City foxes aren’t even shy any more.
There’s a garden a few houses down from us that’s a Prime Development Opportunity, which means that it’s abandoned until someone works out how to afford to build the totally underground house that’s the only thing that could get planning permission in that space. Because ‘it would be impossible to return to the usage the Victorians had envisaged for it’, even though that use was as a garden and it seems to be doing fine at that at the moment. Aaaanyway, it is a very overrun garden that hasn’t been touched since about 1972, 15-foot-high rose bushes and all, and it’s a good place for the local urban foxes to settle down and raise the cubs. Pictured: teenage cub.
I thought he was a cat when he came down the path, because the neighbours’ cats often stroll through our garden on their daily tour of small-bird murder and mayhem. But when I leant over to look at him, he was not only obviously a fox, but a fox who saw me and came trotting over to say hello. We were about six inches apart from each other, separated by the glass, him sitting on the back doorstep looking curiously at me like he was just dropping by on a social call and what had happened to friendly conversation around here anyway?
Alas, by the time I’d grabbed my iPhone, he’d gone off to investigate the rest of the garden; he’s sniffing some of the feral mint in this picture.
