For most of us, foxes are probably the most impressive wildlife we ever see in our gardens.
Several foxes, or the same one several times, have trotted up through the garden during the last week. As I sit tapping on the laptop on the kitchen table I get a good view out through the French windows, but I'm all but invisible to them and they saunter past without a care. One sniffed at the guinea-pig hutch, then squeezed through the gap in the fence and was gone.
We city dwellers have a soft spot for these animals. For most of us, foxes are probably the most impressive wildlife we ever see in our gardens. And because they are so widely fed, or can so successfully scavenge, they obviously do very well here. I know, however, that they are not so welcomed in many rural areas.
My mother, a farmer's daughter, cannot understand why my children think foxes are so wonderful. She tells the tales, so common in farming communities, of foxes getting into the chicken runs and killing everything, even though only one or two birds are eaten. Such blatant (and seemingly vindictive) waste grates hard.
As a disinterested (that's dispassionate not uninterested) ecologist, I can perfectly understand why the fox behaves like this. The instinct to kill is deeply ingrained and under normal 'wild' circumstances the occasional double or multiple strike means the fox can go back the next day to recover further victims. But when it finds the unnatural corral of dozens of birds, the fox's continued slaughter becomes out of proportion and it then finds itself persecuted by the birds' owners seeking revenge.
There are quite a number of urban chickens in East Dulwich these days (and probably elsewhere in London and other cities too). Some neighbours had six or eight birds, until a fox got in. Someone forgot to close the hens up one night. Only one survived, it had been hen-pecked and penned separately. It was a strange sight to see feathers blowing on the wind across the tarmac that night. I wonder how much urban chicken loss needs to happen, before us townies start to view foxes differently.
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