Foxes in the City

Foxes were once creatures of the countryside, glimpsed at dusk on the edge of a wood. Since the 1930s, however, they have colonised towns in Britain, and the number of foxes living in cities is now estimated to run into the tens of thousands. Their success surprised many naturalists, who had expected the animals to avoid people. Zoologists who study them regard the move as one of the quickest adaptations to a new habitat that any large mammal has made. The attractions of town life are not hard to find. Gardens, parks and railway embankments provide shelter and routes for travel, while household waste, bird tables and discarded takeaway food supply a diet that is richer and more reliable than anything available in the fields. An urban fox typically occupies a much smaller territory than a rural one, sometimes no more than a few streets, because the food it needs lies close at hand. Young foxes that would once have travelled many kilometres to find a vacant territory now often settle within a short distance of where they were born. Closer contact has brought conflict. Complaints about noise at night, the digging of flower beds and the fouling of lawns are common, and a small number of attacks on pet rabbits and chickens are reported every year. Newspapers have occasionally described foxes as a threat to young children, though careful investigation of such stories has found that they are extremely rare and that the animals involved were usually reacting to being cornered. Personally, I find the alarm in some of these reports out of proportion to the risk. Residents' attitudes are divided: surveys regularly find that a large majority of people who see foxes enjoy watching them, while a smaller group wants them removed. Control is difficult. Removing foxes from one area simply creates a vacancy, which neighbouring animals soon fill, so culling must be repeated indefinitely to have any lasting effect. Councils that have studied the cost have generally concluded that the money is better spent on advice to residents: securing bins, closing gaps under sheds, and avoiding feeding the animals by hand. Wildlife charities add that feeding is itself a cause of nuisance, because it encourages foxes to lose their wariness of people. The most interesting question may be what urban foxes are becoming. Researchers comparing city and country animals have found differences in skull shape and in boldness, and some suggest that urban populations are being shaped by natural selection to tolerate people. The evidence is far from settled, since the differences could also arise from diet and upbringing rather than inheritance. If the suggestion proves correct, however, it would mean that cities are not merely hosting wildlife but changing it, and that is a good reason to keep studying them.