Fox News: Papers Kept Disappearing. Here's How Man Caught Culprit

WINSTON-SALEM, NC — When his neighbors’ newspapers first began piling up in the lot behind his Winston-Salem home a couple of weeks ago, James Eubanks was a bit irritated. He figured some kids were having sport.

It was probably just a one-time deal, the 63-year-old retired computer analyst for Sprint Corp., decided. So he cleaned up the litter and went about his business.

Then it happened again. And again. Sometimes, Eubanks found only one newspaper. On other occasions, he picked up as many as 10 in one night.

And then Yellow Pages phone books were delivered in his neighborhood and many of them ended up in his yard, still in their plastic bags. It was time to solve the mystery, once and for all. He set up an infrared night-vision camera and got what he calls “the money shot” of the culprit.

It wasn’t a mischievous kid. It was a gray fox pup carrying the newspaper in its mouth. Any annoyance Eubanks had been feeling melted.

"It’s more funny than something to get mad about,” Eubanks told Patch. “I have never seen anything quite like this. Evidently, according to wildlife experts, the foxes were probably born this spring. They’re having a good time stealing newspapers out of people’s yards.”

Every night, Eubanks’ game camera captures about 50 shots of the three or four foxes frolicking with their bounty. The shutter is silent, so the foxes don’t know they’re being photographed as they toss the newspapers in the air and drag them around. Foxes are nocturnal, and these playful young pups are active in Eubanks' yard from about 9:30 at night to 5:30 in the morning.

“This is their way of having fun,” Eubanks said. “This is not really normal behavior for foxes, but when they’re that young, anything is possible.”

Allen Boynton, the coordinator of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission’s wildlife diversity program, agreed the theft of the newspapers and phone books is outside the norm of typical fox behavior.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” he told the Winston-Salem Journal, whose newspapers are among those that have been stolen. But Boynton noted that as residential areas expand, “people are in closer and closer proximity to wildlife, so the animals have to adapt to living in a human environment.”

When Eubanks solved the mystery and posted photos of a fox with a newspaper in its mouth on his Ardmore neighborhood’s Facebook page, it cleared up issues for people who stepped out on their doorsteps and didn't find their morning papers and called to complain. Carriers have begun hanging papers on telephone poles to, er, outfox the bandits.

On Thursday morning, Eubanks and his wife, Edith, didn’t find any stray newspapers on their property, so the tactic seems to be working. But who knows what other hijinks the foxes may come up with, Eubanks said.

“We’re in the middle of a city of 244,000 people, and Ardmore is quite wooded,” he said. “We have some gray foxes that are denning and having pups in our neighborhood, and they have plenty of places to hide.”

Eubanks figures that as the foxes mature, “they’ll move on to other things,” but for now, he’s enjoying the nightly show.

“It’s been quite an enjoyable pastime,” he said.

Photos by James Eubanks, used with permission