The Hidden World of the Fox
Adele Brand
‘A lovely little book … quietly lyrical, often funny and gently persuasive’ Sunday Times ‘Succinct, clear, sophisticated. I couldn't stop reading it’ Jeff VanderMeer We’ve all seen the fox. A flash of his brushy tail disappearing between the gap of a fence, a blaze of orange caught in the headlights as he scampers across the road. We’ve heard him too, his strange barks echoing in the city night. Perhaps we’ve even come face to face with him, eyes meeting for a few moments before he disappears once more into the darkness. But where is he going, and what is his world really like? In The Hidden World of the Fox, ecologist Adele Brand shines a light on one of Britain’s most familiar yet enigmatic animals, showing us how the astonishing senses, intelligence and behaviour that allowed foxes to thrive in the ancient wildwood now help them survive in the concrete car parks and clattering railway lines of our cities and towns. The result of a lifelong obsession, Brand adds a wealth of firsthand experience to this charming, lyrical love letter to the fox, whether she’s fostering their cubs, studying their interactions with humans, or catching them on hidden cameras everywhere from the Białowieża forest of Poland and the Thar desert of India to the classic English countryside of her home in the North Downs. While encounters with a host of furry acquaintances – Chatter, Old Dogfox, Sooty, the Interloper, the Vixen from Across the Road – will delight and amuse, her message about the importance of living peaceably side-by-side with nature will linger long after the last page is turned.
COPYRIGHT (#ue9285ca1-f1c7-4270-b4c3-4310965bbcb8)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://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
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Source ISBN: 9780008327286
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008327293
Version: 2019-09-27
For my parents
CONTENTS
Cover (#u59bfbb48-804f-5e66-93c9-e25df2908a7a)
Title Page (#u7cb8679a-6fe1-553c-a42c-01ad327d6fb4)
Copyright
Dedication (#u2a3d1db7-36aa-568e-b815-1eeadcd3ee42)
1 Who is the Fox? (#ulink_e28b7aa4-5413-53eb-9d7b-b3ad064bde43)
2 A Brief History of the Fox (#ulink_e026dacd-1af4-5421-a41e-bff471c65b83)
3 Where do Foxes Live? (#ulink_2817ea82-ecb0-5a25-bd01-29c3bc63f716)
4 What Does the Fox Look Like? (#ulink_93952f5b-8f6b-587b-8315-94022c302aa4)
5 Fox Family Matters (#litres_trial_promo)
6 The Fox and its Neighbours (#litres_trial_promo)
7 What Does the Fox Say? (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Counting Foxes (#litres_trial_promo)
9 In Sickness and in Health (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Predators Among Us (#litres_trial_promo)
11 When the Fur Flies (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Tornado in a Cage (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue: Fame and Foxes (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fox Watcher’s Toolkit (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_c132e961-cd4e-51d7-b15d-ba90d24cd47c)
Who is the Fox? (#ulink_c132e961-cd4e-51d7-b15d-ba90d24cd47c)
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.