United States was pretty much a nonentity. DDT eradicated it. But DDT isn’t an acceptable pesticide for reasons illuminated by Rachel Carson, among others. As more people traveled the world, bringing back these notorious little hangers-on, colonies grew and they also grew resistant to common treatments.

Nowadays, says Lessard, “if you’ve one or two bugs in a room, you’re done.” And finding one or many? It has nothing to do with cleanliness. Five-star hotels fall victim. OCD clean freaks get them. Once your home's infested, two of the more common ways exterminators will treat your home is with freezing chemicals or heat; a friend in D.C. recently vacated her home so that technicians could blast the place with space heaters. It appears to have taken care of the problem.

One solution not to try? Diesel fuel around the bed. For more about that, read our cover story. Got a solution or a bed bug story of your own? Let us know in comments.

Photographs by City Paper Staff Photographer Darrow Montgomery

I learned that early this morning. Exiting my Petworth abode, I spotted a squirrel scampering pell-mell down a tree across the street. Was he fleeing a jealous mate? Had my roommate's snakes gotten loose?

Neither, it turned out. The squirrel had merely trespassed on a robin's nest, and the robin was not amused. It pursued the frantic rodent down the tree, up the street, through gutters, under cars, and finally onto my lawn, before the squirrel sought asylum within the wooden latticework of my porch.

Home free? Not a whit. Sounds of scuffling indicated that the robin, unflappable, had broken through and was now tormenting a beast three times its size. By the time the ragged combatants emerged, the robin had clamped his beak to the squirrel's tail. A great general flailing ensued; then, mutual retreat. Peace, or something like it, had been restored.

Are the robins particularly mean this year? Do they have ancestral beef with the squirrels? Has anyone seen anything like this before?

Photograph above by photoholic1