An Irishman's Diary

WALKING BACK from the supermarket one evening recently, I saw a fox. Not in a fleeting glimpse, as it skulked from shadow to shadow, or dashed across a road.

No, this one was standing still, out in the open, and only a few a feet away from where, stopped in my tracks, I watched it.

The fox was not nearly as interested in me as vice versa. It had already attracted another admirer – a man walking his dog. And it was on its fellow four-legged creature the fox was focused. The dog was a small one – a terrier. But the fox studied it without either fear or aggression, only curiosity, as if trying to decide whether it was a possible meal.

Of the two animals, it was definitely the canine one that looked more worried. In fact, as I marvelled at the fox’s cheek in wandering around our neighbourhood at 8 o’clock in the evening, it calmly sat back on its hind quarters, just as a dog would. And I realised that in all my years, I had never seen a fox do this, except on wildlife programmes.

Even when the dog owner started taking pictures of it on his phone, the fox remained unperturbed. It all-but posed for the camera. Only when I too attempted to get a shot, moving around slightly to capture the fox’s best side, did it think better of the situation.

It rose then and turned, heading towards the road. And for a moment I feared it might run into the path of a car. But no, the fox waited its chance, crossed when it was safe to do so, and belatedly disappeared into the night.

We were barely a mile from Dublin’s O’Connell Street at the time. So, clearly, this was one of the new breed of urban foxes that have adapted to life in cities. Which, with their abundant food sources and contrasting scarcity of licensed shotgun owners, must, if anything, be more hospitable to the species than the countryside ever was.

Indeed, urbane as our local fox seems to be, there may be even more cosmopolitan examples in Dublin. More city-central ones, anyway. I’m told, for instance, that in the grounds of Dáil Éireann, you will occasionally see foxes (and no, I don’t mean Mildred, who was returned to the wild after the 2007 general election and is rarely spotted these days outside Wicklow).

Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square are reportedly home to vulpine life too. And according to Éanna Ní Lamhna’s book Wild Dublin, a fox has even been known to share the city centre’s most prestigious address: No 1 Grafton Street.

This is better known as the Trinity College provost’s house: from which, circa 2008, Ní Lamhna reported sightings of the resident creature (the fox, that is, not the provost) emerging for night time prowls of Grafton Street and its environs.

There are ups and downs to city living, of course, even for scavenging animals. The advent of wheelie bins was a big a set-back, I believe.

And if so, the privatisation of bin services, which seems to be encouraging a revival of bag use, may be more popular with foxes than humans.

But the ubiquitous left-over food aside, I suspect Dublin’s big advantage for these outlaws of the animal world, serial killers that they are, is the mostly benign attitude of the human population.

Not owning any chickens, or lambs, or even a small dog I, like most city dwellers, consider the fox a charming addition to my neighbourhood.

Mind you, as readers may recall, I do – somewhat reluctantly – own a cat. Or to be more exact, I have responsibility for a cat that hangs around the back garden and has guilt-tripped me into behaving as if I own her.

In which capacity, I note from the same Ní Lahmna book that foxes consider cat liver a delicacy. Kitten liver, preferably. Which means that our cat probably has nothing to worry about. By my calculations, she’s 115 years old in human terms. So not only are kittens unlikely, but her own liver is well past its best-before date.

Besides which, I’m told that adult cats can deter foxes with a mere hiss or the threat of a clawing. And despite her laid-back relationship with the local magpies, which grow ever-more brazen as they share her meals and leftovers, the cat could probably still fight her corner if the need arose.

To tell the truth, there are times when, reviewing the amount of money I spend on food for a pet I didn’t choose (I don’t even like cats), the prospect of her meeting a tragic but natural end at the hands of another animal does not seem entirely unattractive.

In fact, when I’m out late and find myself worrying that the creature is at home staring at my back door, waiting desperately for me to return, the prospect of a vulpine raider putting her out of her misery is even more alluring. But the feline-thropists among you can probably relax.

If the cat ever qualified as part of the food chain, the fox would have had her years ago.