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Susy Smith has mixed feelings about living with the urban fox

It began with the disappearing footwear. We had not long moved back from the countryside to the outskirts of town. First, one of my gardening shoes went missing.

I was perplexed. I looked in all the obvious places to no avail. I bought a new pair. Then my daughter lost two trainers. Not matching, you understand, but one each of two pairs of outrageously priced designer brands. I was incensed. “How could you be so careless?” I fumed. “Ah,” said a wise and experienced local friend. “It’ll be the foxes.” I was sceptical. “Really?” In the 11 years I lived in rural Hampshire, I had only ever seen a fox once. It sounded like they were commonplace around here. “What would they want with our shoes?” I asked. And anyway, how is it possible? The trainers were in the hallway, at the front of the house. A fox would have to come in at the open back door (it was spring), walk the length of the kitchen, through a sitting room and along the hall. Would they really be that brazen?

It turns out the answer is yes. Urban foxes have become so used to living alongside humans that they make regular forays into homes through catflaps and open doors. The shoe-stealing is not unusual. Foxes like to play with them. Last summer, the BBC news relayed a story from the Berlin suburbs where a kleptomaniac fox had a penchant for flip-flops. One resident finally caught the vulpine culprit in the act and discovered its den on a piece of wasteground where it had amassed a hoard of more than 100 shoes! These fearless foxes are encouraged in part by people who, in my view misguidedly, feed them.

I was astonished to discover that one local householder goes a step further, welcoming foxes into her home and photographing them sitting on the sofa next to her children!

I have learnt to live with the foxes, even though they lounge on our outdoor furniture, chew through the garden hose and hold night-time pizza parties on the soft-top of my treasured Fiat 500 convertible, leaving the greasy remains for me to clear away. I’ve even seen a dog fox and vixen strolling down the high street, looking for all the world as if they were out for an evening promenade. When I don’t see foxes, I smell them – their pungent urine is deposited liberally outside the house and, as they defecate to mark their territory, I’m used to having to clear this up from the doorstep, garden planters and even out of the birdbath. I hear them, too, barking to one another through the darkness. A vixen’s scream on a dark winter’s night is one of the eeriest sounds you’ll ever experience.

Despite all of this nuisance, I still find them stunningly beautiful. I stop to watch when they pass through my garden and marvel at the ease with which they scale the six-foot-high walls. We have photographs of a pair of foxes curled up asleep on top of one wall among the climbing plants that cover it. But my best sighting was a few years ago in the depths of winter. I opened my bedroom curtains one morning to find it had snowed in the night – always a magical experience but that day enhanced by the addition of three foxes – their glorious russet coats offset by the pristine white landscape. A handsome dog fox and a vixen were having some sort of altercation on top of the garden wall, while a third was on the ground – ears flat, body arched, tail curled – hissing and spitting. I felt extraordinarily privileged to watch this mini wildlife drama played out right under my window.

However we view foxes – as friend or foe – we might as well get used to them. According to the last count by DEFRA, there were around 430,000 of them roaming the UK, roughly one for every 150 humans.

And it would seem that, as a result of living in such close proximity to people, the adaptable urban fox is developing striking differences to its country cousins and becoming more like the domesticated dog. A recent study by the University of Glasgow found that, as they no longer require the mental agility to catch live prey, urban foxes have evolved to have smaller brains and a shorter snout with a stronger bite to aid city foraging.

So what of our missing footwear, I hear you ask? A year after my daughter’s trainers went missing, I found the chewed remains of one of them at the end of the garden. The other and my gardening shoe are probably decking out a fox’s den somewhere nearby. I just hope they appreciate their pricey designer decor.