Today, Timber Bear the 9-month-old silver fox is safe at home, reclining on the plush carpet of his playroom and cuddling with his lifelong friend, a Maine coon cat named Princess.
But for a nine-day stretch between Feb. 2-11, Timber Bear was on the lam, traversing a broad swath of northern Lincoln County and possibly leaving a genetic legacy among the area’s population of wild foxes.
Timber Bear’s owner, Danielle Katherina Brann, believes that the domesticated fox escaped his outdoor enclosure while she was at work on the night of Feb. 2. A friend had fed Timber his customary dinner of raw chicken drumsticks that night while Brann finished up a double shift, she said. When morning broke the next day, the fox was nowhere to be found.
While Brann traversed a widening radius, searching desperately for Timber, the friendly fox attracted attention across Waldoboro as he sporadically emerged from the woods to sprawl on the side of the road or approach residents outside their homes.
Some who spotted Timber uploaded photos of what they believed was a wild fox with extremely rare coloring to social media. The location of the posts revealed that Timber was traveling quickly.
He was spotted on Friendship Road in south Waldoboro on Saturday morning, sitting placidly in the sunshine; later, another post placed him near Sammi’s Family Entertainment Center, closer to downtown. By the next weekend, Timber had traveled more than five miles to Nobleboro, where he was repeatedly spotted haunting the woods around the fire station.
Brann, seeing these posts on Facebook, was consumed by both hope and worry. Timber was still alive — but he was proving evasive.
Brann’s worry was compounded by the fact that Maine’s fox hunting season runs until the end of February. She worried for Timber’s health, too; one photo uploaded to Facebook later in the week showed his snout bristling with a painful-looking cluster of porcupine quills.
By the second weekend that Timber was missing, the Maine Warden Service was involved in the search. Usually, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office assists with missing pets, according to Animal Control Officer Allen Oliver. Timber, however, is considered “a wild animal, even though it’s domesticated,” bringing the case under the jurisdiction of the wardens, Oliver said.
With residents and law enforcement across the area on the lookout for Timber, it wasn’t long before Brann got another call. Later that weekend, she was alerted that a group of community members had surrounded Timber. Brann immediately traveled to the location, which was more than five miles away from where Timber originally went missing.
A group of about 10 good Samaritans still had Timber surrounded and were keeping him occupied with treats when Brann arrived, she said. Wielding a juicy steak, Brann approached Timber, who she said seemed uncharacteristically jumpy.
“I went to grab him, but he got the steak and slipped away — he ran away with the steak,” Brann said.
For more than an hour, Brann and the community members attempted to capture Timber with no success.
Defeated, Brann climbed back into her car — but then, she said, she got a feeling that she needed to try just one more time.
At last, on that final attempt, Brann got a good grip on Timber’s tail. Soon she was standing with her pet in her arms, overcome with emotion.
“At first, he [growled], because he didn’t know who it was,” Brann said. “But then he started to cuddle me … I totally broke down, I was crying. I couldn’t believe it. I was thinking, is he really in my arms right now? Is this really real?”
When he arrived home, Timber Bear was visibly tired, with four porcupine quills still embedded in his nose.
Brann and Arnold Konecny, a fellow fox enthusiast, carefully removed the quills, fed Timber a hearty meal, and reunited him with Brann’s cat Princess, with whom they say Timber has a deep bond.
After nine long days of searching for her pet “everywhere, in the cold, in the dark,” Brann said that having Timber home brought her immense relief.
“I was just so happy he was here,” she said.
Brann credited the community members who helped corner Timber Bear with being essential to his recovery. Many of them recognized him from online posts, including on a Waldoboro community Facebook page, which helped raise awareness that the fox catching residents’ attention was in fact a missing pet.
The online discourse around Timber Bear was not all positive, however, with some commenters sharing beliefs that wild animals like foxes should not be kept as pets. Commenters pointed to the high amount of exercise that foxes require, with some suggesting that keeping wild animals in enclosures was inhumane.
Foxes require up to three to four hours of exercise each day to stay healthy and happy, according to the charity Save a Fox Rescue.
Others openly doubted whether Brann owned the exotic pet legally.
Though foxes of Timber Bear’s coloring are known colloquially as “silver foxes,” they are in fact uniquely colored variants of the common red fox, also known by the Latin name Vulpes vulpes. Red foxes exist in the wild throughout Maine, but coloring like Timber’s is extremely rare in the wild.
Whether wild or captive-born, keeping a Vulpes vulpes as a pet in Maine is only possible with special, costly permits from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, according to the department’s website.
Brann told The Lincoln County News on Feb. 12 that she had the correct permits to own Timber Bear.
“I have him completely legally,” she said.
Brann purchased Timber from a permitted fox breeder earlier this year. He is the product of generations of carefully paired crosses that have made him a “true silver fox,” she said.
Those silver fox genes, highly valued in the pet trade, might be slightly more common among Lincoln County’s wild foxes in the future. Timber was in heat when he escaped, said Brann, who added that she was almost certain he had run off to follow the scent of female wild foxes.
Fox mating season in Maine happens around this time of year, so time will tell whether Timber Bear did indeed father any silver fox progeny during his time on the run. If Brann’s suspicions prove true, uniquely colored young foxes may be born in the Waldoboro woods this spring.
For now, though, Timber Bear is resting, snuggling with Brann and his feline friend Princess, and recuperating from his adventure. For her part, Brann said that, this summer, she plans to build another fence.
This article appears through a media partnership with The Lincoln County News.
