I began to be suspicious shortly after taking a photo that I shared in my previous post. As Sherlock Holmes once pointed out, there is a difference between seeing and observing. Seeing a preoccupied young fox on my garden decking on a hot June morning was one thing. Observing that his nose and chin were bespeckled with mud hinted at rather more.
Here is a close up from that same sighting. Common mud? No; alas, all “mud” in the North Downs is as stiff as concrete in this charbroiled summer, and in any case, even in normal weather it barely exists at all on our steep slopes – it is a mere flinty skin over the hard chalk bedrock. This fox had discovered something much better: potting soil!
Deep inside my greenhouse, two fox nose-sized holes were imprinted in a raised bed. A snuffle hole, if you will, an inquisitive prod used by both foxes and badgers to extract earthworms, beetles and other delicacies from soil or fallen leaves. A good field can be peppered with snuffle holes after a rainy night.
He cannot have found much in the raised bed – at least, that was my first thought. But, he had discovered the greenhouse! And a greenhouse is full of wonderful things that a fox simply must, through some ancient unwritten law, handle and rearrange.
Visit number two: he spied my gardening gloves, carried them across the greenhouse, and carefully buried them between a Brussels sprouts plant and a garlic.
Sadly, it did not make them edible. Visit number three: he removed one glove from this hiding place and relocated it to the eggplant bed. As a bonus, he also dropped a golf ball of unknown origin in my garden.
And he still made time to critique my in-progress garden pond.
This is Fox: graceful, mysterious, cat-like, intelligent, adaptable – with a faint touch of the absurd to complete the charm.
A Walk with Wildlife 
Leave a comment