Reading about the fox

It’s too wet and windy for a walk – Storm Atiya is on its way – so I’m reading up on foxes. The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand is not, as the blurb on the cover says, a lyrical love letter to the fox, but it is full of facts about foxes. How small they are (sometimes weighing in at less than a domestic cat); how keen their hearing is (yesterday’s fox had his head down because he was listening for earthworms); and how well they fit into whichever of the many and varied landscapes they inhabit.

One such ecosystem, notes Brand,  is Białowieża, a tract of near primeval forest in Poland. White booted eagles fly overhead, and if you are lucky (I wasn't!) you may see elk and bison. Fallen tree-trunks, supposedly dead,  are alive with mosses and thronged with woodpeckers, squirrels and invertebrates. The colour green is all around you. Oak, hornbeam, beech, lichens, sphagnum, and grasses; each tree, each plant, has its own particular aura of green. Białowieża thrums with life. If I describe the forest as magical I mean that in the two or three hours I spent there I felt more alive than I have done anywhere else on earth. My senses were sharpened, my skin became alert to the texture of the air around me.

In Białowieża foxes feed on wild boar carrion, the boar brought down by wolves and scavenged by their smaller relatives. English foxes too are scavengers, but it's unlikely that they would feed on wild boar; their teeth are not strong enough to deliver a killer bite, and there are no wolves to do it for them. So, our wild boar are safe, and free to roam - a reason, perhaps, to bring back the wolf?

Fox

Hoar frost hangs in the air. A robin greets me. A clatter of woodpigeons flies too close for comfort. Two crows, their black plumage bigged up against the cold air, fight over a chunk of bread. 

In the field next to the farm a fox, the fog dulling down his russet coat, meanders slowly across the grass. Head down, tail down, he is rootling for earthworms. Foxes eat a lot of worms. Rain, such as we had last night, brings them to the surface, but now the ground is almost frozen and it will be a while before he can unearth his breakfast. I am glad to be well-wrapped up. I am glad to have made it out this early.

Fox

As I walked past the small field beside Carriage Drive, I had the feeling I was being watched. It’s a feeling I’ve come to trust: If I think I’m being watched, I am. Who, or what, was watching me?

An animal was crouched in the middle of the field. A cat perhaps. No. It was a fox. Very pale in colour, as though it had been sprinkled with silver dust.  Its ears and tail were too big for its body, and yet, as foxes go, this was a large animal.  I gasped with pleasure, and the fox took off across the field – a fox can run at 30 miles an hour – and leapt over the perimeter ditch, its magnificent tail streaming behind it like a comet.

I stood at the field end.

Deeper in was a fox.

Suddenly I felt myself feared.

It was not a good feeling.