Nature focus
Packham loves them, folklore fetes them, and they are a huge asset to our native woods. Lizzie Catt peeks into the world of...
Fantastic Mr Fox
I GREW UP in fox country – they were always around my village in the Surrey Hills,” says Adele Brand, ecologist and author of The Hidden World of the Fox. “As a child, they caught my eye because each individual is so easy to recognise. You can really tune in to the ups and downs of their lives.”
Nature’s ultimate maverick, our native red fox can turn its paw to making most places home: wetlands, mountains, the space beneath your shed. But its favourite habitat is a healthy mosaic of trees, hedges and woodland – in country or in town.
“To a fox, a wood is a house, a larder, a social media board, a public transport system,” explains Adele. “An understorey of bramble and holly gives shelter, glades offer plenty of prey. And because foxes are playful and fleet-footed, a fallen tree makes an irresistible miniature highway. They just have to walk along it!”
Globally there are 15 vulpine species, and the red fox is the most widespread carnivorous mammal on Earth. In the UK, their earliest fossil dates back 330,000 years. It’s thought that as many as two-thirds still live in the countryside, and while latest estimates put their population between 350,000 and 430,000, the British Trust for Ornithology reports overall numbers have fallen by 53% since 1995.
vulpine species worldwide
years - the earliest fossil in the UK
decrease in numbers since 1995
Adele suspects this could be tied to a declining rabbit population, though cars pose another big threat. A sobering 100,000 foxes are killed on UK roads each year, which means mammal underpasses can be literal lifesavers – like the one installed under the A6 highway in Northern Ireland’s Faughan Valley after lobbying by the Woodland Trust. And in urban areas, where about a third of the Trust’s work is focused, we are championing more hedges and copses in tree-starved neighbourhoods, giving foxes safer passage through the concrete jungle.
Meanwhile, there is plenty in the woods to please a resourceful omnivore. Foxes are clever hunters with radar-like ears and an elegant pounce, thanks to their light bones and steadying tails, and the Trust’s Tom Walsh says their unfussy diet means the take a range of prey depending on what’s available locally, helping preserve the wider balance of the woodland ecosystem: “They keep rabbit and vole numbers in check, aiding regeneration of young trees and ground flora, and they’ll take a squirrel or a wood pigeon if they can catch one. They’ve even been known to take down muntjac and fallow fawns.”
"Foxes are the ultimate survivors; they don’t only resist our unkindness towards them, they triumph in spite of it.”
Chris Packham
Their favourite food doesn’t call for much cunning, though – fruit like wild cherries and blackberries: “It makes them important dispersers of plant species through a wood.”
The relationship between foxes and humans has been woven into storytelling since Aesop’s Fables, in 600BC. By the Middle Ages, Reynard the fox was characterised as a charming scoundrel across literature in English, French, Dutch and German.
Bernadette Russell, storyteller in residence at Lesnes Abbey Woods in Bexley, South East London, dubs this ‘foxlore’ – and says some of it links with the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.
“Yes, the fox was portrayed as a trickster, but also as a friend to the poor and outcasts,” Bernadette says. “There are lots of tales about foxes helping Wat Tyler’s rebels and even sharing their food! It’s why they became so strongly associated with Robin Hood.”
Author Adele still prefers real-life foxlore: she has fostered injured and abandoned foxes, and tracks the life stories of individuals near her North Downs home.
“One vixen was raising a litter when half her home wood was levelled by builders,” she recalls. “Instead of abandoning her cubs, she trespassed daily into the next fox’s territory to find food, defying all attempts to keep her out. It was astounding. But then foxes are like Plasticine: they have always adapted.” The naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham is another who favours resourceful Red above all other creatures – as he told Broadleaf last month: “I love their gorgeous golden eyes, the white chin, the rich russet coat. That smart smack of scent they leave on my paths, and the weird screams they’ve scared me with in the moonlight.
“But most of all I love their success. They are ultimate survivors: they don’t only resist our unkindness toward them, they triumph in spite of it. The fox is one of nature’s winners.”
