A coastal family has been left shocked and amused after discovering a young fox has been stealing shoes from their back door in the dead of the night.
It all started when Emily Marney's 10-year-old son's running shoe went missing from their property in Denmark on Western Australia's south coast.
"We had no idea where he lost it — or at least that's what we thought had happened," she told the ABC's Peter Barr.
"Then on another night, my husband was walking back to the house and there was a fox cub.
"He tried to get it to come and say hello ... it was like a dog and came right up to him.
"About an hour later, we were missing another shoe."
A pink shoe was next
Ms Marney's mother was the next victim, losing one of her pink running shoes.
"It was then that we thought maybe the fox had taken it," Ms Marney said.
"We decided to set up the iPad overnight to record and see what would happen when we put our son's remaining runner out.
"Three hours later at about 2am, the fox came and just took it straight off the step."
The dogs slept through it
The family had sprinkled dog biscuits near the shoe, but the fox showed no interest in the food.
"He just came and got the runner and off he went," Ms Marney said.
"So now he's got a full set of Nike runners and one pink Reebok runner that's my mum's and we also think he has a pair of goggles because they have gone missing.
Ms Marney said the fox thief had been a source of entertainment at school with many of her son's friends finding the incident highly amusing.
"We've been setting up the iPad every night to see if it comes back and tries to find more things," she said.
"But we're not leaving anything out anymore."
A few days after the video identified the fox thief, Ms Marney said her mother's missing runner turned up in a paddock ... missing just the shoelaces.
