The Fleeting Fox
A few weeks ago, I opened the curtains covering the kitchen back door to see a healthy looking fox looking straight at me from its position about twenty feet away under the pergola. It quickly vanished through the hedge that adjoins next door and I saw its tail disappear over their fence into the back road. The following morning, the bucket we use to collect waste kitchen water, and which had been at least half full the night before, had been tipped over.
On seeing my interest in this very welcome night visitor, my wife bought me a trail camera for my birthday last week and this is what happened on the second night I set it up:
After 34 years in the same house, we have together shaped our front and rear gardens with our personalities. Some would regard our outside space as a bit of a mess, a bit higgledy-piggledy, but there is method in our apparent madness, in our inability to conform.
When we moved in, we inherited square lawns bounded by uniformly spaced rose bushes, but that was from a different time and there was a sterility about the place. A beautiful if dilapidated, wooden garage occupied half of our restricted rear space. It may have been over-engineered to last, but it had by now come to the end of its days. Its place was taken by a wooden octagonal greenhouse, with a shed for my intended wood carving further along our secure drive. Over the years we have increased both functionality and privacy, but always with an open invitation to insects, garden birds, and other wildlife.
One of the first things we did when we moved in was to install a small pond. The pond quickly attracted frogs and the occasional toad. When we last cleared it out five years ago we counted 188 frogs. In the spring and summer months we are mesmerised by hover flies, mayflies, dragonflies, butterflies moths, and other flying creatures, not least the bees who last year found a way to build a hive between the pond lining and the soil it retains. For several years we had a heron swooping down to claim victims of frog and fish, to the point where we needed to deter. So we constructed a pergola to create height and over a period of years placed sticks in the ground around the pond, harvested from a hazel bush, to prevent landing and take off.
The sticks around the pond have attracted garden birds because they can safely perch there to preen or survey the lie of the land. They drop down to the water and take a bath among the lilies before returning to their perch to shake themselves dry. We leave the seed heads on our plants throughout the winter, and as well as looking stunning after rainfall, these gems supplement the feeders we have hanging from both the rowan tree in the back garden and from a pole enhanced with more hazel sticks in the front.
And now we have our new visitor. It feels really special, like a gift for all our patience, care, and hard work. There are foxes on our allotment two blocks away from here and they are quite bold but look rather straggly. Our garden fox is in significantly better condition, clearly thriving on food waste in these suburban streets. First indications are that our garden is on its nightly run. The photos taken by the motion sensitive trail camera shows it visited between 1am and 2am and spent only a couple of minutes here. So now I need to learn how to use its video settings.
The microcosm we have created here is for the co-existence of all creatures. It is our place of peace in a frenetic world, a place to just be. We do not give ourselves nearly enough time to ‘just be’, but when we sit outside we can lose half an hour just watching, and taking in everything that is going on around us in our small garden. It refreshes and inspires, calms us and teaches us to appreciate the beauty of this life that is so frequently forgotten.
We often use expressions like “it helps us to switch off”, but actually it doesn’t. It helps us to switch back on a part of life we should all get to know more.
John Reed – June 2020