Erik Brady: I’m learning to live with foxes. But they’re starting to leave their stuffed toys everywhere!

(Not Fox News. That’s a different species.)

Until recently I never knew much about foxes. Then we discovered a family of red foxes living in our suburban backyard in Arlington, Va.

We called the folks at local animal control to come take them away. They politely said no. If the foxes are healthy, they said, there’s no reason we can’t learn to live with them. After all, these highly adaptable creatures have learned to live with us.

At first we were angry at this advice. Then, over time, we found much to admire, and little to fear, in the red foxes that are common to rural areas — and, more and more, to cities and suburbs, too.

“Foxes are our friends,” says Elise Able, who styles herself as the Fox Lady. “They are intelligent, resilient and beautiful.”

Able, who lives in a cottage on eight acres in East Concord, near Springville, is president of Fox Wood Wildlife Rescue, a small nonprofit in Erie County that she founded 30 years ago.

“Foxes are in every county of New York State,” she says. “I get calls from every town in Western New York. I get calls from all over the United States, too. I’ve gotten calls from as far away as Australia.”

The other day she got a call from Canada. That one was from me.

Six of us in the Virginia branch of the Brady family are happily ensconced just now in our cousin-shared cottage on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. We spotted a red fox trotting along the beach on our first day here. We joked that maybe it had followed us the 400 miles.

Back in Virginia, we didn’t know at first that we had a nuclear family of foxes living in a den in the bushes by our back fence. We saw only the father in the beginning. Then one day there were the mother and four kits frolicking in the grass. They were cute beyond belief.

“If you have a den in your backyard, consider yourself lucky,” the Fox Lady says. “Let the kids watch them out the…