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You would think there could scarcely be enough room for a medium-sized native carnivore to live alongside us in Britain. Yet the cunning and resilient fox has led to it not just surviving, but actually thriving, anywhere from on rural farms to in the heart of Britain’s biggest cities. It’s a tough life, though, and particularly among the urban residents it’s a ‘live fast die young’ scenario, where cubs must learn the tricks of their trade quickly to give themselves a chance of breeding the following year.

Fox cubs

WHEN

Late April until the end of June

WHERE

Widespread and can be seen anywhere, although easiest seen in cities such as London and Bristol

A fox cub seemingly without a care in the world, but it can be a surprisingly short and brutal life.

Andy Rouse

The word ‘fox’ is considered a very old English word that came from the proto-Indo-European word ‘puk’, or Sanskrit ‘pucca’, which both mean tail. Our only native canid (member of the dog family) was widespread in Britain from the end of the Ice Age: evidence of fox remains reveals that the earliest human inhabitants hunted them for fur and meat. Despite a history of persecution through the Middle Ages, the number of foxes was scarcely reduced until the rise of pheasant shooting in the Victorian era, when an army of gamekeepers was employed to wipe out the ‘ vermin’. The liberal use of vastly improved guns, traps and poisons meant that, at the turn of the 20th century, foxes had been virtually exterminated from much of East Anglia and the large estates in eastern Scotland. But, as gamekeeping declined after the First World War, fox numbers recovered, and current estimates indicate the population has remained largely stable over the last 30 years at a pre-breeding population of 250,000 adult foxes.

Despite foxes being recorded from the length and breadth of mainland Britain, their distribution is far from even, with the highest densities occurring in southwest England, the Welsh Borders and up into southern Scotland. While foxes can be found anywhere from moors or woodlands to the centre of towns, they prefer fragmented habitats that are able to provide them with a wide range of cover and plenty of boundary edges along which they can hunt. Contrary to popular belief, despite the relatively recent colonisation of towns by foxes from the 1930s, 86 per cent of foxes are still thought to prefer living in the countryside, although a number may regularly move between the two.

The adult fox and its cubs are immediately identifiable but, on close inspection, many people are surprised by how small foxes actually are. A male dog fox weighs little more than 6.5 kilograms with an average body length of 67 centimetres plus a bushy tail adding a further 40 centimetres, while the female or vixen weighs even less, only marginally more than a domestic cat.

Their coat can vary in both colour and condition during the course of the year and they generally look at their scruffiest in the summer during their long protracted annual moult that begins in April. It is not until autumn that the old fur has fallen out and a new, shorter coat is revealed underneath. By the end of October or early November it is long, thick and ready for the winter.

In terms of sight, foxes do not enjoy the palette of colours available to the human eye and are often reliant upon movement for the object to register on their visual radar. However, their hearing at low frequencies is particularly acute, and is heavily used at dusk or night-time to track down the rustling of small mammals in the leaf litter. Once the sound is pinpointed, the fox will pounce on an unsuspecting mouse, vole or rat from as far as two or three metres away. A fox’s world is also dominated by smells, which are used to track down the next meal. Areas around the fox’s territory sprayed with urine are also capable of conveying a range of information about the owner, such as their identity or reproductive state.

While many sightings in both rural and urban areas are of solitary animals, most foxes are part of a group. Most consist of a clear hierarchy with a dominant dog fox and vixen, which will usually be the only pair to breed, a number of mostly subordinate females (female cubs from previous years that have not left the territory) and unrelated males. The number of subordinate foxes within the group will depend both on whether food is plentiful and on the local level of persecution, with favourable conditions leading to groups with as many as ten adults in addition to the alpha pair’s cubs.

The groups’ territories can vary enormously in size, with rural foxes generally making use of at least 1.5 square miles per group, as opposed to urban foxes where food is more easily acquired, which may have five territories crammed into each half square mile. In upland areas, where fox densities are lower and food is more difficult to locate, the territory may be as large as 12 square miles. The dog foxes will constantly man the borders of their territories after the cubs have dispersed in the autumn and in winter when the females are approaching oestrus. Upon confrontation with the neighbours, who are not deterred by a snarling match, the resident fox will frequently resort to fighting by rearing up on its hind legs and engaging in pushing and biting matches to try to drive the intruder away.

Foxes are able to mate only ten months after birth, with the mating peak occurring early in the New Year when the females come briefly into oestrus. A copulating pair can sometimes become locked together for up to an hour, a feature unique to the dog family; it is a time when both foxes can be left very vulnerable. This mating period is also the time when the bloodcurdling screams of the vixen and the triple bark of the male shatter the silence of the night as they stay in contact and assess the locations both of members of their group and any neighbouring animals.

Pregnancy lasts 53 days, during which time the vixen will select and clean a number of den sites or ‘ earths’ in which to raise her cubs. The chosen fox earth may be either self-excavated or an enlarged and disused rabbit warren or badger sett in the countryside, with favoured locations in the suburbs commonly being under garden sheds. Four to five cubs are usually born blind and deaf in mid- to late March. For the first two weeks, they will be constantly supplied with milk and attended to by the vixen; she, in turn, will be kept fed by regular provisions brought to the earth by the dog fox. When the cubs’ eyes and ears finally open they begin to stray much more until, after four weeks, they will eventually emerge blinking into the daylight as dark-chocolate-brown coloured fur balls.

Fox cubs playing. This is integral to honing their hunting techniques and sorting out a pecking order.

Manfred Danegger

Undoubtedly the best time to see the foxes’ social and playful side is the period between their emergence and the time when the cubs have to stand on their own four feet in the autumn. Initially they will then remain close to their earth, playing and engaging in mock fights. While they look like they don’t have a care in the world, these tussles are used to develop a social hierarchy and hone their hunting techniques, skills that could make the difference between life and death. As the cubs mature, they begin to spend their entire time above ground; they moult into their orangey-red fur, and their ears and snout elongate to produce the characteristic foxy appearance. The cubs are fed by their parents or other group adults at rendezvous points close to the den sites right up to July, by which time they will have started to hunt themselves.

The adults give the cubs very little training, so, initially, they are dependent mostly on easily caught food such as earthworms, beetles and small fledgling birds; if July is wet, more cubs will survive through to autumn as the worms will be easily accessible. As cubs begin to forage further away from the earth, their inexperience makes them vulnerable to predators such as other foxes, badgers, dogs and, of course, cars, so, where possible, they will try and use the centre of their parents’ territory where they feel most secure.

During each breeding season around 425,000 cubs are born, and, as the fox population remains fairly constant, this means that as few as four in ten cubs make it through to the following breeding season to replace the older animals. This could mean the average life expectancy of a British fox may be no more than a paltry 18 months. After being maligned in the countryside, where it does not get credit for keeping rabbit numbers in check, and undeservedly blamed for taking pets in the towns, is it now time to cut the fox some slack? Its resilience, adaptability and endurance in the face of an ever-changing Britain shows that, as a species, it has more in common with us humans than we dare to think.