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.
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.
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.
After reading all about gnomes, elves, pixies, fairies and such like, it should come as no surprise to hear that Wollaton is not the only place around Nottingham to have played host to fairies in recent times. Marjorie Johnson, the lady who saw fairies in her garden in Carlton was to become very famous in fairy circles. She wrote this best selling book:
Belief in fairies persists still, even in our own time. When we went once to an isolated farm at Constantine in Cornwall, the farmer clearly believed that the huge ruined megalith in his bottom field was the home to fairy folk. He had seen their fairy lights on more than one occasion.
This report by Journeyman starts off in almost comic fashion, but does make some quite serious points:
This film by Torsten Scholl, aka “hatcast” has even more serious points to make:
This account by Richard Williams aka “rockuvages” is of the moment when the huldufólk seem to pop out of their own dimension:
Nowadays, we tend to see fairies and their like as something lovely and wonderful. This attitude has only come about since Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. Before that, fairies were considered by those who had regular contact with them to be malevolent beings who, if they were in any way annoyed, would readily kidnap adults, willingly do harm to them and, most of all, steal their babies, replacing them with changelings. This is why nowadays a lot of modern folklorists tend to equate ancient beliefs in fairies, with our current fondness for space aliens and little green men, who have continued in modern times to carry out all of these evil deeds:
Tales of fairies invariably involve abduction and poor innocent people forced to remain in Fairy Land, sometimes for ever. What difference is there between malevolent fairies holding people hostage in their realm and our modern tales of extra-terrestrial kidnap?
Other parallels are there. Some types of fairies, such as leprechauns and goblins, have green as their favourite colour, just as some aliens are literally “little green men”. Only medical experiments seem to be absent from the connections between the two groups, perhaps because in sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland or Cornwall, there was no health care available and advanced medicine was not a subject on anybody’s mind. Only ointments and magic potions were on offer back then, and these simple remedies do figure from time to time in the more ancient tales of fairies.
Here is something more modern, a tractor beam, although some would argue that those fairy lights, leading innocent people out onto the marsh to drown or be abducted, did pretty much the same job:
This modern cartoon by “grackle” sums up best our ancient knowledge of fairies, who were by no means the magnanimous and well intentioned Peter Pan heroes of Walt Disney’s world.
In Australia, the enormously large person is called the “Yowie” and he is very fierce indeed.
The huge Yowie, though, has a tiny equivalent. To the white man he is “Brown Jack” but to the blackfella he is the “Junjudee”. He is tiny and here is a purported film of one:
Any film by TheRusty222 is well worth watching. He tries to film Yowies but most of all, he ventures deep into the realm of the thickest parts of the Australian bush, an environment of staggering beauty if you ever watch one of his films.
Talking of “Little People”, a few weeks ago, I bought a postcard of the High School taken in 1927. I was intrigued to see what is obviously the “School Leprechaun” busy guarding the front of the school:
You can see his right hand, his jacket of Irish Green, his little fawn breeches and his lovely top hat. Here he is, slightly enlarged:
Do you see his mutton chop whiskers? And what about little Pumpkin Head, next to him, with his tiny hat and his little legs and boots?
Both photographs, courtesy of the Pareidolia Brothers.
John Knifton 