Foxy Study

A favourite sound-effect for makers of television thrillers these days is the weird night-wail of a vixen calling up a mate: nothing like it for setting the mood as the killer edges through the laurels.

There have been a lot of phoney wails in the night in the west these past few weeks, and a lot of flickering will-o-the-wisps around the borders of the spruce forests. The vixen-cries come from fox-calls of the sort bought in gunshops, or the squeal of polystyrene rubbed across a windscreen, and the willo-the-wisps are the beams of lampers' spotlights, aimed to light an opal glow in the eyes of a questing dog-fox. Sometimes, one will walk to within a dozen metres, but 50 metres will do, even with a shotgun.

From now until April, when the western lambing begins, a midnight patrol to shoot foxes will be routine for many big sheep-farmers. "My ewes are too scared to lie down for long," says a friend in Co Sligo. "If they die after dark, there'll be only skin and bone left by morning." Last year he shot 54 foxes coming up to lambing. Out after woodcock the other Sunday, he saw another seven.

He's a shooter, but one who loves wildlife. He takes visitors to see badgers digging up his fields at night, and his wife puts out food for a pine marten. There's a family of foxes he doesn't shoot because he's never found lamb bones at their den (and, luckily for them, he thinks he knows their faces).

But, in 1997, he lost more than 100 lambs from twins, some of them a week old, and last spring another 34. He has a vixen's footprint in cement from the time she sneaked into a new shed and stole a triplet, three days old.

Some ewes, especially first-time mothers, are apt to run off with one lamb when danger threatens, leaving the other to its fate. Perhaps this is a price to be paid for giving ewes twins and triplets - but this is not, perhaps, a good time for putting arguments of this sort to a farmer. Certainly, my friend's experience has to be set against the sometimes glib, green view of foxes as natural cullers of a "doomed surplus" of weak and sickly lambs, or as mere scavengers of afterbirth.

What it does suggest, however - and this is scarcely news to ecologists - is that shooting adult foxes indiscriminately in the winter has very little to do with "control". An expert study in the western Highlands of Scotland in the late 1980s monitored what happened on the 70 sq km Loch Eriboll estate when the foxes were left alone for three years, and compared it with another big estate where shooting went on as normal.

The result was no obvious difference in lamb losses (0.6-1.8 per cent) and no increase in the number of foxes. This has been the only systematic European study of its kind, carried out in a region with a deep-seated hatred of foxes, rather like Connacht. But Scottish islands with no foxes lose just as many lambs as mainland areas with fiercely active gun clubs.

Available food - mainly rabbits, voles and sheep and deer carrion - was the key to fox population in Scotland. In Ireland, a decade of carrion littered across the hills from a gross overstocking of sheep must have had its impact on fox numbers. My Sligo friend reckons average litters of two to four cubs have now risen commonly to five to seven.

If true, this will be of great interest to the zoologist who is running the Dublin Urban Fox Study in UCD. Dave Wall is now researching the reproductive success of urban foxes compared with those of the countryside. He is looking for volunteers who know of fox dens in either kind of setting and would be willing to watch them and count the cubs (contact him at 01-7062261; fax 017061152; e-mail: mammals@ucd.ie). He also needs more reports of sightings of foxes, rural or urban, (but not by phone) and prompt reports of available road-kill corpses anywhere in Dublin city or suburbs.

The first phase of his UCD study, in 1995-96, has given a quite startling picture of the density of foxes in Dublin. In the 72 sq km from the city centre out to Templeogue and across to Dun Laoghaire there are some 75 fox-family groups, each consisting of up to three adults and an average of three or four cubs, plus an unknown number of animals roaming without a territory.

Foxes breed in the heart of the city, within a few hundred metres of Grafton Street. The vixen's yearning screams (sometimes delivered from the roof of a parked car) are often mistaken for those of a child and have been reported to the Garda. But most fox territories have a number of people who feed the animals and who are sometimes rewarded by cubs playing on the lawn.

The amiable acceptance of foxes by Dubliners seems fairly general, and complaints are few. Their greatest offence seems to have been the rooting up of lawns in their nightly forays for grubs and worms (though foxes have a finely-judged ability to extract a worm from its hole without snapping it) and a habit of burying dead things in flower-beds with one leg sticking out.

The introduction of wheeliebins in many areas has minimised the problem of the rifling of dustbins (though bird-tables and compost-heaps are still attractive) and there were no reports of fox attacks on cats - not fully-grown cats, at any rate.

But Dublin's foxes seem to have a high mortality rate, chiefly among young animals with no road sense. And some are poisoned, either by eating poisoned rodents or directly. This year's study will collect more information about the animals' diet and body condition, and give a better idea of their distribution through city and suburbs.