Foxing The Great Escape
After a week away in France I came home and experienced one of those ‘Goldilocks moments’ – who’s been digging in my beds…? There was bark, earth and compost strewn across the path – but who or what had been doing it?
Past experience has shown that the minute you put bark down the blackbirds in your garden see it as some kind of activity-challenge, like the animal intelligence puzzles they used to run on BBC2. Blackbirds seize hold of the bark in their beaks and immediately take up the challenge to see how much of it they can toss on the adjacent path.
On a similar theme, the moment I plant anything in a pot, such as a fritillary or an allium, our local squirrels have this insatiable curiosity to see if I’ve planted them the right way up. They just have to burrow down and check…
But the scale of this particular incursion, and the degree of debris flung from out between the recently planted sedums, gave a clear indication that it was a mammal of a much larger scale. This was either a fox or the wife.
My wife will admit she isn’t the greatest fan of sedums, but I didn’t think she disliked them so much that she would dig them up while I was away. And also, looking at the scrapings in the earth, they didn’t look like her forepaws either.
No, this was definitely done by a fox. I presumed it had got the hump because I’d blocked a really shallow scrape of a tunnel that it had made further down the garden fence. This sudden excavation of fairly loose earth, compost and bark was payback time. However, you’ve got to extend a degree of respect to an animal that burrows carefully between plants instead of scattering them across the path in fragments.
But why dig two holes? Was it mimicking The Great Escape – the tunnel on the left codenamed ‘Dick’ and the tunnel on the right codenamed ‘Harry’. Were there two foxes at work digging to see who could get through first, or just one who was a very poor planner? There’s an old Eddie Izzard sketch about cats drilling behind the sofa, and the mind conjures similar pictures of a fox surreptitiously spreading the excavated earth round the garden so as not to alert the authorities what it was up to.
It must have been digging at night but even so, you’d think if its true intention was making it to the other side of the fence it would have started closer to it. These were more like infantry fox holes. If it is intent on burrowing all summer long then it will be the start of hostilities.
Though, come to think of it, if it believes sedums are sacred, that’s a very good excuse for going out and buying some more…
