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The Sedgefield golf community, home of the Wyndham Championship, started in the late 1920s as a place to play for golfers and fox hunters.

More than 80 years later, the golfers remain. Gone are the hunters, horses and hounds.

The Sedgefield Hunt, organized in 1927, still chases foxes — and now coyotes. Only the club does so in northern Guilford, Rockingham and Caswell counties and in Virginia.

The hunt had to leave its namesake location, with its miles of bridle trails, in 1959 because of increased development.

The foxes didn’t get the message that their services were no longer needed. They have stayed and multiplied.

Mary Christine S. Kostainschek, a Sedgefield resident, enjoys walking along Forsyth Drive, where the clubhouse is, “and seeing their heads pop up,” she says about the foxes.

Keith Wood, Sedgefield’s course superintendent, loves being out early in a golf cart with his yellow Labrador, Abby, and seeing fox pups.

They play on the arched stone bridges over the Sedgefield course’s 12 streams.

“There are a couple of families that have dens throughout the property,” he says. “It’s fun watching them grow up. You’ll see a parent fox running across a fairway with a goose egg in its mouth.”

Is he sure that’s not someone’s golf ball?

Wood says Abby’s ears prick up and she starts sniffing when a fox comes into range.

The dog doesn’t give chase.

The foxes look at Abby and Wood curiously.

They aren’t pets, however. Come too close, and they’ll scurry.

Wood says he’s sure these are red foxes, the choice of fox hunters, although Kostainschek thinks they might be gray foxes, slightly larger and slower than the red.

According to Wood’s theory, the foxes are the descendants of those imported by a hunt club founder, Jim Hendrix, in 1927, about the time the Sedgefield golf course opened.

According to the hunt club’s Web site, Hendrix raised the pups in the hollow of an oak in Irving Park, another ritzy neighborhood about 10 miles from Sedgefield.

When the foxes were grown, Hendrix freed them.

How the animals knew to make their way to Sedgefield where they were needed isn’t explained.

When humans have abandoned a spot in Sedgefield, the foxes have moved in. Wood says dens can be found at the site of the old Manor House, scene of many grand parties and balls before it was torn down.

Dens are also within the dense growth of what used to be the Embassy Club, a night spot beside the No. 6 fairway that was never rebuilt after it burned in 1975.

“The environment is beneficial to fox making here,” Wood says, adding that at certain times of year he sees foxes almost every day on the course. “You can see the pups, the adolescents, the adults.”

With its tall woods, spacious residential lots full of foliage and crisscrossing creeks, Wood says, Sedgefield is an ideal wildlife habitat.

On his daily rounds, Wood often sees groundhogs, muskrats, an occasional beaver and heavy deer tracks.

He believes deer bound back and forth at night between Sedgefield and adjoining Grandover Resort, which has two golf courses.

He says a hawk spends hours daily perched on an electrical wire just down from the clubhouse. The hawk makes occasional dives to snare a snack.

Coming to the tournament? Leave your hunting guns and hounds at home. Chances are nil of seeing a fox, Wood says. They sense a change has taken place at Sedgefield.

“There’s too much going on,” Wood says. “We haven’t seen one in weeks.”

They are chilling in their dens while humans work up a sweat watching golfers.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9873 or beale1@clearwire.net