Extra! Extra! Newspaper Circulation Is Up Among at Least One Area Demographic Group.

You may have heard that nobody has time for newspapers anymore. Don't believe it.

Someone in Beverly Turner's Alexandria neighborhood is obsessed with newspapers. Of course, that someone lives under a tree and marks her boundaries with a squirt of urine.

Beverly and her husband live near the Potomac River in the Yacht Haven subdivision. She says they're surrounded by urban foxes, one of which has made a home in the hillside of their property. This particular fox collects newspapers, including The Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Examiner and the Mount Vernon Gazette.

"We wake in the morning to find our neighbors' newspapers dragged into our yard," Beverly wrote. "A line of sometimes six newspapers, or a pile of more, will slowly disappear over the crest into a hiding place under the roots of a large oak tree. . . . I hate to think of the calls our Washington Post carrier is receiving."

I wondered if perhaps the fox was shredding the papers up for bedding, but Beverly said she didn't think so. The papers are intact, with a few teeth marks on the plastic bags. "We think maybe the mother is teaching the kits how to drag their prey or to hunt."

Just trying doing that with a laptop.

Speaking of animals, Rockville's Jim Nichols pilots one of those landing craft for D.C. Ducks. Weekend before last, he was turning the corner from Pennsylvania onto 15th Street with a load of 28 passengers when they noticed a small crowd peering over the fence that surrounds the Boy Scout statue on the Ellipse. Eyes were drawn to a red-tailed hawk, apparently one of the pair I wrote about last week. It was standing atop one of the statues, eating a blacksnake.

"What a show!" wrote Jim. "We had to move on, and the hawk was gone by my next trip down the street. . . . It certainly did show out-of-town visitors that D.C. is not just a big city of pigeons and pedestrians, though, but of all sorts of wildlife."

Send a Kid to Camp

Forget snake. Wouldn't a hamburger taste good about now? How about a classic Clyde's burger? That's the special today at area Clyde's restaurants and the Old Ebbitt Grill. At $9.25, it's a steal, and a portion of the proceeds will benefit Camp Moss Hollow, the summer camp for at-risk kids.

Vegetarian? You can make a tax-deductible gift by sending a check or money order, payable to "Send a Kid to Camp," to P.O. Box 96237, Washington, D.C. 20090-6237. Or contribute online by going to http://www.washingtonpost.com/camp and clicking on the donation link. To use MasterCard or Visa by phone, call 202-334-5100 and follow the instructions on our taped message.

Here's another way someone's making the summer nicer for kids: Yesterday Bill Duggan took more than 30 D.C. kids to his house in Dewey Beach for four days.

The owner of the Adams Morgan bar Madam's Organ has been doing it annually since 1996, since a trip back from the beach took him down Seventh Street NW and past a decrepit playground. "It looked so horrible: all the glass out there, guys drinking out of bottles," Bill said. "I sort of felt guilty that my kids were at the beach and this is what these kids had to look forward to for the summer."