LATEST NEWS

We’re almost finished with spring and most parts of the country have seen heavy rain and gale force winds for most of April and the start of May. To many people’s surprise, and frustration, this hasn’t lifted the hosepipe bans and warnings of water shortages that many parts of England were faced with at the end of March. The reason for this is that we’ve had 18 months of drier than usual weather and, although this rain helps, most of it is falling on hard ground and running straight off into rivers and out to sea. That which is sticking around is evaporating more quickly and being utilised by vegetation more quickly than it would had it fallen during winter. The result is that even the sort of heavy, persistent rain we’ve had lately doesn’t do much to recharge aquifers when it falls during the spring. Still, all this rain has been good for many birds and mammals; if they survived the floods the wet weather should've opened up a rich prey-base (worms and other invertebrates) that aren’t accessible in dry soil. Indeed, during the heavy rain last Sunday our lawn was covered in blackbirds and starlings plucking worms and grubs out of the soil.

Ordinarily, I’d spend this time listing some of the wildlife highlights to be found during this month, but this month I’m taking a slightly different tack. As some of you may be aware, Channel 4 are currently running a short series of programmes exploring Britain’s relationship with Red foxes. The first of these shows (entitled Foxes Live) aired on Channel 4 last Monday at 8pm and the remaining three are at the same time tonight, tomorrow and Wednesday (i.e. 7th – 9th May). The programme aims to look at both sides of the story of the Red fox in Britain, talking to rescue centres, fox lovers, fox haters, gamekeepers, pest controllers, etc. I have been involved in fact-checking some of the scripts for the coming three shows and the clips that I’ve seen so far have included some very interesting footage. Having been lurking on the Foxes Live Twitter and Facebook feeds, I have also seen how the discussions invariably descend into petty name-calling and threats between pro- and anti-fox people. There are also the same questions and misunderstandings of foxes cropping up time and time again. Given that the new fox article is still being formatted along with the rest of the site (sorry…again!), I thought I’d use this month's homepage to run through a few quick-fire questions and misapprehensions about the Red fox. Most of these will be covered at greater length in the forth-coming article.

Statement: Foxes break into a coop, kill all the chickens, and leave the bodies lying around. They are vicious killers that kill for fun.
Foxes do often break into chicken coops and when this happens they may kill all the inhabitants. In some cases only a single bird is removed, while in others no birds appear to be missing. This gives the impression that the fox killed all the chickens just for the sake of it, or just to spite the owner. This is quite simply false. Let’s face it, foxes don't stumble across a hen house and 'decide' to kill all the residents either because it’s bored and can’t find anything better to do, or even because it doesn't know when it'll next find something good to eat. Instead, the fox finds the coop and breaks in with the intention of scoring itself a meal. Upon breaking in there is uproar, with a flock of panicky fowl flapping about all over the place providing exactly the kind of stimulus the fox has evolved to recognise as prey and respond to by catching and killing. Once a single bird has been killed, there are still more flapping about and the fox's predation reflex is continually triggered until the last bird is dead. If you think of a situation of a fox hunting, say, rabbits in a field, by the time a single rabbit has been caught the others are hunkered up underground well away from the fox, so there's nothing to stimulate its chase/kill reflex further. Going back to our chicken coop, now that all the birds are dead the fox's 'future-proofing' behaviour kicks in and it starts removing the bodies and caching them for further usage. Sometimes the fox is scared off before it can take any birds, in other cases it may leave with one.   In many cases the fox never makes it back to the hen house (it gets killed, distracted, usurped, was just passing through, etc.) or the chickens are found by the owner before the fox can remove them all. I have reliable testimony from several people telling how, when the bodies were left in situ the (a?) fox came back and recovered every last one over the coming nights. So, surplus killing is essentially a natural predatory response (to catch stuff that behaves like prey) to an unnatural situation (this prey being unable to get away) and caching evolved as a response to this sudden surplus of prey. Waste is a human economic term; nothing is wasted in Nature.

I posted the above in response to the answer Channel 4 gave, to the question of whether foxes kill for pleasure, on their website and one respondent described it as “giber” (which I presume is short for gibberish). But is it? If this behaviour wasn’t a response to the artificial situation of penned-in prey, why don’t we see this kind of outcome all over the place? Why aren’t there piles of dead rabbits littering my local playing fields and railway banks? Or countless pheasant corpses scattered around? Surely if the fox only killed for the sake of it we’d see this happen all the time. But we don’t. In fact, we see it happen only under a very specific set of circumstances: conditions where prey cannot escape from the fox. As for whether foxes derive any pleasure from the act of killing; who knows? My suspicion is that they get a surge of adrenaline and endorphins and that probably provides a pleasurable experience. Foxes are, after all, predators that must kill for a living. A predator that stops to think about the ‘feelings’ of its prey or hates the idea of killing something else doesn’t hang around long in the wild. I’m sure at this stage, some anti-fox folk are rubbing their hands together while the pro-foxers are mortified by that statement. Neither should be. It’s an important distinction to make that having fun doing something is not the same as doing something for the fun of it. Sometimes I have fun at work, but I don’t go to work for the fun of it – I go because it pays the bills.

Statement: I’ve seen a fox walk through a lambing field, ignoring abundant rabbits, to take a lamb being born. Foxes deliberately target livestock.
Sometimes, I think people expect too much of foxes. Foxes are predators; they deliberately target prey in whatever form they find it. They don’t look around and think, “right, that small squirming thing over there that smells a lot like food is actually livestock and therefore off limits, so I need to go for one of those fuzzy speedy grass-munching blighters at the edge of the field”. A lamb being born is an easy meal that smells like food (given that it’s soaked in blood and amnion); all the fox needs to do is walk up and pick it up. If it ignores the lamb, it has to stalk, chase, catch and kill a rabbit that is pretty focussed on keeping itself alive. Catching rabbits is a tricky business and the fox may only succeed once in every three or four attempts. Have you ever come home from work and stuck a meal in the microwave for three minutes rather than spending ages cooking an equivalent meal for yourself? I know I have. In the end, to a fox, food is food. A fox doesn’t know that the rabbit in this garden is different to those that graze on the railway embankment 500 yards down the street and shouldn’t be touched. Consequently, we have to make this distinction clear, by keeping our pets out of the reach of the foxes, thereby removing the temptation.

Q: Do foxes need to be controlled?
Circumventing the issue of how effective the various methods of control are on fox populations; in some situations, yes foxes do need to be controlled. If your livelihood depends on being able to raise as many gamebirds or lambs as possible, then any predator is going to be an issue. It is impractical to fox-proof 500 free-range pheasants or grouse, or a lambing field. At the same time, it’s no doubt frustrating to be told that foxes rarely take lambs (however true, at the national scale, that may be). The fact, as uncomfortable as it is to hear, is that some foxes will take lambs (see above) and the evidence is that certain individuals learn to target lambs and can cause considerable damage. Indeed, I know a couple of gamekeepers who have observed that lamb losses stopped following the shooting of one particular animal, even though other foxes were still around. Even losing a single lamb can set you back by £100 or more, which in the current economic climate is not simply beer money. Thus, there are times and circumstances where a landowner may consider it necessary to cull the foxes on his property. Provided this is done legally and humanely (ideally, lamping with a suitable firearm) this must be accepted.

Q: I have a fox earth in my garden/street. Should I be concerned about my cat?
This is not really a question I can answer. I have personally never seen a fox attack a cat: all the cases I've seen have involved foxes and cats either ignoring one another, or the cat (even very young ones) chasing the fox off. That said, I have heard testimony from several readers and friends who have had their cats attacked (and in some cases killed) by foxes, and I have no reason to think they’re lying or embellishing the incidents. Thus, I am of the opinion that attacks (both ways, as healthy adult cats are perfectly capable of doing a fox some damage) happen from time-to-time, but they don't seem particularly common. Part of the problem is that, where such incidents take place, there often aren't any witnesses and the cat returns with injuries that are consistent with a small dog bite and therefore often assumed to be fox-related. Essentially, the issue is that cats and foxes are both mesopredators – that is, they're both about the same size, both solitary hunters that hunt for the same prey (i.e. small birds, rodents, reptiles, etc.), so each is competition for the other. Cats, particularly healthy adults, are generally more than a match for your average fox, but when the foxes have cubs they can be very protective (and cats have been known to kill fox cubs). I confess to having no data to support this (I don’t know of any studies, but if your cat has been attacked, I would like to hear from you), but I wouldn’t be surprised if attacks were more common during the denning period, when foxes had dependent cubs.

I hope the above have laid to rest some commonplace misconceptions about foxes, although I suspect not, given that they’re so ingrained in the human psyche. Moreover, when you've been on the raw end of a fox's behavioural overload, it's hard to remain objective and not take it personally. Still, we live in hope…

********************************************************************

Okay, for those of you that are new to the site, let's take it from the top!

What is Wildlife Online?
Essentially, WLOL is an educational website about British wildlife.   The site contains profiles of various British animal species, with new articles in preparation all the time.   The site also has articles looking at wildlife-related subjects, including hunting and animal emotions.   This site is purely a hobby of mine; it does not generate any money or contain any advertising, and I am happy for it to stay that way.

What does Wildlife Online aim to achieve?
The ultimate goal of the website is to be useful.   My intention has always been to provide un-biased, accurate information that’s accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.   Increasingly people are coming into contact with their local wildlife and whether such interactions are positive or negative, they generally inspire a desire to learn more about the species.   Moreover, there are still a great many misconceptions surrounding our wildlife (fox behaviour springs immediately to mind) and these are brought up time and time again during discussions in the media.   Each article aims to provide a reasonably comprehensive overview of the species in question by drawing on information from the media, books, TV programmes and the scientific literature.   I feel that this combination of sources, along with my own observations and those of my friends/colleagues/readers provides a unique online resource of British wildlife information.   My hope is that the information provided here will go some way to changing people's perceptions of the creatures with which they share their parks and gardens.

Why create a website when there are books and TV programmes about your subjects?
Books can be a fantastic resource and I can't image being without my library.   Not all libraries, however, are equally well stocked, and not everyone has the funds to splash out on what are often very expensive wildlife books (especially those written by scientists).   More importantly, much of the scientific research never makes it out of the journals into books and TV shows.   Similarly, many of the early books -- which contain some of the pioneering work on the species --  are now long out of print and can be difficult or expensive to track down.   Books have the 'luxury' of being able to devote their entire contents to a particular species, covering all aspects of its life history.   Television, by contrast, is a much more limited and variable medium: the programme editor(s) has to create a show that is likely to hold the viewers' attention and appeal to a very wide audience.   The result is that, although some reach this compromise very well (the BBC, for example), many documentaries focus heavily on the 'wow factor' (multitudinous slow motion shots of Great whites leaping out of the water in pursuit of seals, for example) and this often comes at the inevitable expense of the information about the animal.   Finally, both books and TV programmes go out of date quite quickly; new research is always being conducted.   Consequently, a website is an ideal intermediate - it offers the opportunity to provide a decent amount of information about the subject that can be updated at the metaphorical drop-of-a-hat as any new research is published.

Why include so much information?
I honestly believe that if a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well.   There are hundreds of websites with brief species profiles and if that's all WLOL offered there would be little point to it.   I understand and appreciate that some people are of the 'too long; didn't read' mind-set and will thus be turned off by the amount of text facing them.   I have tried to remedy this as far as possible: there is a Speed Read section with a brief profile of each species featured in a main article, and each article has been 'virtually split' with the aid of hyperlinks into sections that allow people to easily jump to the information they're looking for.   I wish to provide as much information as is feasible and I hope that most readers approve of this approach.

Why haven't you included a complete bibliography?
My intention with WLOL is to provide the information in an accessible format, which means that anyone should be able to read an article and understand the information in it.   Consequently, I didn't want to format it as a scientific paper because the current format allows for a much more informal approach and writing style which, I hope, will appeal to a wider audience.   Most people should find enough information in the article (I typically provide the name or one or more of the authors and the journal and year) to track down the original scientific paper.   When I take information from books, I always give the name of the author(s) and the full title of the book for easy reference.   I am also happy to provide full details of any of the references upon request.

Are you really qualified to do this?
I'm certainly not an expert on any of the subjects presented on this site.   The articles stem from my varied interests in natural history and biological sciences.   In terms of qualifications, I trained as a scientist (studying natural sciences at degree and postgraduate level) and all I really do is interpret information, blend it with associated research and personal observation, and present it in what I hope is an accessible format.   Unless specifically stated, I do not claim any of the information on this site to be my own research.   I have built relationships with some researchers producing the data that I use and I am happy either to recommend an expert or provide my own opinions on a subject.

As a final note, I want to make a quick reference to the quality of the material on the site.   The great French philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes, once said: "If you would be a real seeker of truth, you first must be willing to doubt as far as possible all things."   This is very sage advice, especially when it comes to believing what you read on the Internet.   Most Internet sites (indeed, books and TV shows too), including this one, have no form of peer-review (i.e. nobody with experience of the topic checks the site for accuracy); consequently pretty much anyone can have their own little corner of cyberspace and information can make it onto websites that is either misguided, or downright false!   When creating material for this site I take every care to ensure that the information I present is accurate.   Invariably errors will creep in; typos are almost inevitable (although each article goes through several levels of proof reading before it appears online) and research is always underway on the species featured here, so the data can go out of date almost overnight.   However, each page has regular (ish!) reviews, during which I update the information, adding details of new findings and taking out that which is now thought highly unlikely.   You can see most of the books I have used in the preparation of this site on the Recommended Reading page and I have provided links to some of the most interesting sites I came across during my research – these can be found under the appropriate sub-heading on the Links page.

Anyway, I digress....   I hope you enjoy looking around the site and I hope equally that you get something worthwhile out of it.   Any comments, suggestions or (constructive) criticisms are welcome via e-mail - appropriate addresses can be found on the Contact page.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DISCLAIMER: All the photographs and artwork on this site are either my own work or have been donated by readers.   All images remain property of their authors and, if you wish to reproduce any of the pictures, consent must be granted by the appropriate person - requests can be directed via myself or see FAQ.   For more details on the content of this site, please see the full WLOL Disclaimer.