Not-so-clever fox messing with the wrong man

We’ve heard of urban and rural foxes, but Charlie Adleyis involved in a territorial struggle with what seems to be a mixture of the two

AFTER washing the dishes, I feel a sad need to reassert an idea of manhood. Stepping outside the back door, I inhale the cold, sweet country air, the deep darkness of night, the silence of winter. Wandering into the garden, I scent my territory and feel primal.

Not primal enough, because the next morning a fresh fox pooh was laid over the spot where I peed the night before.

So it begins. Wherever I scent, the fox poohs. Sometimes, there’s baby fox pooh alongside the regular contribution from ‘himself’. Or ‘herself’? If there are cubs, it might be a vixen, but it feels like a male, asserting his territory.

He’s had this patch to himself for years, but suddenly there’s another male, me, scenting all over the place. He’s not having it. So he drops his ‘gifts’ on my scent, telling me I’m on his patch, and that’s the order of things.

Close up, he looks like a male. A month ago, I stepped out of the house an hour after dusk. Slamming the door, I crunched over the gravel driveway and froze in my tracks. The exterior light illuminated a large and oblivious fox on the front lawn. He didn’t give a damn. I’d made a racket storming along the drive, but he hadn’t lifted his nose from the grass. Running in huge figures of eight, he tracked something running at high speed and ate it.

Being a friendly idiot, I whispered to him, starting peace talks over our border issues. He was magnificent, almost a metre long with a luxurious, sunburst brush. Cool as butterscotch sundaes, he pootled around, as uninterested in me as I was captivated by him. To protect my tender, much-loved lavender plant, I lay an old rug over it on frosty nights.

That was adequate until the morning I stepped outside to find the rug lying in a heap on the middle of lawn. There had been no wind that night, and it would take a gale to lift that rug.

From the disruption to the dew on the grass, I can see that the rug has been dragged along and dumped.

Not many wild creatures in Ireland could do that.

Even fewer who would want to do that.

Well, if ‘himself’ is going to war with me, via my plants, he couldn’t have picked a more provocative tactic.

Listen, foxy, you can pooh anywhere, but you don’t mess with my plants. You’ve got the whole countryside.

But has he? When he’s on the lawn, he knows I’m watching, but he doesn’t care.

I’d expect such levels of confidence from an urban fox, but this area is rural.

Well, it is but it isn’t. Once all farmland, there’s been a plethora of houses built around here in the last 20 years. Fox ranges have shrunk dramatically.

So, if neither a rural nor an urban fox, is he a suburban fox?

Makes me shudder to call this area suburban. It couldn’t be more different to the London suburb of my birth, or the anodyne, city-less suburbs of the USA. But this pure farming population is now mixed with city commuters, so while being rural enough that one can see the Milky Way, it is also suburban.

Maybe the fox is, too.