Fox dating and mating season

A vixen has between 4-5 cubs, born March and mid April after a gestation period of just under two months

Young fox in Killarney National Park. Picture: Valerie O'Sullivan

We’re now in a period when people may hear strange, eerie calls in the dead of night. Plaintive sounds like a woman wailing can carry for long distances across quiet countryside, and chill people.

Sitting around winter firesides (not too long ago!), our ancestors would tell tales of the banshee’s haunting call — the fairy woman only heard from when somebody was about to die in a locality.

Such stories might still be told when people gather during the festive season. I knew some who fully believed in the banshee’s cry as a portent of death, and that hearing it around the time of somebody’s passing was definitely not a coincidence.

Likelihood is that it was a fox’s mating call. Their mating season runs from December to February, and if you listen on a calm, tranquil night you might hear repeated shrieks.

Fox mating season typically runs from December until February. Female foxes then gestate for approximately 52 to 53 days

By the way, a recent column on the campaign to ban fox hunting elicited feedback with a common theme — a general folk belief that foxes are exceptionally intelligent, cunning animals, well able to outwit human beings when necessary.

This is well recorded in the National Schools Folklore Collection from the late 1930s: 

• One pupil, Mary O’Brien, of Redmond Street, Fermoy, County Cork, related a story of a fox raiding a farmer’s hen house, in nearby Kilworth.

The fox ate so much that it just lay on the ground. The farmer thought it was dead and instructed a workman to throw it over the wall until they had time to bury it. But, wrote Mary, the fox was only pretending to be dead and ran off as soon as the man turned his back. 

"This is a true story," she proclaimed.

• John Kevran, of Coolvuck Lower, County Westmeath, offered an even more fanciful yarn. A farmer bothered by a fox secured the door of his fowl house, but the wily fox got in through a hole in the roof.
  Later, the farmer came by and, thinking he had the fox trapped, bent down to pick up stones to kill it.
  “But, when he stooped, the fox jumped up on his back, out (through) the hole in the roof, and escaped," noted John.

Back to the banshee: Risteard Ó Faoláin, a teacher in Kilmacoliver, County Kilkenny, 90 years ago, noted the belief that this spectral being kept combing her long hair, was thought to hang around fairy forts, and was continually 'keening' (making a mournful cry).

“People in this area still believe in her. Also, that it is impossible to get near her and woe betide anyone that crosses her path."

Listen these nights…and be careful out there!