COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Adele Brand 2019

Cover design and text artwork by Jo Walker

Adele Brand asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008327286

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008327293

Version: 2020-08-10

For my parents

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 Who is the Fox?

2 A Brief History of the Fox

3 Where do Foxes Live?

4 What Does the Fox Look Like?

5 Fox Family Matters

6 The Fox and its Neighbours

7 What Does the Fox Say?

8 Counting Foxes

9 In Sickness and in Health

10 Predators Among Us

11 When the Fur Flies

12 Tornado in a Cage

Epilogue: Fame and Foxes

The Fox Watcher’s Toolkit

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

About the Publisher

1

Who is the Fox?

VISUALISE A FOX: flame-orange on a white canvas, black paws and thick brush, pointed muzzle and diamond-sharp eyes. Now paint its native wildwood behind it – this fox is trotting through the undergrowth, exploiting trails within the brambles trampled by badgers. It leaves neat narrow tracks on mud softened by afternoon rain, and snags its fur on thorns in passing.

Woodland, farmland, hedgerows and weary old trees. Owls, hedgehogs, rutting deer. Dead man’s fingers – that is, grisly-looking black fungi – poking through sweet chestnut leaves in the autumn; woodpeckers playing rat-a-tat-tat on dying branches in the spring.

This is the classic British landscape of the classic British fox: the precious fragments of countryside saved from industrialised agriculture and overdevelopment. Ancient, intriguing, revitalising and poetic, our rural semi-wild has enchanted animal-focused authors from Beatrix Potter to Colin Dann of The Animals of Farthing Wood fame. The fox of tradition lives squarely within it, running under a cloud of mythology stirred by friend and foe alike.

But it is not the only fox of twenty-first-century Britain.

IMAGINE ANOTHER DUSK, this one after a day when chainsaws groaned and concrete mixers churned, and builders wolf-whistled at local women from a half-built rooftop. Woodland here is being transformed into a housing estate, rimmed by a newly built wall thick enough to please Hadrian, its bricks highlighted in passing by the headlights of commuter traffic.

A small vixen with a slender face and wary eyes tugs at chips dropped by the workmen, slicing artificially flavoured potatoes with enlarged molars called carnassials which define her species as a member of the Carnivora. She digs under the perimeter fence, and darts across the main road, feet fast and brush bouncing, passing me as I walk my dog. Ironic, perhaps, for wolves – the ancestor of dogs – once lived here too, feeding foxes through scraps of deer meat. The last Home Counties wolf was killed in Hampshire 800 years ago. The crowds returning from London have forgotten; perhaps the woodland has not. In an ecosystem, every extinction is like snapping a link in a chain.

But foxes themselves are in no danger of disappearing. Into a driveway the vixen turns, past trees native to China, through a side gate sealed against burglars, into a garden where another fox is burying Bakers Complete dog biscuits. The little vixen is an intruder in this territory. The resident flies at her, flipping her upside down, and skull-splitting screams – theatrical, but bloodless – pepper the night over the droning of the traffic.

She struggles free, and bolts back across the road into the fragmented woodland. Her motive for this daring if ill-fated trespass is obvious: she is lactating and needs food and water to produce milk for her cubs. She is driven by an unquenchable instinct to survive.

THAT WAS LAST YEAR’S DRAMA.

I haven’t seen that particular vixen for a few days; it is mid-March as I write this, and doubtless she is underground with a new litter. She has survived the last twelve months despite her wood being turned into houses with million-pound price tags, and despite the best efforts of the neighbouring fox group to keep her out of the garden. Her body language is tenser than theirs, her eyes a little sharper, and her habit of poking her muzzle through gaps in the fence never fails to amuse.

This is not the city; it is Surrey’s battered greenbelt. Despite the developers stalking the county like thieves eyeing up wallets, we still have rich and abundant wildlife between the golf courses, out-of-town supermarkets and ever slower M25. Yet only a few miles north of the endangered wildflowers thriving on our chalky hills, the mood changes. London town spikes our northern horizon with towers, giant wheels and an orange nocturnal haze. Somehow, once there, we consider it unremarkable that we have grown buildings taller than trees.

It is undeniably beautiful, that old city filled with lion statues. History smiles from every spire and road name, grand, grotesque or tragic. You fall into the rhythm of it: the river of people flowing from Victoria station in the mornings, the shouts of Big Issue sellers, tourists photographing themselves in St James’s Park. Cyclists speeding across pelican crossings, strangers apologising in the street when you bump into them, anti-war protesters perched on window frames with placards while weary police keep watch – it is such a human place.

Human, but full of foxes. Many thousands of them live in urban environments in Britain, from London to Edin- burgh.

We jolt at that, sometimes alarmed, sometimes happy that a being of the ancient wildwood can find a home in Britain’s sprawling capital – it feels a little out of sync, like an Elizabethan lady in ballroom dress among the revellers in All Bar One. The contrast between free wild animal and hard concrete street is vivid, irresistible, burning a place in our collective consciousness. Fed on television images that associate wildlife with wilderness, this displacement of ‘normal’ can beget either wonder or fear. Perhaps the social reserve in the British psyche leaves us puzzling over the correct etiquette. Upon seeing a fox, many people are not quite sure what to say.

So, instead, we have put the fox in the dock for questioning. We have accused it of trespassing into the human domain, of being cheeky, of spreading disease, harming pets, and even posing a significant risk to ourselves. Unperturbed, the fox strays ever further into our world, permeating our language, pop music, movies, pub names and television adverts. They are debated in offices, schools and Parliament. One was recently filmed by bemused journalists outside 10 Downing Street as they awaited the appearance of the prime minister. Another found fame climbing 72 floors of the Shard, and lives on in that monolith’s merchandise. Others have trotted onto the pitch in the middle of high-profile football matches.

Bizarrely, even our real courtrooms are not immune. Temping as a court officer to staunch debts after my graduation, I was surprised to hear the defendant in my very first criminal trial claim an alibi of being busy feeding a ‘baby’ fox. She was still found guilty; it is beyond the court’s powers to summon foxes as witnesses.

Foxes have filled my life, too; it has become a running joke among friends that wherever I go – from the Indian desert to the Yucatan rainforest – I am bound to meet one, usually sitting, as they do, watching me from a distance. They dominated my wildlife diaries as a child, were part of my academic studies in ecology, and have always been the most popular stars for the millions of visitors dropping by my corner of the internet. I have fostered orphaned cubs and injured adults for the Fox Project charity, and been privileged to observe and film some extraordinary fox behaviour in the wild. Mostly, however, I wish to know them as individuals, to learn the stories of their lives as honest biographer – and to be a mediator, hoping to keep the peace between human and fox.

Through that, I have crossed the trail of two foxes: the wild one which fills my spreadsheets with scientific data, and its non-identical twin that dwells in the human imagination. Twenty years of observing, photographing, and occasionally rescuing foxes have impressed on me just how very complex a neighbour we have in this small, curious member of the dog family. But the human response to wildlife can be just as nuanced. I’ve seen the extremes of it: the fear, the hate, the passion and kindness.

This matters. The world is now mostly humanised. There may be valleys in Tasmania which have never been explored, and tundra lakes in the great Canadian north that are lonely save for mosquitoes and caribou, but for many wild animals eking a living while you are reading these words, wilderness is irrelevant. They’re living on land that is controlled by humanity. From forests heavily managed for commercial timber to grasslands seeded with exotic crops and split by dangerous roads, many creatures must compensate daily for anthropogenic changes to landscapes that they occupied long before palaeontologists revealed the existence of deep time.

Yet this overlap zone, where civilisation and wilderness meet, is not devoid of biodiversity. With tolerance, respect or sometimes by simply ignoring, nature can thrive in the human shadow. Urban wildlife is here to stay, and not only in London. Leopards share the exotic bustle of Mumbai with twelve million people. Spotted hyenas scavenge rubbish in major African cities. Vancouver occasionally debates the pumas that stalk mule deer in suburban gardens. And foxes, no less controversial than the great carnivorans, have adapted to the new biome called ‘city’ from Aberdeen to Zurich, from the bitter winters of western Canadian metropolises to the scorching desert towns of Israel.

Sharing the same geographical space as wildlife brings out instincts in people that were more proportionate in days when we had to fend off sabre-tooth cats. In a world full of modern dangers, we are haunted by the idea of a primeval fate. The results of that fear can be ugly. I’ve watched Canadian police officers kill bears that were harming no one because, well, they just couldn’t be sure what tomorrow might bring. False widow spiders, coyotes, wolves, raccoons, foxes – they’ve all had their headlines.

But as night falls in my 1,300-year-old Surrey village, the other side of the equation swings into life. All down these streets are householders who will smile at a fox trotting across their lawn tonight. Fear may have grown as we have become ever more disconnected from nature, but so has a desire to rekindle that relationship. The small glimpse of a wild fox – and, it has to be said, the controversial practice of deliberately feeding them – brings a lot of happiness to many.

MY AIM WITH THIS BOOK is to explore how the red fox, a wild animal that evolved in the wildwood, has adapted with such dramatic success to modern Britain. This involves understanding the real fox as researched by cutting-edge science, and considering its behaviour, physical form and intelligence in the context of the world that it inhabited for thousands of centuries before finding us.

This is not a book about fox hunting. That argument has consumed multitudes of space elsewhere. Once the real creature displaces the mythological fox of hunters’ lore, and a vague sense that ‘populations must be controlled’ is replaced with scientific knowledge, the question of whether arbitrary cruelty is acceptable rather answers itself.

To a small extent, this is also a book about people: how we form our opinions of nature, and why honest observations can sometimes be misleading. To clarify, I am not anti-human. Environmentalists who are, doom themselves to an eternity of digging tunnels for Swampy and being ignored by decision-makers. Education is more effective than alienating the public with abrasive name-calling – a lesson some animal rights activists would do well to remember. Assuming that everyone who is concerned about foxes sharing their garden must be a paid-up member of the Countryside Alliance is about as realistic as Aesop’s fox dismissing the sour grapes.

This great British public, these people whose world overlaps that of foxes – they are binmen, bankers, the bankrupt, golfers, mothers caught in traffic on the school run, even criminals.

This is you, England.

You are beautiful, heart-breaking, eccentric and implausible.

You are the people who foxes tolerate as neighbours.

The question is now, will you tolerate them?

2

A Brief History of the Fox

WE ARE REDESIGNING THE FOX: its diet, territory size, social interactions, and its longevity and causes of death have all been changed by us. Even their body fats are impregnated with our lifestyle, carrying residues as diverse as fire retardants and nuclear radiation. Their days are filled with human-made noises, human-made landscapes, and human-made risks.

But foxes have not spent their evolutionary history sunbathing on greenhouse roofs or evading aggressive pet cats, let alone treading on broken glass or eating leftover pizza. Wild nature has been twisted out of joint in Britain; except for the lonely saltmarshes of the north Norfolk coast, very little has not been reshaped by our fingerprints. But to understand the fox among us, we must first consider the world as it was before.

I AM FOLLOWING a wild wolf with a hind foot as wide as my hand. The paw print is written in the soft clay of a path flanked by wrinkled old trees that take circuitous routes to the sky, their branches bending under a red squirrel’s leaps, their bark festooned with furry moss. Looking past their trunks, I see more trees, and yet more: shadows of green upon green, and woodpeckers laugh from within. There is not a sound nor sight save of natural things – just tree frogs purring at dusk, and pure, sweet, forest air. Where the canopy has been opened by a giant’s fall, new saplings race to the light over the carpet of wild garlic flowers. Deer consume many such infant trees and are themselves taken by wolves; the leftover bones fall to foxes.

This is Białowieża, lowland Europe’s closest match to a truly wild forest. It mantles the border of Poland and Belarus – a living palace of oak and hornbeam, and a mortuary of naturally dead trees that sport brilliantly coloured fungi, nourishing new life where they crumble. Old growth or primeval forests are relatively widespread in North America, although their fate is the subject of bitter battles between loggers and environmentalists. On the European Plain, we only have Białowieża, and its history has been uneven, from bison-hunting Russian Tsars to the Nazis who murdered Polish patriots under gently shadowing leaves.

Yet today, the rails laid by Germans to export timber in World War I are overgrown by wild pansies and chickweed. Disputes over logging in the buffer zone aside, the forest remains largely in control of itself, as it has been for most of the last 8,000 years. Human tragedies, triumphs and the entire Roman Empire have risen and fallen, and, all the while, Białowieża has quietly evolved along its own lines, its vast compendium of living things predating, competing, and joining into symbiotic relationships with each other. It is the last benchmark: a reference point that explains how European foxes are when the human touch is light.

That path where I found sign of the wolf’s wandering is also a datasheet of information. The damp ground reveals more tracks – of wild boar, roe deer, red deer, bison – and here, not three metres from the wolf’s trail, a fox footprint.

I could probably fit all four of its little paws into the track of its distant relation.

It is living here as a pure wild animal, sustaining itself on other life supported by the forest, and when it dies, its flesh will grow more trees.

What is a fox in such a place? I’ve caught glimpses on my camera traps: visually indistinguishable from foxes in gritty south London boroughs, they trot confidently down trails trampled by gargantuan bison bulls. They balance deftly on fallen tree trunks beside rivers that flood when they please. They lope across tracks at night, under crystalline stars untainted by light pollution.

Białowieża forest by Aleksander Bolbot, Shutterstock

Białowieża

There are questions that all wildlife biologists ask of their study species, and most of them would take a lifetime of research to answer. Where do they live, and how are they distributed within those areas? Do the regions with the highest activity have characteristics in common? What about their social interactions with their own kind – do they defend territories? When do they breed, and how far do the young disperse? In a forest with uncountable forms of life, with which of the plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates do they interact as predator, as prey, as disperser of seeds, as bringer of change through some- thing as subtle as digging the mud to create a den?

Unravelling these mysteries requires deciding a research hypothesis, collecting data to test that hypothesis, and exploring those data with statistics or maps. I have no recourse for such ventures during my holidays in Białowieża. But I do spy some clues: fox scat, for example, the ubiquitous silent witness to their diet.

It is full of the bristling black hairs of wild boar.

Boar are as far beyond a fox’s hunting prowess as is an elephant – fourteen times heavier, and armed with tusks and teeth. They are quite capable of fending off leopards. Yet here in a near-pristine forest, they comprise a startling portion of vulpine diets.

The link is the wolf. About 30 per cent of the fox’s winter diet in Białowieża is carrion, specifically red deer and wild boar. Some may have starved, but many were killed by wolves and lynx. Despite the popular image of wolves as marauding Vikings, they inadvertently assist many other creatures. Ravens, martens and eagles are among those which feast on the wolf’s leftovers.

The beauty of this forest is its completeness; nothing is wasted, and ecological relationships almost forgotten in Britain’s radically altered landscapes shine clear.

Perhaps the message from Białowieża, then, is that the wild fox is an interactive creature. They are part of a living web that cycles energy from plants to herbivores to predators to scavengers, a natural dodgems in which species knock into each other. Sometimes that brings death to one and food to another; sometimes there is mutual gain. Wherever it is, whatever the backdrop, a fox can never be understood outside of its relationship with the rest of the natural world.

But what is a fox in the first place?

A FOX’S SKULL, like a wolf’s footprint, fits neatly in my hand. In its way, it is a birth certificate, a genealogical signpost that reveals the fox’s relationship to other mammals, living and extinct. Not for nothing did Victorian scientists spend so many hours measuring bones; patterns emerge from meticulous study, and the bewildering array of vertebrate life can be organised into logical groups. In recent decades, genetic analysis has refined our understanding.

So imagine an Ark with all the world’s animals entering two by two: birds, reptiles, amphibians, and other, more exotic creatures. A fox would enter the deck reserved for mammals, for it has fur and suckles its young, along with a diaphragm and a neocortex. But a fox is clearly different from its mammalian relatives. It is certainly not a bat, giraffe or horse. To divide mammals logically, Noah must look at their jaws. Teeth are not only clues to diet, but also indicate who is related to whom.

Foxes have 42 teeth inside their narrow muzzles, among them the trademark of the order Carnivora. Their last upper pre-molar and first lower molar are called carnassials, modified with a tall shearing edge for slicing flesh. All 300 or so Carnivorans possess carnassials. Your pet cat has them – in fact they are exceptionally well developed in felids, which are the most meat-specialised of the entire order. Pandas, on the other hand, have flattened carnassials because they are largely vegetarian.

What about foxes? Their carnassials are specialised for nothing. Berries, mice, insect larvae – they can eat it all. That adaptability is the main reason why the wild dog family has been such a runaway evolutionary success.

Foxes are of the canine kind. Many fox-watchers, including myself, enjoy the cat-like grace of the species: the delicate pounce and careful footsteps. But beneath that rich orange fur, foxes are undeniably a canid – that is, a member of Canidae, the dog family. Turning the skull over, the base of the ear sockets is fused into a bony casing called a tympanic bulla, protecting the fragile inner-ear bones. In canids it is uniquely divided by a septum: a thin, bony wall. It is believed that this extra echo-chamber enhances their ability to hear low frequencies.

Five toes with claws that are not fully retractile, a long muzzle filled with delicate turbinal bones that magnify smells, the nuchal ligament that strengthens their necks to allow them to run for extended periods with nose to the ground – the physical hallmarks are unambiguous. The fox is a dog.

Or very nearly.

THERE WAS ONCE another forest, more remote to our lives and fainter than Białowieża’s leathery trunks: an ancient jungle that no human saw, in a global climate hotter than we have ever known. Fifty million years ago, the so-called Eocene hothouse featured Earth at its balmiest, basking in temperatures averaging 14 °C (57 °F) higher than present. Ice vanished from even the poles, and lush forests extended across the globe. Palm trees grew in what is now the London basin; extinct primates foraged under them, and the peculiar horse-like ungulate Hyracotherium browsed in their shadows – but there were no foxes. Canids had not yet left their family cradle.

That birthplace was North America; perhaps dogs are the United States’ most successful export. Canids have spent the majority of their evolutionary history restricted to this one continent, and the distant ancestors of foxes are dated to the Eocene jungles of Texas. Prohesperocyon – the first known canid – was a small, omnivorous creature in a forest of astonishing giants, a natural neighbour to the likes of the fearsome Nimravidae, sabre-toothed carnivores resembling great cats. As Earth gradually cooled and dried and the dense jungles were replaced by extensive grasslands, the elongated legs and long strides of the canid body shape clearly provided an advantage in long distance chases. Canidae thrived.

Most of the fox’s extended family is extinct, and known to us only through palaeontology, but the glimpses defy imagination. Among them is the subfamily Borophaginae, containing species that might frighten Cerberus – they were the bone-cracking dogs, with massive teeth capable of extracting marrow from giant carcasses. Epicyon haydeni, the largest of all, is estimated to have weighed four times as much as an average grey wolf, and a pack on the hunt must have been a formidable sight. Yet the dentition of many fossil canids, not least the little Leptocyon – the direct ancestor of the fox – strongly suggests a varied, plant-inclusive diet.

Plate tectonics and the reduction in sea levels during ice ages eventually connected North America to other continents, and its wildlife migrated into South America and Eurasia. By seven million years ago, at least one canid was present in Spain, and Vulpes riffautae – the earliest known fox outside North America – lived in what is now the N’Djamena desert in northwest Chad. Fast forward another few million years, and Vulpes galaticus is part of the Turkish fauna. Vulpes vulpes, the red fox – the only species that we have in modern Britain – is recorded first in Hungary, perhaps 3.4 million years ago, when humans in Africa were just beginning to use stone tools. Recent genetic analysis has provided further hints; it appears that all living red foxes are descended from individuals who lived in the ancient Middle East. From there, they spread across the entire northern hemisphere.

Canids travel. Their long legs and unfussy diets enable them to colonise new habitats with ease. Nature is not a fixed condition, and Britain has experienced many waves of colonisation and extinction over its geological history. But from the perspective of a wild animal, one of the most significant qualities of our island is that it lies rather far to the north. Much as we complain about the weather, it is remarkably mild for a country on the same latitude as Moscow. Take away the Gulf Stream, and it would be time to buy some serious winter clothing. Add all the geographical and solar phenomena which regularly cause the world to have ice ages, and the Thames Valley becomes cold, hard tundra.

I have tried to breathe normally in temperatures of -35°C (-31°F), on a day in Alberta when humans seemed disinclined to be outside. Gulping such air is like swallowing swords; your lungs baulk at the freezing blast, yet it is nothing compared to the frigid temperatures reached in the wind-chill from a continent-wide ice sheet several kilometres thick. The Pleistocene Epoch played a long game of catch-and-release with Britain, repeatedly coating the northern half of the country with dense ice and then releasing it in warm interludes called interglacials. We live in an interglacial now called the Holocene. It has lasted nearly 12,000 years, but it probably won’t continue forever.

© Red fox skulls and jaw and jaws from Ightham Fissure, near Maidstone. Plate III in Sidney H. Reynolds, A Monograph of the British Pleistocene Mammalia. Vol. II, Part III: The Canidae, London, 1909 (Wikimedia Commons)

A study of red fox bones. This one lived during the Pleistocene in what is now Kent.

Our wildlife has been dictated by ice. The fossil record suggests that red foxes appear in the interglacials, historically alongside a wealth of other creatures that would monopolise attention if glimpsed on safari in Africa. Our first British foxes perhaps scavenged on the carcass of a straight-tusked elephant predated by cave lions, and certainly would have heard the whooping laughs of spotted hyena. The next time you wonder why a fox sits and watches you rather than bolting in panic, remember they have had to judge the risk from very dangerous predators for thousands of millennia, and their evolved strategy is waiting at a safe distance with access to a known safe spot, such as a den or – these days – a gap in a fence. If they had run further than required from each Pleistocene sabre-toothed cat, European jaguar and cave bear, the energy wastage would have crippled them.

Meanwhile, Arctic foxes – along with woolly mammoths, wild horses and reindeer – were present during the colder times. Red foxes disappeared from Britain entirely, surviving in the relatively mild refugia in Spain and the Balkans. Sometimes, while walking in my native Surrey Hills, I try to imagine what those glacial millennia must have been like. The glaciers never extended this far south, but the bite from the wind must have been excruciatingly bitter, and the landscape would have been an austere mixture of bare rock and frozen snow. Fed by the ice sheet were huge rivers of cyan-blue glacial meltwater.

And foxes must have drunk from them. But were they the Arctic or red species?

Over in Somerset, one cave dated to 12,000 years ago contains fossils of both, but red foxes have always returned north and displaced their smaller Arctic cousins in times of mild climate, and they continue to do so on the modern thawing-line of Sweden. In any case, while lions and hyenas did not migrate back to Britain after the ice retreated, foxes rapidly did, even as tundra budded with crowberry bushes and mugwort, and finally grew trees once more.

SO THE FOX trotting across a Clapham street is directly descended from individuals that encountered species wondrous beyond our most outlandish fairy stories, survived extremes of climate that we have never known, and crossed land bridges long lost beneath the sea. Human culture is such a late entry into the story of the fox that it would seem disingenuous to mention it – except, of course, we have a strong bias towards it.

No one will ever know where the first Homo sapiens laid eyes upon a living fox, or how the two species perceived each other. As pre-history continues, our fossils and theirs begin to overlap in palaeontological sites, a silent testimony to forest meetings that have passed into the veil of unwritten time. But 16,000 years ago, when Palaeolithic painters were drawing steppe bison in the Spanish cave of Altamira, a woman of unknown name died in what is now Jordan, in a site called ‘Uyun al-Hammam. Her body was laid among flint and ground stone, and a red fox was carefully placed beside her ribs, resting with her for eternity on a bed of ochre.

We cannot perceive the meaning. Was this a pet, or an animal kept for its ceremonial significance? The care in the joint burial is believed to suggest some emotional link between human and fox, beyond that shown to wildlife perceived as food or clothing. It has been speculated that these pre-Natufian people coexisted with foxes that were at least half domesticated. Perhaps they scavenged rubbish on the edge of camps, along with the earliest dogs. Perhaps the behaviour so often complained about in London is more ancient than we think.

In any case, it is clear that foxes held a strong cultural significance for the later peoples of the Levant. They are commonly found in human graves in Kfar Hahoresh (modern Israel), dated to around 8,600 years ago, while stone carvings of foxes with thick brushes adorn the pillars of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, believed to be the world’s oldest temple. In Mesolithic Britain, humans who hunted deer by the shore of extinct Lake Flixton – in the North Yorkshire archaeological site of Star Carr – must have been aware of their small red neighbours. Bones from two foxes have been found at this ancient settlement, along with those of Britain’s first known domestic dogs, but there is no indication of what role, if any, canids played in their culture.

© Prince Hanzoku Terrorised by a Nine-Tailed Fox, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861) (Wikimedia Commons)

A nine-tailed kitsune in nineteenth-century Japanese art.

Later, as humanity discovered the joy of story-telling, foxes joined the cast. The oral literature of native Americans occasionally opts for a fox as a trickster, albeit a potentially handy one; according to one Apache legend, it was Fox who stole fire from the fireflies and introduced it to Earth. It is across the Pacific in Japan, however, that fox folklore reaches its most astounding heights. Kitsune – the revered fox of Japanese myth, poetry and traditional belief – has existed in human thoughts for many centuries. It even makes an appearance in what may be the world’s oldest novel: the eleventh-century epic The Tale of Genji, where a human character debates whether the figure by a tree is a woman or a shapeshifting vulpine. Kitsune delight, deceive and confuse in countless other legends; while the theme of pretending to be an attractive woman is frequent, other tales relive how they mislead travellers by lighting ghost fires at night, assume the form of cedar trees, or even become the guardian angels of samurai. Today, anime writers continue the kitsune tradition.

BACK IN EUROPE, by Roman times the uneasy relationship between foxes and agriculture had woven itself into religious rituals – in the festival of Cerealia, for example, live foxes were released into the Circus Maximus with burning torches tied to their tails. Seven hundred years later, Aesop’s tales also provide a nod to fox interactions with farmers, and – to a lesser extent – with their neighbouring wildlife. My favourite Aesop fable features a wolf taking a fox to court for theft; given the vast quantity of wolf-killed carrion that real foxes consume, it seems vaguely reasonable.

Old English literature picks up similar themes. The Fox and the Wolf, a rhyming poem from the thirteenth century, stars a fox who helps himself to some chickens and then tricks a wolf into taking the blame:

A fox went out of the wood

Hungered so that to him was woe

He ne was never in no way

Hungered before half so greatly.

He ne held neither way nor street

For to him (it) was loathsome men to meet

To him (it) were more pleasing meet one hen

Than half a hundred women.

He went quickly all the way

Until he saw a wall.

Within the wall was a house.

The fox was thither very eager (to go)

For he intended his hunger quench

Either with food or with drink

And so it continues, with the hungry fox trapping himself in a well before deceiving a wolf named Sigrim into taking his place. Ironically, this poem was written about the same time that the wolf’s howl was finally falling silent in southern Britain.

Did the fox notice the disappearance of its distant relative? Perhaps, unconsciously. As shown in Białowieża and elsewhere, the wolf was a provider as well as rival, a powerful force in the wildwood whose absence has changed these islands as much as a spoke missing from a wheel. Some species have sharply increased, and others have probably declined.

Yet civilisation has done more than simply rip out culturally troublesome natives while boosting deer and grouse for hunting. We have released millions upon millions of non-native animals into the countryside: rabbits from Spain, fallow deer from Persia, sheep from Mesopotamia, hens from south-east Asia, cats from Africa. Our trading ships accidentally added black rats from India and house mice from the Middle East, while American grey squirrels, Japanese sika deer and even Australian red-necked wallabies joined our countryside from zoos. We have persuaded ourselves that the six million sheep of Scotland are part of the ‘natural’ scene, but the Highland ecosystem evolved with none. Even the Scottish red deer population of 300,000 is far higher than in the time of the wolf. These changing grazing pressures affect the rodents and berries that foxes eat, and near-total deforestation has altered their territory sizes and feeding habits.

In a flash of geological time, we have rewritten the fox’s wildwood, in ways both graphic and subtle. We have added, taken away, replanted and concreted.

And the fox that once played its natural dodgems with the rest of the natural web will inevitably interact with the components of the new Britain that we have designed without ecological aforethought.

The fox is not an intruder into our world.

We have simply laid our modern ambitions over the landscape it already knew.

3

Where Do Foxes Live?

OPEN-TOP TOURIST BUSES and impatient black taxis battle for territory in the concrete canyons of central London; beside the gridlock, cyclists squeeze past wary pedestrians, and silent women push today’s Metro into the hands of freshly arrived train passengers. The city’s heart is within the embrace of the two highest towers of British justice: the Royal Courts with its soaring gothic spires and vaulted archways, and the Old Bailey, centuries-old theatre of the grimmest human drama. Perhaps it is no surprise that such a place tries to judge foxes too.

Humanity floods the senses. It’s noisy, so noisy, with cars, and drills, and cries of ‘Can I interest you in a …’

Salesmen offering free organic yoghurt samples, those you can escape; not the smell of vehicle exhaust, however, nor the tourists agog at military statues that screen out so much of the sky. It is musty yet grand, the mood here: intimidating, disconnecting and mesmerising. It is the bones of something; British history, perhaps, stacked so high over press crews hoping to witness more of it, while a tiny old man tries to photobomb them – his Staffordshire bull terrier is wearing a jacket emblazoned with anti-nuclear slogans.

For British people, these streets are a hook from which we dangle and debate our civilisation. For British foxes, this is a land of nothing.

Truly, nothing at all. Not a blade of grass, not a mouse, and hardly a bird in the sky. The ancient wildwood has been utterly extinguished.

At least, all logic would say so.

Yet there was a fox in this very place, not many hours past – a single scat has been deposited on a sprawling gum-spotted pavement between a bus shelter plastered with anti-police propaganda and the unsmiling security fence of the Royal Courts of Justice; a homeless man begs for coins from a populace oblivious to both wildlife and him. Over towards City Thameslink, where wet concrete was recently laid to tidy some aberration, a fox footprint is written literally into London’s frame.

That foxes thrive in leafy suburbs, wooded gardens, and even fields radically transformed by intensive agriculture is not news. But the Strand is a frontier beyond most living things. Faded carvings of red squirrels brighten one business’s wooden sign, while the tavern’s name leaves no doubt that cockfighting once brought brawls and gambling within a street-sweeper’s walk of the Inner Temple. But there is not much non-human life today, save for the pigeons where tourists break the law and feed them, and a gull or two chortling from the spires.

And a fox, somewhere.

When people exclaim that foxes are everywhere, they are both correct and imprecise. The Mammal Society’s National Mammal Atlas shows fox records in nearly every British grid square, from Cornwall to Sutherland, the Cambridgeshire fens to the Western Highlands. They are absent from the remotest islands, but mainland Britain is unquestionably the domain of the fox.

Not to an even degree, however. The weakness of a simple presence-absence map is that it gives the impression that all landscapes are equal. In reality, of course, some places have far higher fox densities than others. No one considers it surprising that humans are clustered tightly in cities, with only a smattering of houses in moorland. In one sense, the fox population also has its high-rise flats and hamlets. All land is not alike.

‘DESERT FOX!’

My guide, a khaki-clad middle-aged Indian of military bearing and Sherlockian skill in tracking all creatures wild, spins the steering wheel of our jeep. Dust spurts, the vehicle’s suspension lurches, and behind us lie treadmarks in the white, white dust. Ahead, no doubt, there is a fox; but mostly there is nothing, as only the desert knows it. Vast flat horizon and vast, vast dusty sky: a land crossed by Rabari tribals and their cattle, but immune to the modern world. I am in the Rann of Kutch in India’s Thar Desert, rattling across the dry ancient bed of the Arabian Sea. I have travelled to many remote places, but this is a landscape apart: seasonally cracked in fiery heat, swamped by monsoons, bleached by salt, and blurred by mirages – stark, wild, beautiful and brutal.

Crossing India’s Rann of Kutch, part of the Thar Desert.

The jeep has stopped.

A fox looks up at me.

It is sitting in a scrubby thicket of what the local people call toothbrush bushes, amber eyes so clear and sharp. It is a red fox, Vulpes vulpes; just like those in London, although its fur is straw-coloured, as if irradiated by the Gujarati sun. It is a curiously sobering thing to observe a fox in an overpoweringly enormous landscape – a theatre refined by torrid heat until it retains only the core essentials of grit and sky. They, too, are raw and unhumanised, and their basic needs cleanly defined.

What is actually needed for survival? We ask that question of ourselves in Robinson Crusoe and its modern spin-offs, but applying it to wildlife may remove the confusion over seeing a fox in the very heart of the metropolis. A hypothetically shipwrecked fox would probably thrive, for its needs are very simple: some shelter to evade weather and enemies, and about 120 kilocalories per kilogram of bodyweight per day. That equates to about nine voles or one rat daily – or one double cheeseburger with fries. Even the bleakest of our cities offer sustenance on this scale to a scavenger-hunter.

The cracked dust of the Gujarati desert does support some hardy plants, which in turn feed herbivores. The desert fox may seek exotic-sounding rodents such as the golden bush rat, the jird, and the Indian gerbil; insects, and the carrion left behind when wolves or jackals kill chinkara gazelle, are also possibilities. Those little thickets of toothbrush bushes – known as bets – offer shelter from the murderous May sun and stay above the waterline during the monsoon floods. Nothing more is required. However improbable it may feel to a human figure dwarfed by a blood-red sunrise, watching wild asses gallop across bone-dry salt flats, this land is perfectly suitable fox country.

On the other hand, so is the ancient forest of Białowieża in Poland, where bank voles scurry past gigantic fungi and wolves inadvertently provide a regular feast of wild boar carrion. So are the gloriously wild prairies of southern Canada, where a bewildering array of rodents whistle from meadows painted glittering silver in springtime ice storms. And so most certainly are suburban British gardens, where they may have their weekly calorie requirement handed to them on a dogfood dish every single night.

The abundance of potential food in each of these habitats is different, however. There is no ‘normal’ or ‘correct’ fox population. Each area is unique. Even the subtlest local changes can trickle upwards – in the harsh mountains of northern British Columbia, for example, areas dominated by lichens are avoided by foxes in favour of those where goat willows are found. In Belarus, forests growing upon clay soils support more prey than those on sandy deposits, and have higher fox densities. How many journalists musing over British fox numbers have thought to take samples of the local soil type?

Obviously, the more food available, the more foxes that the area can potentially support. As a general principle – and notwithstanding countertrends driven by disease and the impact of natural competitors like badgers and coyotes – foxes are distributed unevenly across their huge natural range because food itself is uneven. By that yardstick, the Strand may be even harsher than the Thar Desert; yet both have their foxes. So do the Himalayas, the sub-Arctic, the rainy Spanish mountains and Edgware tube station.

At this point, it is worth taking pause. Think of the world’s most famous animals: tigers, elephants, koalas. How many exist in a range of habitats even close to the diversity of the fox’s natural homes? Range expansion is one of the fox’s rewards for being unspecialised.

Improved odds of beating extinction are another. Replacing wildwood with cold London stone devastated many of our native species, but the fox has survived – and often thrived – during all our changes to the British landscape. A clue as to why comes from the enchanting knife-edged mountains of Sichuan in China; unlike the giant pandas that also wander this landscape, Sichuan’s foxes do not risk starvation when a single food source fails. The panda, famously, is a specialist consumer of bamboo. Should this plant flower and die, as stands do on a regular basis, the panda must move to a new area or perish. Not the fox with its catholic tastes; if, say, its stereotypical British prey of field voles runs short, it will simply switch to pouncing on wood mice or rabbits instead.

Nor are they specialised to a specific habitat. Otters can be wiped out from an entire district by river pollution. A fox population, in contrast, covers so many habitats that even if it faces an environmental disaster in farmland, it will persist in the neighbouring wood, and soon recolonise.

Wherever it lives, a fox learns an acute cartographical knowledge of its local landscape and explores it at a purposeful-seeming trot. In the Swiss Jura, foxes travel about 4 to 12 km (2.4 to 7.4 miles) daily; interestingly, their kin in a residential district in Toronto, Canada, have wider extremes, varying from 2 to 20 km (1.2 to 12.4 miles). Urban Canadian foxes are provided with far fewer deliberate handouts than their British counterparts, however, so source a large percentage of their meals directly from the land.

While foxes have allegedly been clocked at 50 kph (31 mph) in short bursts, their typical pace is far slower, and punctured by rest periods in which the fox will doze under a hedgerow or in a quiet urban corner. The Swiss foxes averaged a speed of about twelve metres per minute, although one individual, who was a transient – a fox without territory – moved considerably faster. While all this may seem like a considerable exercise regime, it is far below the 26 km (16 miles) averaged by male wolves per day. Individuals of both species that are dispersing from their parents into a new territory can wander much further.

One persistent piece of fox folklore is that they are nocturnal – that is, active by night only. Sometimes, this myth slips into the medical department via warnings that a fox enjoying the sunshine must be ill. In fact, it is no cause for alarm. Foxes do pursue a nocturnal existence in regions where they are heavily persecuted, and, as is the case for many human-caused aberrations to the natural world, we have grown accustomed to this atypical state of affairs and convinced ourselves that it is normal. Left to their own devices, foxes will adapt their activity patterns around their social and food-gathering needs. In the world’s great wildernesses, from the Thar Desert to the boggy forests of Ontario, foxes are easily found abroad during daylight hours.

Foxes are often active in daylight where they are undisturbed.

In Britain, field voles tend to be diurnal – day active – if the temperature drops below freezing, and foxes, and indeed barn owls, naturally follow suit. Needless to say, if they find a person who regularly feeds them pork sausages in daylight, they will adapt their activity around that food source instead. I have also known several low-ranking foxes that opted for daytime travel to avoid confrontation with dominant individuals.

Radio-tracking has shown that the daily wanderings of a territory-owning fox fall into two distinct types. The first is a circumnavigation of its entire territory, and the second – and more common – is of visits to different parts of their range each night. Varying their journeys gives them the optimum chance of exploiting food resources; if they were to concentrate on the same field month upon month, it would eventually run dry of voles while the untapped pasture half a mile away is awash with them. It is worth adding that the enormous bounty provided by people who feed garden foxes has added a third trend: foxes who travel little and appear in sizeable numbers in specific sites every day.

Under more natural conditions, foxes tend to cross the landscape in a large-scale zigzag pattern. They are often religiously loyal to specific routes, wearing narrow paths into grass through repeated trampling. In the wilderness, they climb onto fallen tree trunks and walk down their full length as a kind of elevated track; in Britain, they occasionally exploit railway lines instead. Last year, I was shown some startling footage of a fox in Wales trotting briskly down a train rail hardly wider than a human hand, balancing like an expert on a tightrope.

Railways and foxes often occupy the same sentence. While human commuters frequently feel that our rail network is more of a hindrance than a help to travelling, it is commonly stated that our vulpine neighbours are transported by them. Not as passengers – although there are several credible accounts of urban foxes jumping on board public transport – but rather as walkers along the banks. Even at those moments when the Gatwick Express thunders past the East Croydon congestion at 100 mph, and on just the other side of Network Rail’s perimeter fence, millions of people shop, argue and check their phones, the embankments themselves remain one of the least disturbed environments in the city. It is often said that foxes first immigrated to London in the 1930s, the pioneers moving down railway lines into this new brave world full of human creatures.

But when talking of the arrival of fox in city, it is as well to remember that city has also travelled extensively into the traditional land of the fox. London has bloated massively over the last two centuries, and despite the best efforts of greenbelt campaigners, continues to do so. Many of today’s ‘urban’ foxes may be descended from ‘rural’ foxes whose habitat was suddenly turned into housing estates. Incidentally, records of foxes near towns in Finland date back to the medieval era, and their distinctive barks were heard in Tokyo in the ninth century. There is even some suggestion that foxes scavenged on abandoned scraps from humans as long ago as the Palaeolithic – the Old Stone Age.

Regardless, considerable research has taken place in recent years to establish the impact of railway lines on fox densities and movement patterns. But evidence that dispersing foxes, and indeed territory-owners on the hunt, are funnelled by the railways is also remarkably scant; radio-collared foxes have shown little preference for the train lines.

Taking the wider view, why would they? Humanity has proved tragically skilful in fragmenting the habitat of hedgehogs, toads and dormice, but foxes are much more capable travellers. They can and do cross roads, car parks and fences. Even the natural world’s topography has little impact; genetic sampling from Croatia has shown that they migrate freely across rivers and small mountains.

When not travelling or feeding, foxes require a suitable place to rest. This may be anywhere within their home range, even close to the territorial border. Foxes have more than one den, including sites that may only be used temporarily. Researchers in Polish farmland found that earths tended to be dug on steep south-facing slopes, with western exposure avoided, possibly due to the prevailing westerly winds. In suburban Britain, foxes often rest on greenhouse roofs or sunbathe in quiet alleys. I’ve found one stretched out contentedly on warm plastic in a narrow gap between a wall and a garage, peaceful and safe, despite being within metres of a major supermarket car park used by hundreds of humans each day.

BUT THE STRAND is crossed by thousands upon tens of thousands of people. Even at midnight, it is alive: lights on the arching stonework, music thumping from cars as they choke in bus-filled traffic jams. I’ve come back here because I want to better understand the miracle of foxes in a desert of towering grey rock. Friday night has spilled people upon the streets, shouting, selfie-taking, watching buskers batter their drums. More of them sprawl between the paws of the giant lions of Trafalgar, strangely drawn to the cold stone models of wild animals. Night itself seems defeated by the battle squadron of lights jumping upon these grandest of buildings, reflecting on the river, luring punters into shops. So it continues on the journey southwards: shuttered shops, drunken youths, urban cries and urban dreams.

There is a fox.

A male, all long limbs and thick brush, sits on a patch of grass under one of Brixton’s tower blocks, half illuminated by streetlight. He turns his head towards the car as we pass, watching, just like his kin in the silent and utterly wild Thar Desert.

Adaptability.

That, in essence, is the fox’s gift.

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