Category Archives: Widdle

by | March 29, 2023 · 6:16 am

My best friend, Widdle (5)

Last time,we were looking at what Widdle the Friendly Fox would eat and what he would turn his nose up at. Over time, we gradually built up a list of his likes and dislikes.

Physically, he was very thin and very wiry, but he was extremely strong for his size. If he pulled one end of a stick and you pulled the other, you could feel his muscles and his strength. Most of this came, in our opinion, because he wouldn’t eat bread or cakes. He wouldn’t eat curry or anything flavoured. He wouldn’t eat pizza. Even our local magpies wouldn’t eat pizza, incidentally. Widdle wouldn’t eat hamburgers, although we didn’t quite understand this. Perhaps he had his culinary standards. After all, the bar was set pretty high by our sausages (42% meat).

This photograph appears to show the biggest object Widdle ever managed to carry away. I have no idea what it was, but may have been a big bone or maybe some cut of meat that had gone past its sell-by date:

Raw bacon rind appears to be a delicacy in the fox world. Firstly, sniff what it is…

Don’t let it escape under any circumstances:

 

“A second piece? Don’t mind if I do!”

In the next picture, note the first piece of rind safely stashed on the floor. He didn’t find getting both in his mouth at the same time too easy!

 

“Cheese is different. You have so many dreadful flavours in cheese. So make sure you sniff it first….”

 

“Take hold of it carefully. It may crumble and you might lose some.”

“Sniff the next piece carefully. Just because the first piece was cheddar, that doesn’t mean they all will be.”

“Yes, it’s OK. I’ll take it, please. It’s good for the teeth, cheese!”

Not that Widdle would turn down proper meat.

“Would I like a bit of steak? You bet I would!”

“Mmm. Lovely!”

“Watch what you’re doing. Fingers at your own risk!!”

Widdle usually took all the food that was offered to him. He filled his mouth up with sausages, bits of meat and so on, and took them back to Mrs Widdle in the den. She would eat some and share the rest with her cubs. The largest litter I ever saw in our garden was four, with No 4, the smallest one, perhaps only two thirds the size of the others. Mum and Dad taught them their table manners. Any transgression got a sharp nip on the backside to emphasise the point.

Notice how, in the last three photographs, Widdle has a great gaping wound on his chest. As I mentioned, male foxes frequently fight each other, and they bite their opponent’s muzzle and fore-limbs. I don’t know how Widdle acquired this particular wound, but it didn’t take long to heal up.

On four occasions, Widdle had bad injuries to one of his front legs and he could barely walk. In a wilder world, he would not have managed to hunt and he would have died, but his friends stepped in with Sausage-Aid and he got over it. That gave him five lives instead of the usual one, a minimum of four or five years of life compared to the usual two or three, and as many as fifteen cubs produced, instead of the usual figure of between none and four.

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by | March 23, 2023 · 6:16 am

My best friend, Widdle (4)

Between approximately 2007-2010, our family had a completely wild fox as a friend. When Widdle came to you like this, you knew that he had only one thought on his mind. Sausages!!

These are the brand he preferred. We used to buy them at a frozen food supermarket called Iceland. We wanted a cheap, but nourishing, sausage for our furry friend, so we looked round most of the butcher-type shops in our suburb of Nottingham and finally made the decision to buy at Iceland where the budget sausages were 42% meat, easily the highest percentage in the world for the budget sausage. Dog food was even more unbelievable. All of the cheaper ones I looked at were full of “ash”. I’d really like to know why!

And what type of ash was it, that was included in so many dogfoods? Surely not the ashes of former dog owners? :

Sometimes Widdle was extremely polite, putting a fore-paw on each knee, showing you his pale brown eyes, and staring with a mixture of wistfulness and plain hunger:

On other occasions, he was a lot more forthright, explaining with his pointy teeth, that he was pressed for time, so could you crack on with it, please? After all, we both know how it’s going to end:

I wasn’t the only person who could feed him, but that perfect lunge was always his favourite method. Keep still and you were perfectly safe:

On occasion he was over excited and perhaps got some sausage stuck on his teeth. He would always want to clean it off straightaway:

He made several trips back to “The Den” to feed the family. On his last trip, the sausage or sausages were always for him, and he would get over excited and lick his lips in anticipation:

He was happy enough to eat leftovers. Here he has the carcass of a chicken, I think it is. Just look how, in this view, the early stages of his moult are easily visible:

This next picture comes seconds after the previous one. It catches Widdle in a strange pose. He has just heard a noise behind him and looks over to where the noise has come from. The angle makes it look as if he is being aggressive and snarling. But he isn’t. In actual fact, I never heard him make any noise of any kind. That pointy, sharp tooth is there though:

The noise came from next door’s cat, an old bruiser called Yin-Yang.  He was taken, as far as I know, as a young kitten, from a feral cat’s nest and brought up in a normal home. People always seem to think that foxes eat cats but Widdle and Yin-Yang didn’t ever take any notice of each other. Foxes are always extremely wary of a cat’s claws and the possibility of losing an eye in any fight with one.

Anyway, here they are, both sharing the same bits of the same chicken. Yin-Yang lived to be around seventeen or eighteen years old. He died in my daughter’s arms after some macho hero deliberately drove his car over him in front of our house. Yin-Yang was deaf, so he didn’t hear the car horn.

 

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by | July 27, 2022 · 6:16 am

My best friend, Widdle (3)

Widdle was extremely photogenic, and didn’t he know it! Mind you, he does have such beautiful soft eyes……..

In the days when he had a wife and cubs to support, Widdle did his very best to be the perfect husband and the perfect Dad, but that didn’t mean that he never felt tired. Indeed he had a number of different places that he would use for a rest, and if it was sunny and warm, then so much the better.

If we weren’t at home when he came to call, he would graciously sit quietly and wait for us. Sometimes, he would get nice and comfortable in a large empty planter. Our garden is on two levels, and directly behind the planter there was a fifteen foot drop. It didn’t bother him, though. Widdle never seemed to have any fear of heights…….

When we went to say hello and to ask him what kind of a day he was having, Widdle wasn’t ever frightened.  He liked that lofty perch,  even though he was sitting with his back to any potential attackers. What he saw as the biggest plus point of that planter was the fact that he could immediately spot us as we emerged from the house with his sausages……

On other occasions he would sit like a dog, making sure that there were no rival male foxes on the lawn some twenty feet below:

At other times he seemed very cautious and preferred to sit in the foliage:

Occasionally, he would have his attention drawn by a noise he didn’t recognise:

His proudest moment, however, came when he showed off his new winter coat:

His fur was always at its most luxuriant in the winter, whehn he needed the extra warmth, of course. In summer, he would moult his coat and go around looking a lot more grey than red, and overall, extremely tatty. Picture 4 above illustrates the Punk Fox look perfectly, as does the one below…..

In this photograph Widdle is a little more advanced in his moult, and the grey tones to his fur are really obvious. This picture dates from a different day to Photograph 4, when he spent a sunny warm afternoon in the planter, and woke up so stiff that he needed a good stretch before he could even think of eating.

Having said that, just a few minutes warming up, and he was soon ready for his favourite food…….

 

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by | July 7, 2022 · 6:16 am

My best friend, Widdle (2)

As you have seen in the first instalment of this story, the best animal friend I ever had was a fox called “Widdle”. He taught me more of value than 90% of my teachers ever did. And Widdle, he also learnt a little bit.

Widdle, of course, soon learnt which way his sausage was buttered.

The usual scenario was that he would be out on “Lone Hunter’s Patrol”, looking for geese and turkeys, hurtling round the gardens at top speed:

And then he would hear me calling his name :

And then he would come up the path to the patio

And then he’d let you know why he was here:

And then he’d take a sausage or two from you. He was quite prepared to touch you and he wasn’t afraid :

If he was hungry he would often eat the first one, but otherwise he would put it on the floor and then come for a second sausage. He could always be trusted to carry two sausages in his mouth, and as he grew older and more experienced, he managed to carry three. Here, he seems happy to take just two. As we human thick-heads eventually worked out, neither of them were for him:

Now for the second:

A very tricky manoeuvre :

And then it’s “Up, up and Away !!!

His wife, Mrs Widdle, will get her share of the two sausages, but only if the cubs, up to four of them usually, have had their fill. I was always 100% sure that in the rather extensive fox family, Widdle, the individual who provided all the food, was always the last to eat any.

A lesson for us all. And not just in sausage eating.

 

 

 

 

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by | June 12, 2022 · 6:17 am

My best friend, Widdle (1)

One summer’s day in 2007, I was sitting out on the patio when all of a sudden I looked down and there was an animal standing right next to me. It was a fox!! Latin name “Vulpes vulpes” for anybody who lives in a country where foxes are not known.

I said to him “What do you want?” “Are you hungry?” “Would you like some food?”

He looked back at me and I said, “Just stay there and I’ll go and fetch you something.”

And he stayed there and I went into kitchen, opened the door of the fridge and looked around.

Some milk. No, that’s cats.

Just a piece of apple and some cooked sausages.

That’s it. I’ll take him that. I picked up the apple and went out to feed him.

He was still there. I offered him the apple which he initially sniffed and then gave me a look of such disdain, as if to say,

“Hurry up and get back to your village. They’ll be missing their idiot.”

I went back to the fridge. I got a sausage and I took it out to him. He sniffed it and I put it on the floor. He picked it up in his mouth and off he went. Back into the beautiful green world of flowers, bushes and trees.

That sausage would be the first of literally thousands, with the occasional lump of beef, pork or chicken to stop him getting bored. I soon became an expert on sausages, their make-up, their price, their value for money. We used to buy them in some quantity. I remember once going through the checkout at Iceland (the frozen food supermarket chain, not the island nation). I was buying the usual six packets and the woman said “Do you like sausages then?”  and I replied “Not really, I feed them to a fox”.

And she looked at me with complete disdain as if to say….

“Hurry up and get back to your village. They’ll be missing their idiot.”

Little did she know, though, and little did I know, that very soon I would value our fox at ten times the value of almost all human beings. Being with him was like being with an extremely wise child who was always steps ahead of you. Somebody who could do amazing things that were as if he knew magic. Somebody who was always on his best behaviour. Who never hurt a fly. Who was a damn sight closer to God than I ever was. Here’s his four stage method to being given a sausage:

Stage 1            Look as if you’re hungry:

Stage 2           Reach for the Food of the Gods: sausage fried with extra fat :

Stage 3           Make that strange gesture with your lower jaw that is a basic part of “Talking Fox” but one which we never managed to  understand :

Stage 4    Show the kind humans your lovely brown eyes, and they’ll probably give you more sausages next time :

Sometimes, though, our new friend was nervous and he showed this by cocking his back leg against anything available, and squirting a tiny quantity of fox urine. He only did that when he was not 100% certain of our intentions, because we were human beings and potentially not as well behaved as he was. It gave him his name, though. We called him “Widdle”.

Over the next few weeks, we all grew to love him.

He was a gift from God. A wild creature who let us into his world for a few short years. We fed him morning and evening, day in, day out, and we saved his life several times. When he could not hunt because of injuries we saw to it that he was fed. Thanks to us, he had five lives.

We fed too, all of the minimum of 15 fox cubs that he raised. With a little bit of help from Mrs Widdle, of course.

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