Tag: night

Home Decor

First, there is the bedding – here of straw, bundled into hay by broad powerful paws. However busy harvest time might be for farmers, busier still are badgers. After the wheat is cut, the stubble is theirs for the gathering.

For those unfamiliar with badger habits: they like their setts lined with bedding material, and not being equipped with shopping trolleys, they carry it backwards in the style of a reversing rabbit. I doubt many humans could walk backwards on a winding path without mishap, but badgers hop round corners, past brambles and over dips with apparently little problem.

But sometimes the story becomes stranger. A bundle of bedding abandoned mid-path by a badger has a second life: a scent post for badgers and foxes alike.

Yes, that fox did roll in badger urine or dung. Dogs that throw themselves into fox scat are the horror of their owners but this is the first time that I’ve observed a fox attempting similar behaviour. There is a fairly significant advantage in smelling like the local land – territory owners tend to win arguments with trespassers. That said, it is more conventional for foxes to achieve this by scent marking everywhere at nose height.

Elsewhere in the wood, bedding is a matter of hazel leaves and stripped honeysuckle bark.

Dormouse nest Sept 23

If you look very closely, you might see a ginger nose in there. An older version of these:

Juvenile dormouse2 23 Sept 23

Dormice have a few more weeks before they will weave hibernation nests on the woodland floor. Until then, these babies can sleep alongside their mother in the hazel leaves, oblivious to the antics of more wakeful woodland creatures.

Window on the Wild

Fox intense 22 Aug 20

Judging books by their covers, or something like that. They say that eyes are windows into the soul, and there’s a jolt in the raw intensity of a fox. But this one’s apparent mood is misleading; he has diluted pupils due to low light levels, not because he feels as sharp as a cat that has spied its favourite ball.

The fox physique is often misunderstood. Trotting across a road, they seem much bigger than their 14in high selves. And what about their fur? We are taught the fox uniform from childhood: fluffy, sleek, maybe dusted with snow.

Fox in snow

Not at the moment, that’s for certain. The male fox with his intense eyes is sporting the almost skin-tight fur of late summer, although the weather is cooling fast and his sleekness will soon abandon him.

Fox in summer 22 Aug 20

The adaptability of foxes is a multidimensional marvel. Not only can they live from the Arctic circle to Saudi Arabia, and eat everything from earthworms to hackberries to wolf-killed deer, they also react to the seasons in a way that our lives in climate-controlled houses find alien. True, our outdoor clothing thickens as the year grows old, but generally we change our whole outfits at once, not from the toes upward.

Half a moult

The Canadian province of Saskatchewan has some of the most extreme seasons on Earth, and this fox – who I met some years ago – has to cope with anything between -50c and +45c. In England, their moults are a little less ragged, but it is still not uncommon for a fox losing its winter coat to be incorrectly suspected of having mange.

Conversely, these perfectly healthy foxes in Croatia (where I worked in 2017) look skinny because the unbearable heat of Dalmatia denies them a thick coat.

For every season, there is a fox, and it wears its own fashion.