It's the British not Bristol Fox Study

 

Several times people have referred to me as running the "Bristol Fox Study" which is somewhat inaccurate. It is the British Fox Study which I set up in 1976.

The initial aim of the study was to look at foxes, their behaviour and colouration as I had noticed some variations in Bristol so wanted to look at the national picture. This of course led me along a four plus decade search when I mentioned to other naturalists that I had read about "Hill foxes" and got a lot of laughs and dismissive "That's like old sailors tales -made up!"

Of course I was doing what they were not -reading old naturalist and zoologist journals as well as books by some of the big names of the day such as W. Kay Robinson. By 2000 I knew that the Old foxes were not tall tales but factual. 

There were three Old type foxes -the Greyhound/Mountain fox, the Hill/Mastiff fox and the Common or Cur fox. Where certain people went off the deep end was misconstruing what was being written by their peers. "There are three distinct types of fox" and "Three varieties of fox" was taken to be a claim of three species. As far as we can tell, and I have discussed this with my colleague LM, these were unique island foxes -the same applying to Irish foxes. As far as we can tell -no DNA work has been carried out yet- the three types were the same species just variations adapted to their habitat and the Mountain/Greyhound fox was literally filling in the niche that the coyote has in the U.S. and jackal in Europe and beyond.

Of course, no one had seen any of these foxes since they were hunted to extinction. At one point I found an 1830s illustration of a Mountain fox but I had doubts as to its accuracy. However, LM then sent me a photograph of the fox that had been illustrated and the artist was spot on. I never ever believed that I would see it but I was looking at a photograph of the Colquhoun fox.  Then I was told that LM had purchased the fox itself!

You might ask just how big the Mountain fox was and once the Red Paper II: Felids is available you can see the photographs!  But there is a coyote taxidermy LM has for repair and she raised it up slightly to photograph it against the Colquhoun fox and the coyote is smaller.

It has taken over 40 years but I can now at least show what the Old type of fox looked like.

But there is more involved: I was looking at different parts of the UK for variations in fox colouration and types but soon realised (after looking at a few hundred photographs and video clips) that there was a true mix of coat variations and this I believe is down to fox rescues releasing foxes into "safe areas" and currently we are seeing far more grey and black colourations and we may eventually see far more black foxes appear. 

In 2021, after a lot of wrangling with official bodies I managed to arrange to have dead foxes that met certain criteria undergo post mortem examination. I was lucky enough to haver animal rescue worker Zoe Webber come on board and one of the best pathologists it was possible to get. The Fox Deaths Project is unique to Bristol and so far a number of discoveries have been made helping us understand how foxes are living and the various causes of death.

There is more that I and my colleagues are working on -unfunded as "it's just foxes". The study does not end with the Red Paper I: Canids as on a weekly basis I advise people of injured foxes or foxes with mange and for the last twenty years have been looking at the treatment of mange in foxes. 

All of this and more is beside the wild cat and badger work.

So, not "Bristol" but British Fox Study.