The Hidden World of the Fox. Adele Brand

from the remotest islands, but mainland Britain is unquestionably the domain of the fox.

      Not to an even degree, however. The weakness of a simple presence-absence map is that it gives the impres­sion that all landscapes are equal. In reality, of course, some places have far higher fox densities than others. No one considers it surprising that humans are clustered tightly in cities, with only a smattering of houses in moor­land. In one sense, the fox population also has its high-rise flats and hamlets. All land is not alike.

      ‘DESERT FOX!’

      My guide, a khaki-clad middle-aged Indian of mili­tary bearing and Sherlockian skill in tracking all creatures wild, spins the steering wheel of our jeep. Dust spurts, the vehicle’s suspension lurches, and behind us lie treadmarks in the white, white dust. Ahead, no doubt, there is a fox; but mostly there is nothing, as only the desert knows it. Vast flat horizon and vast, vast dusty sky: a land crossed by Rabari tribals and their cattle, but immune to the modern world. I am in the Rann of Kutch in India’s Thar Desert, rattling across the dry ancient bed of the Arabian Sea. I have travelled to many remote places, but this is a land­scape apart: seasonally cracked in fiery heat, swamped by monsoons, bleached by salt, and blurred by mirages – stark, wild, beautiful and brutal.

      Crossing India’s Rann of Kutch, part of the Thar Desert.

      The jeep has stopped.

      A fox looks up at me.

      It is sitting in a scrubby thicket of what the local people call toothbrush bushes, amber eyes so clear and sharp. It is a red fox, Vulpes vulpes; just like those in London, although its fur is straw-coloured, as if irradiated by the Gujarati sun. It is a curiously sobering thing to observe a fox in an over­poweringly enormous landscape – a theatre refined by torrid heat until it retains only the core essentials of grit and sky. They, too, are raw and unhumanised, and their basic needs cleanly defined.

      What is actually needed for survival? We ask that question of ourselves in Robinson Crusoe and its modern spin-offs, but applying it to wildlife may remove the con­fusion over seeing a fox in the very heart of the metropolis. A hypothetically shipwrecked fox would probably thrive, for its needs are very simple: some shelter to evade weather and enemies, and about 120 kilocalories per kilogram of bodyweight per day. That equates to about nine voles or one rat daily – or one double cheeseburger with fries. Even the bleakest of our cities offer sustenance on this scale to a scavenger-hunter.

      The cracked dust of the Gujarati desert does sup­port some hardy plants, which in turn feed herbi­vores. The desert fox may seek exotic-sounding rodents such as the golden bush rat, the jird, and the Indian gerbil; insects, and the carrion left behind when wolves or ja­ckals kill chin­kara gazelle, are also possibilities. Those little th­ickets of tooth­­brush bushes – known as bets – offer shelter from the murderous May sun and stay above the waterline during the monsoon floods. Nothing more is required. How­ever improbable it may feel to a human figure dwarfed by a blood-red sunrise, watching wild asses gallop across bone-dry salt flats, this land is perfectly suit­able fox country.

      On the other hand, so is the ancient forest of Białowieża in Poland, where bank voles scurry past gigantic fungi and wolves inadvertently provide a regular feast of wild boar carrion. So are the gloriously wild prairies of southern Canada, where a bewildering array of rodents whistle from meadows painted glittering silver in springtime ice storms. And so most certainly are suburban British gardens, where they may have their weekly calorie requirement handed to them on a dogfood dish every single night.

      The abundance of potential food in each of these habi­tats is different, however. There is no ‘normal’ or ‘cor­rect’ fox population. Each area is unique. Even the subtlest local changes can trickle upwards – in the harsh moun­tains of northern British Columbia, for example, areas dominated by lichens are avoided by foxes in favour of those where goat willows are found. In Belarus, forests growing upon clay soils support more prey than those on sandy de­posits, and have higher fox densities. How many journalists musing over British fox numbers have thought to take samples of the local soil type?

      Obviously, the more food available, the more foxes that the area can potentially support. As a general principle – and notwithstanding countertrends driven by disease and the impact of natural competitors like badgers and coyotes – foxes are distributed unevenly across their huge natural range because food itself is uneven. By that yardstick, the Strand may be even harsher than the Thar Desert; yet both have their foxes. So do the Himalayas, the sub-Arctic, the rainy Spanish mountains and Edgware tube station.

      At this point, it is worth taking pause. Think of the world’s most famous animals: tigers, elephants, koalas. How many exist in a range of habitats even close to the diversity of the fox’s natural homes? Range expansion is one of the fox’s rewards for being unspecialised.

      Improved odds of beating extinction are another. Replacing wildwood with cold London stone devastated many of our native species, but the fox has survived – and often thrived – during all our changes to the British landscape. A clue as to why comes from the enchanting knife-edged mountains of Sichuan in China; unlike the giant pandas that also wander this landscape, Sichuan’s foxes do not risk starvation when a single food source fails. The panda, famously, is a specialist consumer of bamboo. Should this plant flower and die, as stands do on a regular basis, the panda must move to a new area or perish. Not the fox with its catholic tastes; if, say, its stereotypical Brit­ish prey of field voles runs short, it will simply switch to pouncing on wood mice or rabbits instead.

      Nor are they specialised to a specific habitat. Otters can be wiped out from an entire district by river pollution. A fox population, in contrast, covers so many habitats that even if it faces an environmental disaster in farm­land, it will persist in the neighbouring wood, and soon re­colon­ise.

      Wherever it lives, a fox learns an acute carto­graph­ical knowledge of its local landscape and explores it at a purposeful-seeming trot. In the Swiss Jura, foxes travel about 4 to 12 km (2.4 to 7.4 miles) daily; interestingly, their kin in a residential district in Toronto, Canada, have wider extremes, varying from 2 to 20 km (1.2 to 12.4 miles). Urban Canadian foxes are provided with far fewer deliberate handouts than their British counterparts, how­ever, so source a large percentage of their meals directly from the land.

      While foxes have allegedly been clocked at 50 kph (31 mph) in short bursts, their typical pace is far slower, and punctured by rest periods in which the fox will doze under a hedgerow or in a quiet urban corner. The Swiss foxes aver­aged a speed of about twelve metres per min­ute, although one individual, who was a transient – a fox without terri­tory – moved considerably faster. While all this may seem like a considerable exercise regime, it is far below the 26 km (16 miles) averaged by male wolves per day. Individuals of both species that are dispersing from their parents into a new territory can wander much fur­ther.

      One persistent piece of fox folklore is that they are noc­turnal – that is, active by night only. Sometimes, this myth slips into the medical department via warnings that a fox enjoying the sunshine must be ill. In fact, it is no cause for alarm. Foxes do pursue a nocturnal existence in regions where they are heavily persecuted, and, as is the case for many human-caused aberrations to the natural world, we have grown accustomed to this atypical state of affairs and convinced ourselves that it is normal. Left to their own devices, foxes will adapt their activity patterns around their social and food-gathering needs. In the world’s great wildernesses, from the Thar Desert to the boggy forests of Ontario, foxes are easily found abroad during daylight hours.

      Foxes are often active in daylight where they are undisturbed.

      In Britain, field voles tend to be diurnal – day active – if the temperature drops below freezing, and foxes, and indeed barn owls, naturally follow suit. Needless to say, if they find a person who regularly feeds them pork saus­ages in daylight, they will adapt their activity around that food source instead. I have also known several low-ranking foxes that opted for daytime travel to avoid confrontation