The fox is a predatory omnivorous nocturnal mammal, leaving its lair (or “earth”) at night to hunt for other small mammals, insects, birds and their eggs – basically anything it can find. Its skill as a hunter derives from its great agility and its speed (at full pelt, it can move at more than 40mph).

Its characteristic red coat can vary from auburn to deep crimson and almost black, but its underbelly and the tip of its luxuriant bushy tail are both white. Its distinctive physiognomy has made it a figure of fascination in folklore for centuries, combining as it does the long, pointed snout and triangular ears of many species of dog with the vertical pupils and amber irises of a wild cat. Its cry varies from the dog-like bark with which it signals to other foxes, to the mournful screech it emits during the mating season.

Urban life

The main reason for the fox’s successful spread over such a wide geographical area is that it is extremely adaptable. Not only is it quite unchoosy about its diet, it can also get along in a diverse range of habitats and, in Britain at least, it has only one natural predator in the golden eagle. Red foxes have been found living at altitudes of up to 10,000ft and, although they were traditionally seen as creatures of woodland environments, they have increasingly in recent years become town- and city-dwellers.

Urban foxes have considerably shorter life-spans than their country cousins, largely because they are at risk of being run over by cars. Where the rural fox has an average life expectancy of around four-and-a-half years, in towns it tends to be barely more than two.

Used to eating whatever comes along, the urban fox has adapted to the relatively scarce food supply available to it. The common perception that they live entirely by raiding dustbins is considerably exaggerated, but this is certainly one source of food, along with rodents, birds, pet food, worms, insects and, if careless owners allow them access to their hutches, domestic pets such as rabbits and guinea-pigs. If it comes across a hedgehog, a fox will urinate on it to get it to unroll out of its spiny ball, whereupon it can be safely attacked. The remainder of its food comes from people who are prepared to befriend and feed them.

The urban fox phenomenon appears to have been a development of the early part of the 20th century. It seems the most likely reason for this is not that foxes came into the towns, but that the towns came to the foxes. Widespread suburban housing development in the period after the first world war and into the 1930s meant that a lot of what was previously rural land was built on. Revealingly, they tend even now to shun heavily built-up areas of towns in favour of the more well-to-do parts of suburbia, where there are bigger gardens.

It is estimated that the urban fox population of England and Wales is about 30,000, a figure that remains remarkably stable from year to year. This suggests that, far from living a meagre, scavenging life compared to their rural counterparts, living from paw to mouth as it were, they are actually thriving.

Friend or foe?

There are reports of foxes establishing lasting relationships with individual households that are prepared to feed them.

The website www.wildlifeonline.co.uk cites the case of a man in Horsham, West Sussex, who began feeding a fox with dog food every evening. It got so used to taking this source of sustenance for granted that it would wait under the same tree in the garden every night, even venturing nearer the house to investigate on evenings when its dinner didn’t appear at the expected time.

For this reason, foxes can be an environmentally sound way of disposing of left-over food, although they should under no circumstances be given processed or junk food. The fact that they catch and eat mice and rats means they are also expert pest-controllers.