The last year or so has been hectic when it comes to finding out more about foxes in the UK.
In Europe a fox or group of foxes can cross a border from one country to another and that can lead to a French fox mating with a German fox and so on and so forth. In the UK we have an island with a population of New Foxes -there is no evidence to date of any Old Fox DNA still being out there- and a population that regularly gets new blood. Thereason for this I will expand upon, like most of what I am writing about in this post, in an updated version of The Red Paper.
What we see as foxes today are not what would have been running around prior to 1900 -in some areas the Old Fox was dying out and about to become extinct in the 18th century. One aspect of the Fox Study has been to try to get photographs of specimens mounted as taxidermy specimens as far back as possible. That will give us a visual to study and compare. In most cases only a mask (head) or brush (tail) is left. These are still useful as masks can, again, give us something visually to study. Whether a full specimen or just a mask if of the right age then it would be very useful to get hair samples from them -whether DNA remains is questionbable but the study of the hairs may yield other information.
The Old Fox types were the Hill/Greyhound, Cur or Common and Mastiff foxes and we do have notes on the post mortem examination of one such fox (Greyhound) from the 1940s. This would have been a rare speciment but was larger than foxes we see today. Descriptions we find in books are of New Foxes and are often referred in the broader term of "European Red Fox" -again, there has been no DNA work carried out on some European island species so there may be sub-types of Vulpes vulpes. There are only references to Old Fox types in 19th and very early 20th century books
Behaviour not previously noted in text books (which is usually all copied from books that have copied extracts from other books ad nauseum) has been enlightening. We know how foxes and other animals interact and that the fox, like the badger, is not the "great slaughterer" of hedgehogs. Decline in hedgehogs comes from centuries of bounties being placed on them, the use of poisons, snares as well as pesticides -and cars (I counted ten killed by cars on one small stretch of road one year). We can also put to bed the old myth that foxes kill domestic cats -not one such claim has ever been backed up by evidence and in fact there are many hundreds of hours of fox-cat interaction filmed and on photographs. Personally, I have had to rescue foxes on four occasions when cornered by different cats which were larger than them.
Other aspects of behaviour have not been noted before simply because researchers had a narrow scope of study. When you have access to hundreds of reports or pieces of information you suddenly notice things that at first seem coincidental but when you come across a second, third or even fifth report you realise that you are hearing of standard behaviour.
Mortality in foxes has never been really studied. We know of foxes killed in snares or shot but the main killer appears to be road traffic -the same cause of death of thousands of badgers, hedgehogs, rabbits, deer and other creatures each year. What has never been highlighted beyond (briefly) at a local level are the number of foxes killed in towns and cities by deliberate poisoning -Bristol has had a recent spate of these from June to July) and it took a lot of work but authorities are now involved. Someone finds a dead fox well "It's just a fox" but finding out what killed that fox could stop someone putting out poison bait killing domestic animals as well as other wild species. It could also alert us to any outbreak of disease such as distemper (NE England 2020).
When it comes to road kill Project Splatter (I make no comment) for one week (26th October -1st November 2020) noted 6 foxes, 8 badgers and 14 hedgehogs killed on the road. In fact 52 mammal species were listed along with 14 bird species and these are only those that were reported.
The history of foxes and the animals imported to try to take their place for 'sport' is a very complex one. Even in 2021 some hunt websites note that fox hunting "is a time honoured sport" and drop the pretence of "pest contriol". Yes, wolves, coyotes and jackals along with others were raised on estates to supply 'sport' for the hunts and the evidence of that can no longer be refuted.
DNA and hair analysis is one aspect of what the Study wants to achieve along with as good a history of Old and New Foxes. The Study was started in 1976 and in 2021 is discovering more.
Interestingly, the fox work has meant that I can even expand on my wild cat research. The wild cat (Felis silvestris) was thought extinct in England and any online source (quoting quotes of quotes) will tell you:
"In England, they had disappeared from the south of the country during the 16th century, due to hunting and habitat loss, and were lost from north England and Wales by 1880."
This is incorrect. We know that along with feral cats there were two "distinct species of wild cat" in a part of Southern England in the 1930s. In fact, we know that there were wild cats in Shropshire up until the 1930s and some may have survived longer in Welsh forests. This was well before the 1990s, at the earliest, when an unnamed group began releasing wild cats around England and we now know they are also sighted in the North of England.
Wolverine research has also expanded but much of it is not being made public while DEFRA continues its policy of killing 'invasive species' some of which have been living and breeding in the UK for more than a century and have not negatively impacted on the environment. In some part information on exotic species was popened up by Prof. Alayne Street-Perrott of Swansea University while overseeing the Exotic Cat Study there (a project now denied despite the mass of evidence on its work). This allowed me to see that any and all exotics were imported, housed at centres for sale and moved around the UK -often by travelling menageries who lost (but then 'found') many animals. On static estates free roaming may have been allowed more than it should have. But we can push wolverine escapes as well as menageries containing them back to 1800.
The research goes on but, sadly, it goes slowly as none of this is funded because I am not a professor or a doctor just a humble naturalist with 40+ years of experience in the field and researching...and coming up with results. No university wants me attached to it as the subject is not "sexy" enough and they cannot see it bringing in money -Prof David Bellamy described The Red Paper as "explosive" and it sold only about ten copies!
Therefore everything comes "out of very shallow pockets" and it is a long ongoing fight with government agencies to take these matters seriously and, unbelievably, also with many fox watchers. I am a small bearded man wedged between two very hard places 😁
Results will be reported on so please be patient as this has all been waiting a couple of centuries so far!
