WHAT TO SPOT
Natural wonders to watch out for this week… Foxes
Nature, like politics, abhors a vacuum. As our city and town centres have been deserted once more during the latest lockdown, so a new resident has increasingly been spotted rootling through bins and trotting along main roads as if it owns the place.
Even in normal years January is boom time for foxes. It is the main mating period when males roam the neighbourhood looking for willing vixens, and if you do not see them then you will most certainly hear them – during the act itself foxes are extremely, erm, vocal…
Growing up in London I would regularly hear their terrifying screams in the early hours. I later discovered this was due to the fact that mating foxes enter what is known as a “copulatory tie” that can last for half an hour or more.
Red foxes (or more likely in city centres you will find them a scabrous shade of grey) get a bad press, but they are one of the most adaptable wild animals in Britain and a fascinating predator in our midst.
If you are lucky enough to be watching a fox on the prowl you will see it perform all manner of trapeze artist tricks as it scales garden fences. More often than not, though, the wily fox will be watching you first.
In the countryside a red fox’s diet will be 95 per cent meat supplemented with insects, fruits and worms. In urban areas, however, meat comprises only half of their diet, the rest being household refuse, rats, and whatever else they can scavenge. Accordingly foxes have developed extraordinarily strong stomachs and immune systems. The Fox Project, a charity that rescues injured animals, says that in 29 years it has never encountered a starving fox.
I have had my own battles with them over the years. I keep chickens at the bottom of my garden and have been plundered on two occasions by the foxes that live in the woods nearby. When one breaks into a hen coop the destruction is total – in a matter of seconds it will bite the heads off every chicken in there.
Each time we have bolstered the defences and still the foxes have found a way through. Following our last round of reinforcements a year ago – which fortunately have still held – we found the fox sitting in our lawn looking over our work to glean any weaknesses that it might be able to exploit.
A 2013 report estimated there were 430,000 foxes in Britain.
The number in urban areas is thought to have increased from 33,000 in 1995 to 150,000 in 2017, although in recent years there have been reports of an unexplained decline in the population. Should we worry? Perhaps out in the countryside where foxes are far more sparsely scattered, but in cities the animals continue to exploit new territories.
My favourite urban fox story is that during the construction of the Shard, London’s tallest building a decade or so ago, a fox climbed in through a stairwell and made a den on the 72nd floor, living off the food scraps left by construction workers.
I love the idea of the ultimate survivor looking down on us all as we scurry about our lives. All too often we blithely assume it is us who are on top.