Brer Fox
Tigger in his blog (Tigger’s Wee-blog) the other day mentioned
‘his’ fox burying a bone. What clever animals they are.
My heart misses a beat when I see one trotting purposefully
across my garden and my blood chills when I hear them screaming in the small of
the night. The sobbing cry of the vixen as she calls for a mate or while mating
is other-worldly.
I know they are loathed by farmers and can understand their
vexation at the damage they cause, but still I admire their cunning, their
style, their elegance.
As a child I liked all the Uncle Remus tales, but one of my
favourites was Brer Fox and the Tar Baby. Later, I enjoyed Roald Dahl’s
Fantastic Mr Fox, which lauds the wit of the fox. (I wonder if that story has fallen prey to the prissy rewriters of
much-loved tales?)
Foxes feature in much children’s literature, frequently in
Aesop’s Fables, those pithy moral tales. The gingerbread man (Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t
catch me , I’m the gingerbread man) meets his end on the fox’s nose, and
Chicken Licken and his friends are fooled into entering Foxy Loxy’s den, never
to be seen again. The fox in Beatrix Potter’s book, The Tale of Mr Tod, does
battle with Tommy Brock the badger, using ‘dreadful bad language’. ‘Fox in Sox’
by Dr Seuss is another favourite with small children.
In song, there is 'The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night' sung by Bob Shane., and found on YouTube.
Basil Brush was a fox glove puppet and the star of a television programme for children. He spoke rather in the perceived manner of ‘a fox-hunting man’ and was given to atrocious jokes, always followed by his catchphrase, ‘Ha, ha, ha. Boom! Boom!’
Leicester City Football Club adopted Filbert Fox as their mascot
in 1992. Filbert is always to be seen on match days, dressed in blue, entertaining
the crowds and cheering on his team from the sidelines.
Reynard was the country nickname for a fox, deriving from
mediaeval English by way of the French ‘Renart’ and the Old German name ‘Reginhart’.
‘Tod’ is also from Middle English and is still used in Northern England and
Scotland as a name for the fox.
Foxes are believed to be largely nocturnal and yet there are
many well-documented stories of foxes sunning themselves on roofs or leaping
over walls and fences from one garden to another during daylight hours. My
next-door neighbour has a visiting fox that spends much of its time resting on
her lawn. We have nocturnal foxes and cubs regularly crossing our front garden.
They have well-defined paths and never seem to stay long, so I don’t know what
they’re looking for. Snails, maybe? They don’t come into the back garden since
we installed our cat enclosing fencing. One night, before the installation, we watched
a vixen teaching her cub to catch rats, but we have not, to date, managed to
photograph a fox. Must try harder!
So much well researched fox lore - F had to mend a Basil Brush (lookalike) at a recent Repair Cafe. He was decidedly in need of some chicken. Little foxes (about Tigger sized) used to run up and down our rows of veg when F was watering in the twilight time. They were so bold they would even inspect the bucket of vegetables - carefully removing the onions to see what was underneath. Their Mum used to sit by the BBQ of the people in the adjoining house and wait for her share of the food. The fox in our backyard used my Tigger flap in the fence until Mr B blocked it up (to stop me, not the fox), but she probably didn't need it as she could leap onto the fence and run along the top of the row of wooden palings with perfect balance. My humans still put out food scraps for the fox. We have loads of urban fox tales.
ReplyDeleteTigger, I applaud you and your humans, living cheek by jowl with such clever animals. Perhaps you could persuade F to regale us with her tales.
DeleteNobby is of course excited by the mere mention of a fox. Once, when he was a very small puppy and I was encouraging him to do his early morning pee on the back lawn, to my utter horror in the breaking dawn light I spotted the larger of our two neighbourhood foxes walking across the other side of the lawn. Fortunately I manage to grab Nobby and take him inside before anything untoward happened.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I'm slightly embarrassed to say, I loved Basil Brush when I was a child. Not sure how well he'd go down these days!
Cheers, Gail.
Lucky escape for Nobby - or maybe it was the fox that was lucky. Terriers have that inbred instinct
ReplyDeleteto chase foxes. Our JRs certainly did.
From my 4th floor I can see a fox crossing the lawn, once it was even followed by 3 fox babies, some people feed them, sometimes when it was so hot they slept in the middle of the lawn. So cute !
ReplyDeleteFox cubs ae enchanting.
ReplyDeleteI counted myself lucky to see a mama fox and three cubs one day while at a rural school on business. You have seen so much more!
ReplyDeleteIt's always a privilege to see wild animals in the wild (rather than in a zoo)
ReplyDelete