Category Archives: Widdle

by | January 23, 2024 · 6:17 am

Widdle (11)

Last time, I had managed tro show you two of the three routes Widdel used to reach our patio aka “Sausageland”. He could do a tightrope act fifteen feet from the ground round the back of next door’s garage…….

He coulf take the path whose steps wound their way up the rockery…….

I didn’t mention though, the last route, which was to make his way across the lawn to the hedge between ourselves and the other neighbours’ garden, and then to walk in and out of the hedge, through the foliage, climbing upwards, slowly, until he reached a fence, a fence which, like the path, I had made some forty years previously when we first moved in…….

Then he could follow the fence along to his destination……..

The last picture was in spring. woth a moulted coat and fairly sparse vegetation. Here’s late summer with an early arrival of his winter coat…..

He’ll soon have reached his destinastion……

And then it’s off to see what’s happening in Sausageland…….

After that, he could do what he wanted. H could reverse his steps and make his way to “The Waiting Tree” which you can just see on the left of this photograph. There, he would wait and wait patiently until somebody came out, and ascertained what he wanted, as if we didn’t know…..

He might put his paws on somebody’s knee and then look wistful and plaintive until he was given a sausage or two…..

If he was feeling particularly fierce, he might even go down to the end of the patio for a quick game of “The Lone Wolf on Watch”………

 

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by | January 11, 2024 · 6:17 am

Widdle (10)

The garden behind our house is rather peculiar in the sense that halfway between the house and the end of the garden there is a drop of some twelve or fifteen feet down to a lawn and a few trees. The soil below this little cliff is alluvial and black and of a stunning quality just as if it had been brought there from elsewhere

Personally, I have always felt that during one of the Ice Ages some 10,000-12,000 years ago, a raging torrent brought ice cold water from underneath a glacier and carried it away to what would one day become the River Trent. As it did so, it left us our mini-cliff , and, a hundred yards beyond our fence, a much smaller, non-raging not-a-torrent, called the Daybrook.

I haven’t any pictures of this cliff, but I do have one or two which show clearly the almost sheer drop down to the lawn. Here’s the first….

The white lines in the trees (on the right) are the window ledges of the bedrooms of the houses in the street below.

In the next photograph, you can see the garage of a house in the street below…….

Because of this fifteen foot cliff,  my friend Widdle was faced with a slight problem in that he had to find a viable route up to the patio where he would be given one or two of the free sausages he enjoyed so much.

There were perhaps three main routes up to the patio. The first and most difficult was to come round the back of next door’s garage where he had to negotiate a path only six inches wide with a drop of some fifteen feet to the ground below. The drop is very obvious in this picture where Widdle turns silently from his precarious perch to the safer surface of the patio, the location of our garage before we had it demolished……..

Did you notice that Wisddle’s paw is perched in mid-air, twelve feet or more above next door’s lawn ?

Alternatively Widdle could come across the lawn and then walk up the flight of steps which I myself had made when we first moved into our house some forty years previously. First of all, he might sit and wait on the luxuriant sward of a particularly damp lawn………

Or, he might just explore the grass, looking for anything interesting that he could take away with him…..

After checking the lawn thoroughly for discarded food, Widdle beats a determined path to the bottom of the steps…..

Once Widdle has made his way up to the top of the thirty nine steps, he can step out into Sausageland…..

Where, with a little bit of luck, somebody would be sitting waiting for him, sausage in hand……

He might even meet an old friend, Yin Yang, the Killer Kat…..

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by | December 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (9)

Let’s remind ourselves of a typical urban fox. Let’s call him “Widdle”.

In December 2009, he arrives at the corner of our blizzard swept lawn:

The weather is unusually cold for Nottingham, and he is rather cold. And, as always, he is rather hungry. Lucky then, that he knows exactly where to go.

He makes his way up to what used to be the base of an old garage which was burnt down years ago in an insurance job fire, and prison time was served, I believe, (not by me, I hasten to add, nor indeed, by Widdle). He doesn’t have to shout out his order, but if he could shout it out, it would be “Sausages all round!” .

And then he settles down in the snow to sit quietly and wait for his meal. Just look at that fantastic fur coat. For winter, it is at its thickest. A luxuriant, magnificent warm fur coat:

Just occasionally, he changes his position so that nothing freezes solid:

He waits patiently until he catches that distinctive smell…….

“What’s that smell?

That meaty smell ?

That’s the smell of…..sausages!!!”

 

The best cheap sausages we could find. They came from the Iceland supermarket chain and contained 42% meat with no ash included, as many foods for dogs seemed to have. Widdle took what he could carry in his mouth, and set off back to his den to take it to his family:

And he ate one, and then he took another three back to his den, for Mrs Widdle and the rest of the family. Naturally, in such weather, Widdle left a lot of tracks. Mixed in may be a few domestic cat (felis catus) but I would be amazed if there were any dog prints:

Here’s an individual print. The claws are visible which excludes domestic cat:

Here’s another one:

The following day, the weather cleared up markedly and most of the snow quickly melted. Even so, I was more than a little surprised to see a butterfly sunning itself in the rays of the winter sun:

And even closer up, it is really beautiful. It’s a Small Tortoiseshell:

It looks as if it is injured but I don’t think it is. It seems merely to have twisted itself a little to make sure that it gets the maximum amount of sun.

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by | August 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (8)

Last time, I tried to explain why and how there came to be a healthy population of urban foxes living in the leafy suburbs of London. Within a decade, there were large populations of urban foxes in other cities with extensive leafy suburbs, such as such as Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham. One of these sophisticated city foxes even came to be a personal friend of Banksie:

There was nothing to stop the urban foxes.  On average, councils found that for every letter of complaint, there were 25 which said “Hands off our foxes”. And killing them off was very expensive. anyway. And unpopular. The Daily Express reported that…….

“Hackney Council ordered the removal of traps in a popular park within hours of animal lovers reacting angrily to the idea of the inner city foxes being destroyed.”

Nottingham, of course, has its urban foxes. On one occasion. long before I got to know Widdle, I found traces of them near a path between the Ring Road and the tennis courts. Here’s the path, which seems to be Nottingham’s first Linear Litter Bin. The tennis courts are to the left behind the chainlink fencing, and the ringroad is behind the heavy black metal fence on the right:

Something seems to have crawled underneath the chain link fencing which protects the tennis courts:

At one point I found this carefully excavated hole, which I believe to be a fox’s den.

In a city, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of possible places for a fox family to live, such as disused sheds and out buildings and underneath garden decking. There’s plenty of food, especially if there is a fast food restaurant nearby. Indeed, news was released recently that foxes in cities have begun to have broader, stronger muzzles than their country cousins, because a certain amount of strength is needed to open the discarded food containers. Once the containers are open, though, the food that they contain will contain many more calories than the usual diet of a fox out there in the countryside, eating mice, hedgehogs, beetles and other insects.

It was Kevin Parsons, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who recently announced that investigators had found that “urban foxes had wider, shorter muzzles than those in rural areas. Diet plays a large part in some of the changes. Urban foxes need a stronger bite for the food they eat in cities.

Foxes have all they might need in the city. Even their life expectancy is better than country foxes. The only fly in the ointment is mange which is a disease which can sweep through a city’s fox population and kill nearly every single one. Here’s a fox with the early stages of mange. Look at his tail ! :

Here’s a fox who is past the point of no return. He looks, and is, a terminally sick animal:

Don’t be fooled though! Sometimes a perfectly healthy fox can look as if he is at Death’s Door, when he is moulting, which is, of course, a perfectly normal stage of his life:

Surely you will recognise this rather tatty chap. He is called “Widdle” and was a personal friend of mine. He could look extremely ill when he was moulting, but there was a difference. If a fox is basically healthy, his moult starts at the tail and then spreads up towards the head, which is usually the last to go. Other body extemities, such as the legs, may also stay rich red rather than turn to that tatty fawn-pale orannge-black. And in the three photographs, one of a healthy Widdle and the other two of a fox with mange, that is exactly what is happening.

 

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by | July 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (7) or, more accurately, the Rise of the Urban Fox

After the First World War, London began to expand as a city, particularly to the north and west. What had been farmland was now purchased and then built on. Many, but not all, of the woods were chopped down, the trees and branches were burnt, and new houses were then built on the site. The people who lived in those new houses for the most part worked in the centre of London and new words had to be invented to describe what they had to do in order to get to work. They took the train. Suburban, local trains, whose only purpose was to carry people who were now being called “commuters”, on their way to work. What they did was called “commuting”, and it obviously paid them to do it. Their salaries must have been high enough to justify adding a couple of hours to every one of their working days.

The very best paid commuters lived in what were called the “leafy suburbs”. They could even afford to buy a detached house near the golf course, with four or five bedrooms and a large private garden all the way round it:

In some cases, the leaves of the new leafy suburbs were attached to trees which pre-dated the building of the new houses. Builders with a bit of vision had soon realised that they could save themselves a lot of cash, and finish up with a much better product if they kept as many of the mature trees as possible. All they had to do was to build the houses between them and to do the same with the streets, if they could. Look at the age of these trees:

That slight change in approach by the builders had quite an effect on the suburbs created at the ends of the hundreds of the suburban railway lines which linked the centre of London with the houses where their office workers lived. And, to their credit, instead of just moving on elsewhere, the creatures which had lived in the woods before the developers arrived, made enormous efforts to stay in their homes and not be forced out.

In some cases badger setts survived the building process and remained unnoticed behind the park-keeper’s new storage sheds.

Hedgehogs hunted slugs and snails in rockeries and vegetable gardens, just as they had in spinneys, copses and woods.

Mice, shrews and rats went unnoticed, as they always have. But above all, one animal benefited enormously. That was “vulpes vulpes”, better known as the fox. They carried on their lives pretty much as they always had done, taking little or no notice of human beings and their machines. If anything, life was considerably easier, and food more plentiful now that they lived in a city suburb, which was always a few degrees warmer than the bleak countryside. And very soon London had in excess of 10,000 urban foxes. And many other cities experienced the same process. Bristol. Birmingham. Sheffield. And Nottingham, the home of the most famous fox of them all…….

Here’s another of them, hurrying to the fish and chip shop to see if anybody couldn’t eat all of what are, hopefully, generous portions:

Foxes, like all undomesticated canids, are extremely intelligent. Once they have made a friend such as a big, fat rabbit, they always like to see if they can get even closer to him, perhaps by pulling a likely chain:

And here’s one of the very few photographs of Banksy Fox”…….

Next time, we take a look at the quality of the sausages available in the Iceland supermarket chain, exploring the views of one of their keenest consumers…………

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by | July 8, 2023 · 6:17 am

My best friend, Widdle (6)

The  colour and texture of a fox’s coat may vary due to the change in seasons.  It will be richer and denser in the colder months and lighter in the warmer months. To get rid of the dense winter coat, foxes moult once a year around April. The moult begins from the feet, up the legs, and then along the back, finishing with the neck and head.

Widdle was a fox who came to us, apparently around two years old, one day in 2007. He was looking for affection and for help. He came to us from a desire to understand nice human beings, and most of all, for unlimited access to good quality sausages:

Over the three to four years that we knew Widdle, his appearance changed a great deal. He was certainly not always what our American friends call a “red fox”, because in the spring and summer months, he was the hapless victim of his single annual moult.

According to Wikipedia, quoted above, a fox’s moult “begins from the feet, up the legs, and then along the back”. Sometimes in June, in the middle of the moult, Widdle looked rather like he’d been down to the pub the night before, and had a few too many:

In May, he had tried stretching exercises, but that didn’t last long:

No, the only remedy is a couple of sausages. Or so we thought. It was actually more complicated than that.

Widdle’s main problem with his coat was fleas, particularly during the moult. Here he is, scratching away. As far as we were aware, it was impossible for humans to be infected by fox fleas, and in up to four years with him, we never thought we had. I did once inquire about trying to give him something against fleas, but we were told it was pointless. Something for a dog and its fleas probably wouldn’t work. It might give him an allergic reaction and kill him. And, as soon as he went back to Mrs Widdle, he would be re-infected:

Male foxes fight quite a lot and here he is with part of his coat ripped off, I remember saying to him “That look’s a very painful wound.”, and he said “Well, you should have seen the other fella’.”

By winter, though, Widdle has acquired that magnificent coat that we all know and love. In this photograph, he shows that certainly as far as he is concerned, the neck is the last section to change.

Anyway, by early September, the transformation is complete. All that is missing is the white tip to his tail, which, as far as I recall,  Widdle never had. Well, not in full anyway:

And certainly, by November, it is as if he had been spray painted “fox-red”. He has lost all the black bits on his legs and the black and white stripes on the upper sides of his paws. He is Red Red Red:

The last picture comes from April 2010 when the very first signs of the Great Itching Time are beginning to appear. Even so, the coat still looks exceptionally thick and is standing on end to trap the warm air:

 

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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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