Urban foxes

[cooksalot Profile]

Does anyone have any tips for deterring urban foxes from a south London garden?
My shed is on concrete so they can't get under there for a den. However, I think they have a den in a nearby garden and they dig under my fence to get through to both mine and my neighbours gardens. This results in my plants getting dug up and wrecked! I have shored up the fence at crucial spots but they still get in...I have actually left a gap where there are no valuable plants so that they won't start digging anywhere else. I would like something that actually puts them off coming into the garden.
I have seen what appears to be a mother and a younger fox.

[hungryhousewife Profile]

I think we are probably back to 'get a jack russell' - but not two, or that will constitute a 'pack' and you'll be in trouble!!

and 'if you live near a zoo, see if you can get some lion dung'!!

HH

[Tatihou Profile]

How big is the area you are trying to protect? Could you run a strand of electric fence wire just where a nose will come into contact with it as they emerge on your side of the fence? Though they can, of course, jump...

[Joanbunting Profile]

I am with Tatihou.

Electric fences are cheap and they do work.

I think another important thing is to make sure that absoluetly no food is available to them and that might involve neighbours too.

[Joanbunting Profile]

Hi again

Nothing to do with foxes but look what we found in the orchard today.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/62387678@N ... hotostream

We have an agreement in the commune to have sheep in enclosed spaces to do what sheep do, ie eat all the vegetation. Save effort and machinery - the cats are most discombubrified!!

[cooksalot Profile]

Unfortunately there is a never ending food supply for them. With many bins not properly secured and discarded rubbish on the street they don't go hungry. (On the subject of sheep ), this morning I found a gnawed lamb bone in the garden! Could have come from a restaurant or domestic bin - who knows. Can't really blame the foxes - they are just doing what foxes do. I will definitely look into the electric fencing idea though, thanks.

[Joanbunting Profile]

I wish there had been an electric fence round the orchard.

I was watering DD's flowers this morning when the baaing got closer and the whole flock trotted past heading south!
Fortunately all the gates were closed. A few urgent phone calls and the shepherd eventually appeared and rounded them up.

We were listening to the foxes round here last night they don't half make a racket when they start - not urban I know but one of the (several ) reasons I haven't succumbed to keeping hens.

[Joanbunting Profile]

How about this for unwelcome garden visitors. In La Provence this morning there was a report about some swimming pool firm who went to a house in the very upmarket Menerbes ( previously Peter Mayle - ville) to clean the swimming pool before the Parisien owners arrived!

They discovered 10 dead wild boar therein and a horrendous pong. The local huntsmen are all outraged because neither the pool, nor the garden which borders the forest, have any boarder fencing and of course there fun has been well and truly spoiled!!

[cooksalot Profile]

Crumbs! I suppose I should be grateful I only have foxes and squirrels to worry about... an invasion of wild boar wouldn't be much fun

[Dena Profile]

I know they are a nuisance but I have had great fun watching the antics of the urban fox family that lives near me. I have watched them in the early hours sitting in the middle of the top of the cul-de-sac where I live, they play, trot off, come back, have tugs-of-war with things they have found and generally enjoy not having to hide from humans. Yes I do know what damage they can do and that they are killers of chickens and other small things, but I think my life has been enriched by sharing their nocturnal life.

[Wokman Profile Website]

I have had a word with a friend who suggests securing wire fencing to the ground with tent pegs on the outside of the fence so the foxes can't dig a hole. He said it works well for anything that wants to dig under a fence, including bunnies.
Grass will still grow through the fencing on the ground, but it stops the little burrowers.

[cooksalot Profile]

Thanks for that idea Wokman - probably a lot cheaper and easier than installing an electric fence! I am not against wildlife in the garden - in fact I have 2 bird feeders. But the damage these urban foxes do to flower and vegetable beds is just heartbreaking!

[ordinarygull Profile Website]

I usually love to see the urban foxes and badgers round here, but not this week as we have had a chicken massacre - we think it was a fox but can't be certain.
Heartbreaking, as one of my girls was 5 years old - and what makes me really sad is that whatever killed them just left them there, and didn't even take the poor girls for food

[Wokman Profile Website]

That certainly sounds like a fox ordinarygull.

[Tatihou Profile]

Sorry for your losses, OG, but I always defend the fox, much as I dislike losing poultry - as we did, a few months ago.

If you put yourself in the fox's paws, when trotting across a field or through a wood, the fox may encounter a group of rabbits of pheasants or whatever but will only get the chance to kill one, at the most two, while the rest leg it to burrows or into trees. It will take not so much what it can eat but what it has opportunity to catch.

Contrarily, imagine Mr Fox in a hen run. Hens everywhere and they can't escape. The fox doesn't have a mental switch that says two or three is enough - he's programmed to kill all the food available. And, because of man's husbandry techniques, we've made them vulnerable. One of our chickens survived - we're fairly certain she wasn't in the run when the fox arrived. She's an independent sort of girl and flies in and out as the mood takes her. We don't think she was in the run and therefore escaped.

One of the BBC wildlife presenters lost chickens to a fox and instead of removing the dead ones that were left behind, he left them where they were. Over the course of a day or two, the fox returned for the remaining carcases.

When a fox got four of our chickens, he was able to take his time about it. When we walked round the fields afterwards, we found one that he'd buried for later. One of the legs was sticking up so we spotted it but it was obvious that it had been reserved for a subsequent meal. It had gone a few days later.

[cooksalot Profile]

I don't think your average urban fox suffers too many hunger pangs. He is well provided for by humans in the form of KFC boxes, McDonald bags and poorly packed refuse!

[Joanbunting Profile]

Think yourselves lucky if it is only foxes you have to deal with.

There are reports here and have been all summer of the increase in the wolf population. So much so that the préfect for Vaucluse has annonced that people may scare them off with a warning shot or two or expoding thingies (!).

The area where we live - the Luberon - is so called because there were once many wolves, loubs in Provencale. Now they appear to have come back, migrating South from the area around Grenoble where they were re-introduced.

Lock up the pussy cats

[jeral Profile]

An erstwhile colleague who lived and drove extensively in Romania was always on the lookout for wolves - maybe they're migrating West?

On urban foxes, ten years ago we'd regularly see them and hear them screaming (like they do) but all quiet now, ditto no squirrels running along the wall, or butterflies or small birds like robins and blue tits. *Wipes a tear away* as clearly "we" (whoever "we" is) have either sanitised or polluted the environment to the extent that they've learned that it's no longer home sweet home.

I'm with the "bring back hedgerows" etc brigade. Pigeons might be a nuisance, but if all "we" are leaving is somewhere suitable for street pigeons and rats, perhaps someone somewhere needs to wake up around here.

Perhaps be careful what you wish for, given I haven't even mentioned honey bees yet

[Joanbunting Profile]

I agree Jeral

We have increasing problems with wild boar - because wild pigs have over the years bred with domestic pigs that these days are bred to have several large litters a year as opposed to the single small litter per year of the wild ones.

The crosses have more and larger litters and do unbelievable damage especially in dry summers like this. They are bringing forward the hunting season this year to try to reduce numbers.