Dublin’s Urban Foxes
The Red Fox
Foxes have been a common sight in Dublin city for many years. Although they are normally seen during the hours of darkness, they can even sometimes be seen during daylight hours. These foxes are the species known as the Red Fox, Vulpes Vulpes, a cousin to the grey wolf. They evolved to live in forests and are distributed across the entire Northern Hemisphere (Europe, North America and Asia). They are easily recognized by their reddish-brown coat, with the outside of their legs and ears being black, a white underbelly and reddish- brown bushy tale with a white tip.
The red fox has been Ireland’s only wild member of the canine family since wolves became extinct here, the last wolf believed to have been hunted down and killed in 1786 at Mount Leinster in County Carlow. Unlike wolves, which became extinct in Ireland due to habitat destruction and hunting, the smaller foxes are much more adaptable and quickly adapted to live in cities and close to other human settlements. The rapid urbanisation of Ireland in the second half of the 20th century was one reason why foxes needed to move from their normal rural habitat. Another reason was the introduction of myxomatosis, a disease deliberately introduced into Ireland in 1954 in order to curb the rabbit population, which was causing unacceptable loss of farmers’ crops. With a drastic decline in the rabbit population, foxes had to find an alternate food source and the rats, mice and waste food which cities provided meant that foxes found cities like Dublin an appealing place to live and rear their young.
Foxes prey on rodents, birds and insects and urban foxes often eat food from bins and refuse sacks. They may also prey on family pets such as rabbits, so if you keep pets such as these in your garden, be sure to keep them in a sturdy enclosure. If there is a way into the enclosure, a fox will be sure to find it.
Foxes are omnivorous and also eat fruit such as berries, apples and vegetables and in fact practically anything edible which they find. Urban foxes also tend to be bigger and heavier than their rural cousins because of the availability of large quantities of food scavenged from bins and waste bags.
Foxes are adept at scaling walls and travel from garden to garden in the hours of darkness. Rural foxes in Ireland can fall victim to hunting, poisoning and trapping but urban ones are at much less of a risk and so therefore tend to have a longer average lifespan.
Fox Families
Male foxes are known as dogs and females are called vixens and their young are known as cubs or kits.
Red foxes form monogamous pairs or small family groups with one dominant dog fox, a dominant breeding vixen and several other vixens. These other female foxes are usually the offspring of the dominant vixen and help to rear and feed their half brothers and sisters.
Dog foxes tend to be more solitary than vixens. They communicate and announce their presence by yelping and using scent secreting glands on the soles of their paws and the roots of their tails. Along with his urine and excrement, these scent secretions serve to mark out a dog foxes territory. Dog foxes patrol their territories nightly, usually following an identical route.
Several vixens may share the same territory and hunting ground. They try to avoid encountering each other and bark or yelp to signal their presence and thereby avoid meeting each other. Vixens become fertile in late winter and are very active at this time. They are fertile for a period of only two or three days. After mating, vixens take shelter in a pre-chosen earth or den, which in the countryside can be anything from an old rabbit burrow to a badger sett, while in cities it can be any suitable space including a disused basement, underneath a garden shed or the roots of trees in parks and other green spaces.
The vixen gives birth at the end of March or the beginning of April and rarely leaves her den for the first few weeks. The cubs have thick dark fur and rely solely on their mother’s milk for sustenance for the first month of their lives. A litter normally comprises between two and six cubs.
After this period, the cubs begin to explore the area around their earth and also begin to eat more solid food, which is brought to them by the vixen or dog fox and the vixen spends less and less time at the earth where the cubs are. By late August, the young dog foxes begin to explore further afield and seek out their own territories. Young vixens are capable of bearing a litter towards the end of their first year.
The Trickster Fox
In folklore and popular culture, foxes are popularly regarded as being sly, cunning and deceitful and they are intelligent animals.
Foxes are solitary and hunt alone, unlike wolves who hunt in packs. Foxes are unable to rely on brute force and are associated with trickery and wit. They are very adaptable and stealthy hunters, stalking their prey silently and using their skill and agility before pouncing and using ambush tactics to catch animals such as rabbits and killing them using a bite to the neck or head. They are also known to play dead, waiting for their prey such as rabbits, rodents or birds to become curious and approach closer where the fox will suddenly pounce upon them. In older times, when poaching was more common in the countryside, foxes would often steal rabbits and other animals from poachers’ snares, leaving a pile of excrement close by. Poachers took this as a sign of contempt from the fox, but actually it was just the fox marking its territory. These habits contributed to its reputation as a clever trickster who could never be trusted.
