Winter Foxes

Foxes can create havoc in the garden, tearing up protective fleece, digging great holes, uncovering the compost heap, leaving their stolen toys scattered about and keeping the whole neighbourhood awake at night. 

Anyway, destructive they may be, but I do realise that 'my' garden is not my garden at all. It belongs even more to the foxes (not to mention other wildlife) who live in it or under its protection, copulate in it, feed from it, bring their young up in it, navigate and understand it in many more ways than I am able  or know how to.  

Red fox, perfectly at home under the apple tree

At present it's the breeding season. You can hear unearthly shrieks in the middle of the night, apparently the female yelling for her lover. In the daytime, two foxes can be seen  roaming about companionably together drinking from the bird baths and investigating the undergrowth. 

There are apparently about 33,000 foxes in urban areas in this country. They are certainly equipped to survive almost anywhere with their large ears to hear the slightest noise of enemy or prey, their excellent eyesight, their nimbleness allowing them to run along the top of a trellis or pounce on a small mouse and their cunning, which has been admired and wondered at through stories and poems over centuries. Their sense of smell, is also very keen - apparently they can smell out prey as much as 3ft underground.  I once found a dead fox cub in the garden, led to it by the sudden rush of greenbottle flies to the spot. I buried it near the shed but the smell must have reached the foxes, who dug it up that night and removed it. 

Their excellent digestion allows them to eat more or less anything they find which can include mice and voles, worms, fruit including blackberries, orange peel (from the compost  heap) and the eggs of small birds or even hen's eggs, not to mention takeway meals of pizzas, after which they leave the packaging lying around in the garden. 

According to the Natural History Museum website's interesting information on foxes, in 2011 a fox managed to get up to the 72nd floor of the Shard Skyscraper, then under construction and survived on food scraps left by the workers. I bet the foxes in my garden have a better life. 

From time to time the foxes here try to dig a den in the garden and I always block up the beginnings of the hole with  bricks or upturned hanging baskets or something else too heavy or awkward for them to manipulate. I am glad the foxes include my garden in their territory buy I do not want it to be their base.

I once inherited a fox fur stole,  head and legs intact,  from a great aunt. I'm bound to admit I was never able to wear it. The poor little paws knocked about like heavy beads on my front and it was so very dead. 

The Wild Life of the Fox by John Lewis-Stempel (Doubleday 2020),  an anthology of meditations,  poems, facts and illustrations on foxes was given to me at Christmas by my sister and I have been delving into it with pleasure ever since.