A #Fox at US @StateDept today : an emissary from #Putin or Brit Hume? Photo by Steven Heydemann pic.twitter.com/E4gAEufSL0 — Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) May 23, 2014

During the federal government shutdown, a fox was hanging out on the White House grounds messing up the gardens, taking full advantage of the absence of the furloughed groundskeepers. Last month, the Wall Street Journal

about the elusive fox, which was never caught – complete with a map of locations around 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. where it had been spotted. Even President Obama has apparently seen the creature through the Oval Office windows.

Also, at the beginning of the year, a fox was regularly spotted around Capitol Hill, prompting (of course) the creation of a Capitol Hill Fox twitter account. Roll Call’s Heard on the Hill blog did a thorough job following its whereabouts.

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The Capitol Hill Fox maintains a fairly active social media presence. The fox purports that it is not political, but the animal’s most recent tweet sounded an environmentalist’s call, asking new politicians who won their Tuesday elections to “please recycle” when they arrive in Washington. Not sure if the fox realizes it was just a primary, and that any new legislators who win the November general election won’t arrive in town until next year, but nice to see it’s staying civically engaged.

So now there’s a fox spending time in Foggy Bottom. Heydemann, in an e-mail to the Loop, said he was told the State Department fox has “put in appearances in the area for some time.” He asked a security guard if someone would try to catch it, to which the guard replied, “Why should we want to catch him? He was just making his rounds.” A colleague told Heydemann, “This fox tried to join the State Department ultimate Frisbee games I play in just across the street from State one evening, too. When we rejected him, he cunningly and quickly ran away with one of our cones.”

Perhaps it’s the same fox, spreading diplomacy between the government institutions. Or maybe the one hanging out by State is a Russian spy fox, which would explain it annexing the cone.