Garden Fox Watch

It was a nice bright evening on Thursday, and I was sitting in our dining room with my camera, watching our current resident vixen in the garden, her three cubs playing around her, the bluebells, the pond, and so on.

I had put some food out on the patio and the vixen came up to retrieve some of it; the boldest of the three cubs decided to accompany her, coming up onto the tiles in front of our patio doors. “Excellent,” I thought, “decent light, cub coming closer, time for some decent photos for GFW.” (It wasn’t the first time we’d seen a cub on the patio itself this year, but the previous time they had been all the way down the other end, further away from any humans who might have been watching.)

Fortune does not always favour the brave.

There is another local vixen who is also feeding cubs, although we’re not sure precisely where she is based. She generally comes into our garden under the fence from next door. That’s exactly what she did this time, screaming at the vixen and the cub… and then picking the cub up in her mouth, around his midriff, and shaking him hard for a minute or so.

I opened the patio door and managed to scare her off, and she dropped the cub and ran away. Our resident vixen nudged the cub to turn him over — he was flailing around on his back — and managed to get him onto his front, but it quickly became obvious he could not stand up. By this point I was frantically searching for the Fox Project contact details (who, it transpires, don’t come over quite as far as our area) and then Wildlife Aid.

The vixen picked the cub up in her mouth and retreated down the garden to the usual space where they sit during the day. The cub still didn’t seem to be capable of standing on his own. She then picked him up again and moved him into the undergrowth.

Wildlife Aid, while warning me that they were basically at capacity at this point, asked if I could get a video showing the cub’s current condition before they sent out a volunteer. I gingerly picked my way into the area that we typically leave to the foxes at this time of year, and — as I am sure you can all guess — found that there would not be any point in sending anyone out, as the poor little chap had passed, hardly a mark on him. I suspect that the shaking may have broken his back.

I had never seen anything like this in several years of watching our local foxes, and I hope never to again. Marc Baldwin’s very informative site tells me that infanticide in foxes is by no means unheard of, but that dog foxes are much more likely to be aggressors than vixens.

RIP, little guy.