Diesel-Powered Fox

It’s late. I nearly fell asleep on the train home from Bristol. Miles and miles of blackness out the window – fields grazed by exotic livestock, woodlands sheltering escaped garden plants, and a sprinkling of lights, indicating where the human touch changes from the subtle to the absolute. The station staff don’t seem too wakeful either, while the car needs diesel. So it pauses in the petrol station – I’m still calling them gas stations after so many journeys in Sask – and varies the tarmac universe with a little metal and rubber.

There’s a fox there.

He saunters across the forecourt, sniffs at the shop door, and trots off into the night. I don’t usually post photos of half a fox, but I was glad to catch any record.

Anyone who writes about foxes will write about adaptability. They’re indivisible. But it may work in more ways than we know. Foxes can thrive in artifical environments, eating fast food chicken and sunbathing on greenhouses, but do they survive unchanged? Wild species are whittled by so much – competition with their own kind and natural rivals, the demands of catching prey that doesn’t want to be caught, and escaping enemies and disease. Humans have fundamentally altered the UK’s ecosystems. Even in the countryside, a fox constantly interacts with human modifications, from fences to sheep dip. The only way we can measure if these change foxes is through a control population subject to purely natural pressures, and there’s no looking for that here.

Still, the Surrey Hills – one of the wilder parts of the south-east – remain much used by foxes. I found male lurking in the grass in the meadows this afternoon, apparently hoping that I hadn’t seen him.

The deer didn’t seem to mind if they were watched at all. I was glad to see them away from the fence, however.