When you’ve been a reporter for a while, you start to think that you’re prepared for anything. But I definitely wasn’t prepared to run into a fox on a quiet Park Ridge sidewalk on Dec. 4.
I had just wrapped up an assignment in Niles. I planned to stop by Uptown Park Ridge to have lunch at Pickwick Restaurant before it closed. Uptown wasn’t that far from where I was, and I decided to simply walk.
And so, I was making my way down Prospect Avenue when I saw an orange creature standing in the middle of the sidewalk. For a second, I thought it was a dog, but I realized almost immediately that no, it couldn’t be it. The head was all wrong.
The fox just stood there. It looked around, across the street, and around again.
I was afraid that, if I got any closer, I would spook it. So I took out my camera, zoomed in and tried to get a few shots.
The fox stayed in the same spot.
After getting a few shots, I decided to walk closer. It moved away, but it didn’t run. It just put some distance between us.
As I got closer, the fox dashed off, toward the trees by a fence. In seconds, it was out of sight, as if it was never there at all.
But not before I managed to get a few more-or-less decent pictures.