Outfoxed: Sounds like a family eviction

Dick Warner on the curious social lives of foxes.

It was a still, quiet night and I was sitting outside. Suddenly the quietness was shattered. The sounds came in bursts of three, a bit like a dog’s bark but higher in pitch. Dogs did start to bark in a number of houses round about and the difference was obvious. Then a hare squealed in alarm.

My wife heard the uproar from inside the house and came out to find out what was happening. It’s the foxes, I explained, something is going on at their earth in the next field.

It went on for 15 or 20 minutes with the fox that was making most of the noise slowly moving southwards. I tracked its progress and tried to imagine the plot of the drama that was unfolding in the darkness.

Foxes are extremely territorial and with most territorial animals and birds a traumatic moment arrives when the parents, who have spent months caring for their young, suddenly turn on them and evict them. It sounded to me as though this was happening to a young dog fox.

The social life of foxes is actually rather curious. A litter of four or five cubs is born in an underground earth in March or April. By the autumn they are mature and the male cubs will leave the territory or be evicted from it. September is early for this to happen, it’s more normally October or even November. In any event, it has to happen before the next mating season in December and January.

If there is little or no competition for territories in the area the female cubs will sometimes leave at the same time. But more normally they stay at home but don’t mate or reproduce. They are spinster aunts who help the dominant vixen to rear her next litter.

Foxes are adaptable animals found in practically every habitat type in the country except very marshy ones and some offshore islands. The size of their territory varies, depending firstly on the food it supplies and secondly on the shelter it offers. On a bare mountain they may control 1000 hectares of land while in a leafy suburb the territory may be as small as 20 hectares.

The last fox I saw, as opposed to heard, was a couple of weeks ago in Sandymount in Dublin. I think it was a vixen. It was running across a large lawn in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon.

Urban foxes are not a new phenomenon. There are records of them from Dublin and Belfast from the 1930s and they’ve probably been around even longer than that. But around the early 1970s their numbers began to increase quite dramatically.

The reason for this is probably that around that time the countryside became a less attractive place for them for two reasons. Firstly there was a high international price for fox fur and we were exporting around 35,000 pelts a year and these all came from rural Ireland. Secondly there was a decline in the rabbit population due to myxomatosis.

Towns and cities not only offered freedom from persecution but also an increasing food supply from fast food establishments and rubbish bags. They prefer areas with large mature gardens and are found in parks and the grounds of office blocks and institutions.

But there are indications that the urban fox population started to decline again in the 1990s. This is probably due to changes in the way we dispose of our rubbish and a gradual improvement in our attitudes to litter. A fox has no problem opening a plastic bag of rubbish but finds a wheelie bin beyond its ingenuity.

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