Shooting Times & Country Magazine
When is it a time to kill?
Whether you rear your birds or buy them in, the fox will never be far away from them so don’t lower your guard, says Robert Bucknell
It might sound like a Basil Brush joke: when’s the best time to shoot a fox? When it’s 70 yards away and standing still is the obvious answer. But we can’t be out foxing all day long and all year round, so we have to pick the times when we can do the most good. It’s all about ‘return on investment’ — ROI — as modern marketing jargon would have it but in this case we’re talking about investing time and effort rather than hard cash.
So, what is the ‘return’ we’re looking for? A dead fox is the glib answer, but that’s rarely the ultimate goal. Why do we want it dead? Usually to stop it doing damage, or any more than it has already, to something we value — perhaps livestock, gamebirds, or vulnerable wildlife. That’s the key to understanding when the best time is to shoot your foxes — it depends what you’re trying to achieve.
Critical period
Imagine, for example, that you’re a keeper on a grouse moor. Foxes won’t be welcome at any time of year, but nesting time is critical. You can’t simply bump up your order of poults to make up any shortfall. One lost hen bird or clutch of eggs is one too many.
So for that keeper the best time to shoot a fox is before the first egg is laid. If that means long, lonely, cold hours sitting up watching over a rocky natal den, high up in the hills, so be it. It’s an unavoidable part of the job. At least nowadays he’ll likely have the advantage of a thermal vision spotter and riflescope to make the job that bit more efficient.
Ironically, it’s a similar situation on a nature reserve, even if it’s run by the most rabidly anti-shooting bunch.
They, too, must protect their nesting birds at all costs — they just don’t feel able to upset the public hand that feeds them. They believe that being seen to kill one type of wildlife to protect another will lose them support and money. This conundrum leads to all sorts of shenanigans, from building hugely expensive fencing to quietly paying a local fieldsports enthusiast to shoot foxes under cover of darkness when the visitors have gone home.
Brown hares
Another person affected might be a lowland arable farmer with no game shooting and little interest in the wildlife on his land other than how much of his profits they eat. For him, a fox is safe; indeed, he might welcome the thought that it will kill a few of the rats, hares and rabbits damaging his crops. I was stopped culling foxes on one all-arable farm — 32 in four visits — because brown hare numbers then shot up.
His neighbour the free-range pig farmer, on the other hand, will be losing sleep at the thought of foxes sneaking in at the dead of night and making off with his piglets. There are few things a fox likes better than a newborn piglet, and it is adept at snatching them up before the farrowing sow has a chance to turn round. For the outdoor pig farmer, the best time to kill any fox is now.
Elsewhere, you may have a shoot that relies entirely on released pheasants and partridges, where foxes don’t really become a problem until the birds are in the
release pens. They
“There are few things a fox likes better than a newborn piglet”
can afford to go easy on the fox control during spring and early summer, allowing foxes to breed unmolested, so long as they do a thorough clear-up job once the harvest begins.
That sort of timing suits the fairweather foxshooters — those who like to zoom around the silage fields and stubbles in shirtsleeves on the back of a pickup, scooping up the naïve youngsters, but would baulk at the idea of sitting up a high seat in a biting January wind.
Here on my own patch in rural Essex there is an arable farm with no livestock apart from a few hens scratching around the farmyard. We run a small family shoot, buying in our birds as poults. That might suggest we could leave the foxes in peace for much of the year, except for two important factors: first, my lifelong love of wildlife and biodiversity; and secondly, my interest in fox shooting as a challenging sport in its own right.
We operate a zero-tolerance approach to foxes throughout the year. I am particularly keen to ensure the ground is cleared of foxes before the bird breeding season. One fox will scoop up a large number of vulnerable birds and small animals over time, but imagine the amount of protein it takes to raise a litter of eight or 10 cubs to adulthood in a couple of months. That’s an awful lot of lapwings, partridges, brown
hares or whatever else you’d like to have enriching the landscape.
So we hit the foxes hard through the winter months, hoping to be foxfree when spring arrives. It’s a job that requires patience and dedication, going out night after night, staying out all hours in the worst weather. Fortunately, I don’t have to do it single-handed. There are several keen helpers, with Colin the keeper and his brother, Jon, who has become an enthusiastic fox shooter in the past couple of years. Then there’s Paul, two Bens, Mark, Darren and Kevin, along with my friend Nigel, who culls the deer but will never miss a passing fox. This team lowers fox numbers over a wide area.
New tech
Developments in equipment and techniques have made the job of fox control a good deal more efficient over the years. I won’t say ‘easier’ because there’s nothing easy about shooting foxes, but with thermal spotters, night-vision scopes, electronic calls and modern rifles and ammunition, it’s possible to shoot foxes that we might never have seen in the old days of lugging around a motorcycle battery and hand lamp.
You can even use technology to monitor any fox activity, with remote trail cameras that will text you a picture and give you the time a fox was there. The clothing is better, too — indeed, if you feel the cold you can kit yourself out with battery-powered heated socks and jacket.
With all this technology at our fingertips, we mustn’t forget the importance of fieldcraft and ‘thinking like a fox’. For instance, there are always some call-shy foxes that have learned to associate our squeaks and squeals with danger. Only experience will tell you the timing of when to call and when to keep quiet.
And remember to consider the wind, as your timing may alter if the wind is in a different
quarter from the one in which you expect the fox to appear. If you’re going to pick the best time to shoot your foxes, you’ll also need to understand their life cycle through the year — that knowledge informs your fox-control plan. For instance, despite all your best efforts in the autumn, foxes will move on to your ground when the mating season kicks in around
December, sometimes travelling long distances in search of a mate or somewhere to raise a litter.
Relax
So if you want to give your wildlife and game the best chance possible, you can’t let your guard slip in January and February. Deal with any foxes — especially gravid vixens — and you can afford to relax slightly in March and April. By then the vixens have settled in with their cubs and the dogs are committed to feeding ‘their’ vixens. There’s only the odd dog fox moving around the countryside.
But you’d better keep a wary eye out in case any litters have escaped detection, or a vixen has moved the whole team to your food-rich area.
“Call-shy foxes learn to associate squeaks and squeals with danger”
Every year we have a litter or two born under someone’s shed in the village where we can’t get at them.
There’s no single ‘best’ time to kill a fox — or not. It depends on many factors and each situation is unique. You might take the pragmatic approach as we do on my farm: that the best time to kill a fox is whenever you can. As my father used to say, “They don’t live on thin air, boy.” You will never kill the last one. Look at Basil, he’s been around for years.