Nature’s strange blueprints for survival
The fox cubs in my garden have vanished. The weakling with its back legs collapsing, bullied by its brothers and sisters, took to sleeping by day on the track up through the woods to this house. It chose a soft dry place with dead leaves. I was the only person walking there each evening and it became used to my approach. There it was for a week or more, curled up fast asleep for anyone to see. At 40 yards it would raise its head and stare at me. At 25 yards it would rise and stretch, yawn, and wander off into the bushes.
One of its more lively brothers or sisters might be seen bouncing away across the path. Then one day my wife found the cub dead. It was skin and bone, I imagine starved to death. The dry early summer weather had made the ground hard. But it was odd that the vixen had not been feeding them.
Also in that week I heard a snuffling and a huffing and a crackle of leaves and a badger cub came out of the wood and onto the grassy verge right under my feet, where I photographed it. It came to within three feet and hesitated as it caught my scent. Its piggy little eyes lifted up at the standing figure in its way but seemed to see nothing unusual. Maybe it thought I was a tree. Its nose returned to the ground and it shuffled on along the verge, sniffing intently among the blades of grass as it hunted a woodlouse or a spider. It looked like one of those old clockwork dogs German toymakers used to make that would shuffle along and perhaps shake their head.
Then in another part of the wood I smelt a foul smell and suspected another dead animal but then I realised that this was only the scent of the stink-horn fungus. Peering through the brambles and bracken I found its pale candle shape and colour with its hood crawling with bluebottle flies that had been lured from far and wide to this take-away. These flies had found their answer to the riddle of survival, weird though it was.
Then I remembered many years ago, back in the 1980s, how the police had been called out by a walker on Kingley Vale who had smelled what he was sure was the remains of a missing person. I joined the hunt but was able to assure them that the smell was merely that of the stink-horn which we did discover.
Summertime can be very hard on young animals and birds and insects. It’s all part of nature’s great sieve. Work out the enigma code or perish. No use giving up. Red kites and buzzards patrol the skies on the look-out for their supplies. They must learn quickly or fall by the wayside. Young stoats have to learn new tricks; such as running up perpendicular oak trunks to young blackbirds in their cradle nests for rich pickings or be confined to hunting the ground tunnels of mice in competition with other hungry ground predators.
Even butterflies have to hunt for their supplies. I’ll tell you of a most extraordinary sight I came across several years ago that would possibly not be believed by some entomologists. There is a pretty little butterfly the size of a fly called the grizzled skipper which drinks the nectar of wild pea flowers and such beauteous blooms. One day in Kingley Vale I found a fox that had been in a state of terminal decay for a week or more. Ten of these lovely little butterflies were feasting on the putrid remains, building up their strength for mating.
As for the purple emperor butterfly and its gruesome habits, the least said on a family page the better. It gets the minerals that make its iridescent colour from any kind of excrement it can find on the ground.
Planet Earth has all kinds of strange blueprints for survival if only they can be found quick enough. Life will go on forever but it is a hard race for every living thing and that goes for us humans too.