For years, wildlife enthusiasts Dan Ballard and Jane Hunter have enjoyed capturing footage of the animals in their sprawling Austin, Texas, backyard and sharing the videos to their YouTube channel, Texas Backyard Wildlife.
Back in 2020, Ballard and Hunter were poring over footage when they saw something they never expected.
“[It’s] about the strangest but most amazing thing we’ve ever seen here on camera,” Ballard said in a video about the event.
In the footage, a mother raccoon stumbles through the brush with her kit. She seems to be searching for a safe spot to hide him for the day so that she can forage for food and water. Eventually, the mama finds a hollow tree stump. She decides this is a suitable place for her baby, so she leaves him by the log and goes to run her errands.
But it turns out, the well-meaning mama is mistaken. This stump isn’t a safe space at all. In fact, it’s very dangerous.
“This is a fox den,” Ballard says in the video. “Mama raccoon seems to be thinking that it’s actually a raccoon day care.”
At first, the father fox hisses at the baby raccoon. But then, as if understanding the little kit means no harm, he decides to leave him alone.
The little raccoon climbs down off the tree stump and into the den beneath, where the baby foxes are resting. He hides in the corner of the den, perhaps feeling nervous around these new friends. The baby foxes are initially wary of the visitor, but they soon warm up to him.
“The little fox pups come in and check on him,” Ballard says. “After a while, it seems like they decided that, ‘Wow, I guess we have a pet.’”
This behavior is very surprising. According to Wildlife Rescue League, foxes are natural predators of raccoons, and they’re especially likely to attack young raccoons, like the one who stumbled into the den.