A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  Sometimes you may glance towards a sunny, favoured spot on the hill and see that the russet patch you first took for bracken is a fox curled at his ease, nose buried in his luxuriant brush, but though he is apparently dead to the world, in reality he is always on the qui vive, for he knows every man’s hand is against him and can never truly relax in the open.

  Besides, he is constantly on the lookout for his next meal. Being a scavenger, he can digest almost anything, and his diet includes as many beetles as mice, as many moribund myxy rabbits, blackberries, rotten apples, and decomposing burgers and takeaways as pheasants.

  Even gamekeepers, his sworn enemies, can be made to admit that a fox is on a different level from the rest of the vermin they persecute, while men and women who ride to hounds treasure him as the mainspring of their sport, and never tire of embellishing stories both of his exploits and theirs in pursuit of him. They protect and preserve him, too, making sure that his earths are not disturbed during the breeding season. The ‘Kennel Fox’ who hangs around the flesh-house is a valued asset of many a Hunt, and can be relied on to get a home Meet off to a cracking start.

  This rather ambivalent attitude towards an animal officially branded a pest finds an echo with most country-dwellers, for whom a chance encounter with a fox lends magic to the dullest day. As far as damage is concerned, it is arguable that by keeping down rabbits, moles, rats and other vermin foxes do more good than harm.

  The urban fox is another kettle of fish altogether. It did not take long for this adaptable scavenger to realise there was an easier living to be had among the overflowing rubbish bags and restaurant slop-pails than in hunting rabbits and raiding henhouses like his forebears. Streetwise, traffic-savvy foxes find rich pickings in fast-food outlets whose meals are so often thrown away unfinished.

  At first, when town-dwellers began noticing foxes in unexpected places, they were welcomed as an interesting addition to urban life. This perception changed, however, as the newcomers grew ever bolder and began to add pet rabbits, guinea pigs and cats to their diet. Outrage followed when a fox actually mauled a toddler in an upstairs bedroom, leaving her badly scarred; the assailant trotting quietly away before the horrified mother could do more than scream. There were the inevitable calls for town foxes to be culled, removed, shot, poisoned, exterminated… But how, in a great, crowded city such as London or Bristol, do you take such radical action against an animal who comes and goes like a shadow, and is thoroughly versed in avoiding human persecution?

  Another unattractive aspect of the urban fox is his propensity to spread disease. Sarcoptic mange is a highly contagious infection, caused by tiny mites that burrow into the skin, making hair fall out in patches and setting up such a furious irritation that a mangy fox rubs and scratches himself raw. Unable to eat or rest, he loses all fear of humans and will stand staring aimlessly, the picture of dejection, until finally he collapses. From infection to death takes about four months, during which time he leaves tufts of infected fur in gaps and gateways where he has rubbed, and the mites are thus transmitted to any passing dog or cat.

  The outraged urban dog-owner who discovers that Reynard has not only been frequenting his garden, possibly even bringing up a family behind the garage, but has also infected his pedigree pooch with fox-mange, soon stops putting out tasty morsels for this uninvited guest. Instead, he may well summon a marksman with a .22 rifle, who offers to rid him of foxes for a mere £200. Well-directed .22 bullets command a hefty price, but one which many a beleagured banker or mother of small children is ready to pay, and a bullet through the heart – provided it is well-directed – is a good way to dispose of mangy foxes.

  Far worse a fate awaits the vixen and cubs who have established squatters’ rights in the town garden of a little old lady. She dreads her Peke catching fox-mange, but she loves animals, she doesn’t want the family shot – just transported into the depths of the country where they can ‘live a natural life.’ For an even more hefty fee, the fox-trapper agrees that this can be arranged, though he knows perfectly well that this means condemning them to a slow, cruel death. Foxes brought up on tikka marsala and chow mein will never have learned to hunt live prey. Nasty tales abound of farmers finding a dozen emaciated foxes in a single field, whimpering with hunger, and having to shoot the lot to put them out of their misery.

  From Aesop to the Canterbury Tales, from the ballad of Reynard the Fox to the Tale of Mr Tod, the persona of the svelte, sharp-featured, super-cool trickster Vulpes vulpes has scarcely changed. No other wild animal retains such a grip on the human imagination, has inspired more literature, or been more widely credited with supernatural powers.

  There is such an aura of mystery about a fox’s secretive comings and goings, his quasi-magical appearances and disappearances, that it is no surprise to find him renowned as a shape-shifter in the folklore of many countries. A hunted hare in fear of its life is reputed to transform into an ancient hag, but a fox prefers a more glamorous metamorphosis.

  According to the old stories, if you pursue a vixen over hill and dale, thorough bush, thorough briar, at last when the sun begins to set and your horse is near foundered, with her last strength you will see your quarry drag herself to the door of a neat cottage, deep in the woods, and slip inside. Aha! You have her at last. Flinging yourself off your horse, you hammer on the door and demand admittance, but when it opens you find no fox within, just a slim, smiling redhead at her spinning-wheel beside the hearth, and none but the sharpest eyes would detect the little white tag of a brush peeping from beneath her long skirt as she sends you on your way.

  Outsmarting humans, outsmarting other animals, the fox is the ultimate survivor, his daring and cunning the stuff of legends. Even in stories like Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Jemima Puddleduck, where his wicked scheme to eat both duck and eggs is eventually foiled, the thin-legged gentleman with black prick ears and sandy-coloured whiskers is still the plot’s dominant character.

  Given his reputation for wit and sagacity, it is sad to discover how vulnerable Brer Fox is to the guns and devilish wire snares of his only real enemy, and how small and slight he appears when trapped. Although he can change his plans rapidly when necessary, he has his own well-defined territory, in which his nightly patrols tend to follow the same paths, the same gaps in hedges and narrow runs through bramble bushes that he marked out when taking up residence. Inevitably the gaps he squeezes through bear the marks of his passage, and a running loop of thin wire secured to a tree or peg across one of his byways is all that is needed to catch him by the neck or pad as he slinks through.

  To free a pad, he will gnaw through his own leg, and subsequently slowly starve to death since he is no longer able to catch enough to survive on. Should the noose be round his neck, however, he can do nothing but struggle until he chokes.

  Walking along a grassy ride that led through a plantation of young hardwoods one spring morning, I heard a scuffling sound to the left of the path and, after listening for a moment or two, went to investigate. About forty yards into the undergrowth, I came on a flattened patch in the brambles, where a fox was lying, apparently dead. It was tethered to an iron tent-peg by a thin wire, stretched taut, which disappeared into its thick ruff. As I stood watching, the wire slackened slightly and the fox began to move. The moment he strained against it, the noose tightened again and, after a few convulsive heaves, the fox again lay inert.

  I had nothing in my pockets with which to cut the wire, nor could I shift the peg, which had been driven deep into the ground. In its struggles, the fox had twisted the wire so tightly that I could not slip back the noose in order to remove it, and the only way I could see to free it was to pick it up bodily and rotate the whole fox enough to untwist the noose.

  I was wearing leather gardening gloves, and the fox lay quite limp as I spun it round and round, but when at last there was enough play in the wire to open the noose it revived enough to snap briefly at my hand as I slipped its head free. Carrying it to the edge of the f
lattened brambles, I laid it on the ground and stood back, wondering if was too far gone to survive. The sun shone brightly on its muddy, dishevelled coat, long angular legs and the narrow jaw whose elongated, drawn-back lips wore a kind of sardonic grin. A lactating vixen, I thought, and felt a wave of fury against snare-setting gamekeepers.

  For a moment or two nothing happened, and then in the blink of an eye she crawled with bent legs towards the sheltering brambles, slipped between two briar-stems and was gone, leaving me looking in surprise at the blood dripping from my glove. That one casual snap had cut right through the leather covering my middle finger, through the skin, and exposed the bone – but it was like being cut with a razorblade: at the time I felt nothing.

  That fox probably survived. Not so the young badger I encountered on another narrow woodland trail. Again there was the telltale flattening of undergrowth denoting a prolonged struggle, but in this case the noose had caught Brock round the middle, and in trying to free himself he had bitten away most of his own back – a truly horrible sight.

  It is absurd that it should be legal to snare foxes but not badgers, since both animals frequent the same territory, as do fallow, roe and muntjac deer – not to mention domestic cats and dogs – all of which suffer equally if trapped by a wire noose. Nor does the often-quoted legal requirement to inspect snares at least once a day guarantee the trapped animal a quick end: it may be twenty-three hours before the snare-setter makes his next round.

  If in doubt, don’t snare is the mantra repeated by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) at every stage of its advice to anyone wanting to know where, how, and when it is legal to set wire nooses to catch vermin. But one man’s vermin is another’s treasured wildlife, and since the two are so easily confused, and snares are no respecters of species, I should like to see the situation clarified by making all snaring illegal, with running nooses joining gin-traps, man-traps, and yellow phosphorus in the refuse-bin of gamekeeping history, where they belong.

  The collective noun for moles is a ‘labour,’ and certainly of all our frontier tribes Moldywarp is the most industrious, toiling underground unceasingly and covering green pastures with a disfiguring brown rash. Not only the fields, either. Sporadic upheavals among the rows of vegetables in the kitchen garden are bad enough, but what really annoys gardeners and condemns Moldywarp to pest status is his determination to invade lawns.

  Fertilised, aerated, precisely edged and mown to look like emerald velvet – the more perfect a lawn the better habitat it provides for moles. Worms are abundant beneath the shaven turf, and the soil is easy to work, so it is hardly surprising that given the choice between a stony field and a lovingly-tended lawn, the mole plumps for the latter.

  Broadly speaking, female gardeners are less fanatical about lawns than men are, and consider the lovely crumbly loam of molehills, so useful for potting seedlings or as a top-dressing for flower borders, a fair return for the scarring of the green velvet carpet, but men value their lawns, and see the brown eruptions as a personal insult.

  Many and various are the methods used to repel, poison, or trap invading moles. Some people swear by sticking toy-size windmills into the runs, which gives the perfect lawn a strangely festive appearance; others use solar-powered vibrators, which emit a low hum, but seem to make little difference to the moles; or drop strongly-scented mothballs down the tunnels – again with no discernible effect.

  One really horrible method of control involves sticking razor-blades across the runs in the hope that the mole will lacerate his paws and, unable to dig, starve to death. Strychine is no longer a legal option, thank heaven, but controlled gas explosions are said to be effective, although you have to employ a licensed operator to set off the canisters of toxic gas, and I find it hard to believe that the process enhances the appearance of a lawn.

  Then there are traps: old-fashioned pincers triggered by a pressure-pad, or the more effective modern equivalent of a short tunnel, from which snaps a metal band to throttle the mole, but both of these are often neutralised by the wave of loose soil which the mole pushes in front of him like a miniature bulldozer. This either jams the mechanism or sets off the trap prematurely, and in any case there is no guarantee that the marauding mole will use the particular tunnel in which the trap is set.

  I find it astonishing that this muscular little barrel of an animal, no more than six inches long, can shift such quantities of soil so quickly with his spade-like paws. Though handicapped by poor sight, since he can barely do more than differentiate between light and dark with his fur-covered eyes, his hidden ears are acute, and the sensory hairs on head, forepaws and tail are extremely sensitive to vibrations above his tunnels. Anyone hoping to catch him at work must move stealthily.

  Some – but by no means all – cats are good mole-hunters, but they do it purely for sport since moles, like shrews, have a disagreeably bitter taste. Such a cat will wait silently, ears acutely cocked, tail twitching, for the tunneller to approach, shoving his load of soil before him, and the moment the earth trembles and heaves up, a long arm with lethal claws is thrust down the tunnel to impale and scoop out the mole. This is quite a feat, since dense fur growing both forward and backward gives Moldy the ability to retreat as quickly as he advances.

  With his cylindrical body, long snout, neck as short as any prop forward, powerful bowed forearms and spade-shaped clawed hands, his physique is perfectly adapted to his chosen way of life, but it is not a life I would wish on anyone. Digging in the dark, all alone, in four hour shifts round the clock in order to keep pace with his daily requirement of worms and other creepy-crawlies, the poor fellow has little time for social life, let alone T.S. Eliot’s ‘ecstasy of the animals’.

  After finding a receptive female and mating in early spring, the boar mole reverts to single life for the rest of the year, in an existence which may accurately be described as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’

  The sow mole is hardly more gregarious. After her annual encounter with the boar, she produces a litter of four or five pups in a nest deep underground, and suckles them there for a month before evicting her offspring to fend for themselves. Thereafter throughout their three-year lifespan each mole crisscrosses his or her chosen territory, digging an ever more extensive network of deep and shallow tunnels, which they defend stoutly against interlopers.

  I often wish I had some form of X-ray camera that could peer through the soil and show the pattern of diggings under our fields. Certain areas are most highly prized – probably where there is underground water – and it is only when earthworms are close to the surface that you can actually track one of these persistent sappers’ route by the raised turf between mole-hills, and see that these excavations seldom run straight from mound to mound. There are branchlines and junctions, extra-large chambers for resting periods, and sloping paths to the lower level tunnels, which are maintained for use when the weather is dry and when worms retreat to the damper depths.

  A dry summer is the mole’s nemesis, and during droughts I have often seen their dehydrated bodies in the lane behind our house, where they have surfaced in the hope of finding worms and water. Each tunneller needs to eat roughly 70% of his bodyweight daily to compensate for his energy output, so if worms and other insects are unavailable even in his deepest workings, he quickly starves to death.

  From our point of view these deep-level tunnels are beneficial insofar as they drain the soil and keep it aerated. It is the shallow earthworks punctuated by molehills that enrage groundsmen and farmers, for grass will quickly grow over the mounds, which then become impossible to flatten with a roller. The result is a bumpy surface that spoils any field for making hay or silage, ruins machinery, and trips up humans and animals – fatally, in the case of King William III, who was pitched over his horse’s head when it stumbled over a molehill. It was an accident from which he never recovered, much to the delight of his Jacobite enemies, who used thereafter to drink the health of ‘the littl
e gentleman in black velvet’ who brought about the king’s downfall. Monarch, horse, and molehill are commemorated in a statue in St James’s Square.

  When the pups are booted out of the family home and sent to find their own territory, the sudden eruption of dozens of molehills which reflects this increase in population makes any sheep farmer’s heart sink. To scatter the offending mounds with a harrow when the pasture is nearly bare makes it difficult for pregnant ewes to avoid ingesting loose soil as they graze, thereby risking listeriosis and possible abortions, but harrowed they must be if the field is not to be covered in lumps and bumps for the rest of the year. Choosing the right moment, when lambing is complete but the molehills are still malleable, is a matter of delicate timing.

  Once the grass is growing strongly, however, moles and their workings become less visible and less of a problem in the larger sphere, though lawns are still vulnerable and a tunnel under a row of young carrots, for instance, is guaranteed to kill the lot.

  By the time of year that vegetables are shooting up, however, another frontier tribe has usually displaced the little gentlemen in black velvet as the gardener’s enemy No.1, and these are the voracious gastropod molluscs, aka slugs and snails.

  Many and various were the goods, livestock, foods and artefacts introduced to Britain by the Romans, and great their civilising effect upon our savage forebears, but even Romans slipped up sometimes, and among their less happy importations, ground elder (to treat gout and rheumatism) and super-size snails (for eating) top the list. Like most non-native species – Japanese knotweed and grey squirrels spring to mind – both ground elder and snails have flourished in their new habitat and over the centuries have become ineradicable pests.