Is It A Badger or a Fox -Which is Digging The Holes?

 I'm often messaged and asked how to tell whether a badger is setting up a sett in a garden -usually under a summer house or greenhouse.

Well, the chances are that it is more likely a fox digging and not necessarily a den. About a year after I buried my old cross greyhound, Sam, two foxes visited during the day and I found out what had dug a hole the night before. One fox dug straight down and the speed of digging and how deep amazed me. The fox started playing with one of Sam's disarticulated leg bones before moving on.

I place chicken wire and paving slabs to cover the grave; they were just doing what foxes do and I had made my garden a wildlife one so...

On another occasion a smaller but deep hole appeared in a neighbour's garden so I was asked to check that no "long tailed friends" (rats) had moved in. Looking at how the ground had been dug it was obvious that a fox must have buried something then retrieved it (or had heard a mouse and dug down to get it).

Foxes will dig to get under tree roots, sheds, summerhouses or even go into any sizeable space where they can have young -decking included. Foxes tend to move den every so often particularly when they have cubs. So, if you see a hole in your garden and you have seen a fox the chances are the hole was dug by a fox.

They are not called "fox holes" for nothing.

Fox den under a tree.

With badgers the situation is different. Looking at Bristol we have the City and as it expanded so all the outlying villages became part of it. Even today some parts still have that village feel and these had badger setts in them going back many decades. I know that some areas had active badger setts back in the 1970s and they were probably established long before.

Badgers have setts that are used by generation after generation and that is why some are very complex with a lot of entrances. Some get abandoned for various reasons but most likely due to disturbance or threats to the sett and badgers. For a badger to suddenly appear out of the blue and start making a sett it is either an individual hoping to set up his own group or one that has been cast out for a reason. So the sudden appearance should lead to people asking why?

Above and below  badger sett entrances

A badger is not like a dog fox which might go on the wander to find a new territory. If they have a site with good food, water and good drainage then they will stay put for generations. Badgers are also very clean animals which regularly clean out their setts -one old tale was that to forced a badger from its sett a fox would "dirty" it and the badger would be so disgusted it would move out rather than cleaning up.

The "fly in the ointment" there is that it is known some foxes and badgers do share very large setts though I would assume when young are on the way that would change as both are ultra protective of their cubs/piglets.  

A site called Nature Features has a page on what might be digging a hole in your garden but to be honest unless you are near to an established sett and badgers are looking to expand...a fox dug the hole!

http://wwwnews.live.bbc.co.uk/nature/23632577

Cats and Hedgehogs -Victims of Fox Predation?

 The question keeps being asked: "We have a fox visiting and I am worried about my cats' safety"

Let me answer that one (again). Things that kill cats are listed by various surveys and of course cars are high on the list. Foxes, on the other hand, are right at the bottom of the list and they are just there -as the survey people note- "just in case".

I am going to give you the gist of my experience watching cats and foxes almost daily since 1976. I also have the benefit of hundreds of trail cam stills and videos of my own plus the hundreds I have looked at and viewed online. I also have over 40 years of reading about foxes from both sides -hunts and naturalists.

The fox is no danger to your cat -even sick foxes do not take on cats as a food source.

A fox can snap -I have seen them do this when pushing for dominance or over food. In one instance the winning fox backed off when a cat moved in on the food. The snapping is why you see foxes with bits of ear missing or facial injury. A fox can lunge and snap which puts it at a disadvantage when it comes to cats. A cat has four sets of sharp claws as well as a rather scary set of teeth -all of which can cut anyone or thing up (I confess to still feeling the wounds of "worming time" or giving meds). A cat attack and facing a stronger opponent will go onto its back and to keep attacking then is equivalent to suicide!

The cat has all the advantages over a fox. I've lost count but I think on five or six occasions now I have had to step in to rescue foxes cornered by aggressive cats and we are talking dog foxes -about the same size as a domestic cat. This is something people forget: foxes can be smaller than or roughly the same size as a domestic cat and I have seen plenty of cats that are far bigger than any fox. Foxes may be called "the cat-like canid" but in a fight they are not cat-like.

When we had foxes I noted how the semi-feral cat living in the gardens stalked them and even lunged at them. The same cat had to be grabbed by someone after it chased and jumped a dog fox and tried to sink its teeth into the fox's next to twist it. I've seen more than one fox back away from food when a cat struts over to it.

During spring the vixen will move cubs for their own safety. People see this and report "a fox carrying a cat in its mouth". This is also jumped on by pro hunt supporters to justify why foxes need killing. Think about it logically. A fox and cat are roughly the same size so how could something small enough to be carried away quickly by a fox be a cat?  I have heard of foxes supposedly scavenging road-kill cats but this is always what so-and-so told someone after hearing about it. Foxes may move a dead cat but really killing a cat for food is far to risky -there are rats, mice, insects and plenty of free food in the form of food put out for hedgehogs or pet cats. 

And that is before I mention feeders. Urban foxes do not go hungry and if they do it is because of (as we have found out with post mortems) underlying health conditions. Even in the countryside foxes are not going to seek out cats for food -there are rats, mice, insects and millions of wild rabbits and rabbit is a main prey item.

Hunts used to kill badgers or cats to carry out drag hunts in which the main purpose was to get foxes to follow trails. Humans kill cats not foxes and that is a fact proven over and over again.

Then we come to some claiming that the decline in hedgehogs is down to fox predation. I have so much footage and so many images -and there are more online- of foxes and hedgehogs eating together and neither pays the slightest attention to the other...well, the fox tends to be wary. I have seen a medium sized hedgehog sit in the middle of a food dish as a vixen and dog fox sit back waiting permission to get some of the food -and I have seen the dog fox try and be bitten by the hedgehog. I even have footage of a hedgehog chasing a fox that dared try to eat from its dish.

I even had one run straight at my cross greyhound dog in the garden; a dog eight times its size. A fox is nothing.

I used to monitor hedgehog deaths (obviously) and the biggest killers in 40 years? Drowning in ponds -so I design ponds and advise others to do so with escape ramps of stones-  falling into uncovered household drains, rat and mouse poisons, slug pellets and the ever present car. Fox predation or evidence of such...zero.

Above: the fox had been eating next to the hedgehog quite happily and as both were taking some water the hedgie obviously did not appreciate the fox's lapping up -you can see by the blurring that the fox decided to move...quickly! Note the size of the hedgehog compared to the fox's head. (c)2022 T. Hooper-Scharf/British Fox Study

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When the hedgehog allows it there is nothing like watching a fox and hedgehog cheek to jowl eating and then you can see how big some hedgehogs are. I did get a fright looking back at some camera footage at one time: a fox with a hedgehog in its mouth! The next few frames showed the fox placing the hedgehog on the ground away from food, nudge it with its nose then go back to the food. Now that, I thought, was rare footage...until someone posted video footage of a fox doing exactly the same thing. In 40+ years I had never witnessed this.

Even foxes and badgers tend to nonchalantly move about the same garden, often eat from the same feeding station and the only time they get wary of one another is when they have young. It is worth noting that the only aggression between the two that I have had reported to me is on the part of the badger but this is very rare and I know of at least three locations where foxes and badgers share the same earth.

Foxes are no angels and that is clear from their fight wounds but those come about from territorial or dominance disputes. They are, after all, wild canids not pet dogs.

Those are the facts and I hope that they answer some questions.

Badgers, foxes, hedgehogs, otters, pine martens and many others are all victims of cars including birds.

British Old Foxes -Three Sub-species?

 

When The Red Paper 2022 comes out you'll see in the wolf section that some believe (like me) that the habitat Canis lupus lives in makes it a unique sub-species. We had no "island dwarfism" in wolves in the  British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland). 

The same I believe applies to foxes in Ireland before they had to import after wiping out all of their Old foxes through hunting.

Whether they had three distinct types as in mainland Britain we do not know -yet. Working with my colleagues, and particularly LM and her museum collection, we are making inroads into getting better picture of what the Old foxes looked like and how they lived.

The Cur fox lived and had a symbiotic relationship with humans and that shaped how they live (and where possible survived). The likelihood of feeders back in the 19th/early 20th century would make the Cur a distinct sub-species and to an extent, in some areas,  habituated.

 The Mastiff or Bulldog fox lived lower down on the slopes of  hills and mountains and I think, based on later photographic evidence (c 1920s), that they were what was also known as Hill Foxes and the same applies to their being a sub-species distinct from the Cur. They lived in rough conditions and this shaped their "type".

The biggest difference was obviously the Mountain/ Greyhound fox. I still wonder whether the ones encountered in bogs and marshes were the same but until there is evidence proving that it is a big question mark.

However, the Mountain fox seems to have been the species that filled in the gap between wolf and fox almost like the coyote and jackal do in the United States and Europe respectively. It is probably why jackals and coyotes were used for hunts in Britain. 

All three were Vulpes vulpes (we believe but we really need to get DNA work carried out) but sub-types each filling a distinct niche. It is important to emphasise that no one is calling these three Old fox types three different species of fox just sub-species. This is why we really need to get DNA work carried out because that would answer a lot of questions. 

LM noticed certain things at the same time that I did (but I kept quiet as I needed confirmation from someone else) and the first is the head shape, the eyes and how they are set but also dentition which was noticeably different to modern New foxes.

LM has achieved a great deal in getting what I think are good examples of Old foxes and a collection that is unique as no other museum, local or national, in the UK has an equivalent -all foxes are circa or after 1900 and all of New foxes. LM has also acquired a fox that is very important to French natural history.

Having a collection of what we term "ancient" foxes, LM noticed something about the coats and this is something that will be noted in The Red Paper 2022 and photographs of some of the Old fox specimens will be included.

The question is where do we go after  The Red Paper 2022 ?

Firstly, it has to be made clear that this work is the culmination of work begun in 1976 which resulted in The Red Paper: Canids in 2010. That work was just around 200pp and described by some naturalists as "explosive" as it threw out a lot of what we have been taught about foxes -dogma. The current work is 360pp and includes upgraded maps, more recent British island foxes discoveries and vastly expanded on wolf section and contains colour images and maps. Obviously, as with all of my books, this one is fully referenced so that everything can be peer reviewed and built on. Also, with the previous Red Paper the fact that Western Europe had its own Old type foxes was unknown.

The follow up project will involve a lot more hands on work but we are keeping that fairly close to our chests at the moment.

The Red Paper 2022

 

When the Doggerland bridge flooded the British Isles became separated from

Continental Europe and its wildlife developed uniquely. The British Isles, for the purpose of this work includes Ireland, and isolated the wolves on both became what would be island species not affected by the usual island dwarfism. These wolves, after millennia. Became “unwanted” and forests and woodland was burnt down or cut down for the specific purpose of lupicide; the killing of every and any wolf –and there was a bounty for “a job well done”.

At the same time there also developed three unique island species of Old fox from the coyote-like Mountain or Greyhound fox, the slightly smaller but robustly built Mastiff or Bulldog fox and the smaller Common or Cur fox –the latter like today’s red foxes had a symbiotic relationship with humans. These canids were mainly ignored until it was decided that they could provide fur and meat and those things earn money. From that point onward, especially after all other game had been killed off, the fox faced what writers over the centuries referred to as vulpicide –extermination through bounties paid, trapping or hunting and despite all the hunters noting that the Old foxes were nearing extinction they continued to hunt until by the late 1880s the Old were gone and replaced by the New –foxes imported by the thousands every year for the ‘sport’ of fox hunting and this importation also led the the UK seeing the appearance of mange (unknown before the importations).

The travelling British sportsmen went coyote, wolf and jackal hunting and on returning to England wanted to bring a taste of this to “the good old country”. Wolves, jackals and coyotes were set up in hunting territories from where they could learn the lay of the land and provide good sport later. Some hunts even

attempted to cross-breed foxes, jackals and Coyotes.

Then there were the legendary –almost mythical– “beasts”; the black beast of Edale, the killer canids of Cavan and the “girt dog” of Ennerdale.

In more recent times raccoon dogs and arctic foxes have appeared in the UK; some released for ‘sport’ while others are exotic escapees long since established in the countryside.

If you thought you knew what fox hunting was about prepare to be woken up by a sharp slap to the face and the reality that, by admissions of hunts themselves, this was all about fun and sport and nothing to do with “pest control”.

Fully referenced and containing maps and previously unseen photographs whether a layman interested in wildlife, a naturalist or zoologist this book is one you must read. This book re-writes British natural history and shows why, for Old British fox types...

Extinction is Forever

Red Paper 2022 preliminary cover design

 

Two More Dead Foxes 'Lost'

 

The above photograph of two more dead foxes in Bristol was sent to me this morning.

It is very suspicious that two foxes are found dead together -you can get that in car strikes on roads but on a park pathway?

This is what we would categorise as "very suspicious" and definitely two that we would submit for post mortem examination. However, we will be losing these two as we have lost others in the past year.

During a normal week Zoe can pick up and take the foxes in next day but foxes tend to turn up dead on Fridays and bank holidays which means the two just found could not be submitted until Tuesday morning. By that time they would be beyond useful with decomposition, etc.

The problem is that this is work not financed by a grant and every penny has to come out of our depleted pockets so a freezer to store carcasses is not something we can afford. In the last year I have asked on the three main Bristol naturalist groups as well as the smaller local ones whether anyone has an old working freezer they could donate or even if they have a freezer we can use for temporary storage (there are a number of taxidermists on groups who have their own freezers). Not a single response.

Everyone seems "interested" in the PM results but it seems that foxes are not something they can be that bothered about (similar with the badger deaths I look into).

Each find like this could help us pin-point poisoning of foxes (and secondary animals) or even illegal snaring which is going on. Disease seems unlikely as two foxes being ill and dropping dead on the same spot are odds of thousands to one.

This is why we ask for donations to the work -not to live a good life but carry out important work. Well, important if you care or have any interest in foxes and to date it seems that very few have.

"Just dead foxes"

UPDATE

Zoe Webber managed to get out and check the foxes over. The two foxes had been moved by the time Zoe got there but she examined both and there were injuries suggesytive of RTA. The foxes were by no means fresh but it seems someone must have moved them from a nearby (20mph) road. Council have been informed for removal purposes. Fox deaths will be logged and added to our map of fox deaths in Bristol -many go unreported but we do what we can.