Monday, March 08, 2010
I HAD a close encounter with a fox the other day.
It was early one morning, soon after dawn, and I was driving slowly and carefully along an icy country road. The fox shot out of the hedge on the right hand side of the road, flowed across in front of the car and bounded effortlessly over a wall on the left hand side.
He was a big fox – I’m almost sure it was a male, the only superficial difference is that dog foxes are normally about 15% heavier than vixens and look bulkier as well as larger. He still had his winter coat, long and silky and deep red with a distinctive white tip to his brush. Soon this will be moulted in favour of thinner, patchy summer fur.
Tom Hayden and Rory Harrington in their classic book Exploring Irish Mammals, in the section on the red fox, note dryly that "public attitudes to it are often ambivalent". I know what they mean, but nobody could deny the incredible beauty of that animal that crossed the road in front of me.
It was travelling fast – foxes can reach speeds of more than 70 kilometres an hour – but there was no great sense of exertion such as you might see in a rabbit or a deer when it’s going flat out. It undulated across the road with effortless, dolphin-like bounds, its streaming tail looking like the after-burner on a jet engine. It left an impression of an animal in equilibrium with its environment.
This is the fox’s great secret. In folklore all over the world it’s described as "sly", "clever", "cunning" – and it is. It’s clever at adapting so that it assimilates into its environment even when this environment is changing rapidly.
As a result it’s the most widely distributed carnivore in the world and one of the few that’s in no way endangered. Of course its distribution has been assisted by human introductions. Its original range was the whole of temperate Eurasia, from Japan to Ireland, parts of Canada and the northern United States and a bit of North Africa.
Then around 1700 it was introduced from Europe into the southern US by Gone With The Wind-type plantation owners who wanted to enjoy the patrician sport of hunting it on horseback. Similar motives brought it to southern Australia in the 1850s and it’s now regarded as a serious threat to the indigenous wildlife there. Apparently it has recently, and rather mysteriously, appeared in Tasmania.
And, as we all know, it is virtually the only large wild animal that has succeeded in adapting to urban and suburban habitats. The urban fox is not that recent a phenomenon. They were reported in both Dublin and Belfast in the 1930s. But there seems to have been an upsurge in the number of foxes moving into town in the 1970s and 1980s in this country. This seems to have been followed by some decline in urban fox numbers in the last 20 years.
There may be reasons for this and these reasons may be another indication of the cleverness and versatility of foxes. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a strong international market for fox fur and up to 35,000 pelts a year were exported from this country. The countryside became a dangerous place for foxes.
In the past 20 years rubbish collection practices have changed considerably in our towns and cities. Foxes are out-foxed by the wheelie-bin and urban foxes have become hungrier. These animals really are the ultimate survivors. We may have ambivalent attitudes, but you have to admire them.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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