My parents bought their house in Toronto's beaches area 43 years ago. It has a steep backyard with an undeveloped forest-like strip across the top and neighbouring properties, connected to a network of ravines in the area. Urban foxes, being nocturnal, seek safe resting places for the day, often in the sheltered yards of elderly people. Between 1999 and 2001, my parents' trimmed shrubs became a locus for them. On a sad and ominous note, most of the foxes that I photographed there - as many as nine at one time - have succumbed to the disease called sarcoptic mange. They are gone now, almost as quickly as they appeared, three years ago. The Urban Fox Project is a continuing exploration of their presence, and of the issues effecting foxes in downtown Toronto.

The Urban Fox Project draws on footage from my extensive archive of digital video of urban foxes, tracing peak population density in 1999-2000, through the decline in 2001 due to trapping and sarcoptic mange.

I have included some of the fox imagery in two previous projects : the video ‘Animal Movies : Fox Past’ (2000) and the CD Rom ‘fox : future’ (2001)*. Screenings for these projects include the Brooklyn Film Festival, Hot Docs, Pleasure Dome’s ‘Blueprint for Moving Images in the 21^st Century, the Canadian Documentary Retrospective at the American Museum in Washington, the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival and Cinemateque Ontario