Fantastic Mr. Fox
- Frank Hopkinson
- Dec 26, 2015
- 2 min read
I don’t object to having wildlife in the garden, I just wish they’d be a bit tidier.
This may be the season of goodwill to all men, but it doesn’t necessarily extend to feelings of warmth to the little creatures that enter the garden.
They may be cute/furry/adorable/taste good in pies, but they’re messy blighters. The squirrels in my garden, as you might have read, love nothing better than to burrow down into some of the garden pots and check to see which way up I’ve planted the fritillaries. That would be fine if they just didn’t abandon their search, like some absent-minded child and go off and do it somewhere else. That compost’s not going to put itself back you know. And it’s not my job etc…
The jays, blackbirds and magpies like to toss the forest bark onto the path in search of something to eat underneath, or maybe it’s part of some beak enhancement training programme. Maybe they’re all suffering from beak dysmorphia and think that other birds have more muscly beaks than them.
The pigeons have now taken a liking for stripping the florets off the dahlia yams and scattering the petals across the railway sleepers. That’s marginally okay, except they’re roosting above the front drive and have created the kind of concentrated area of ‘bombing range’ that you would expect to find underneath a housemartin’s nest. The consistenecy is impressive, but surely there are better places for them to roost – like above my next-door neighbours’ Porsche 911- Carrera.
The fox, after his early year attempts to dig twin tunnels through to next door from an impossible distance away – like striking out for Calais from Ashford – has resorted to leaving scatological messages as close to the house as it can. It seems to be very keen on berries at the moment.
However there are lighter moments.
Earlier in the autumn we discovered that the fox had been learning to trampoline. We came out one morning and saw the muddy traces of one of its training sessions. It was most certainly a fox because – and this is quite surprising – we are a cat-free garden.
Whether it managed a somersault with half-pike we shall never find out, but just like the roller-skating pandas in the Kit-Kat television advert, we’re certain if it can do that, it will never do it when we have video equipment trained on it, such is its cussed nature.
Although given the tunnelling from earlier in the year, maybe it’s trying to bounce over the next door neighbour’s fence…
