Bog Myrtle & Peat

It has been a few months since Richard and I last visited the Chayne to lamp it. Having seen the tiny fox cub crossing the road on the way back from Orkney last month, I had a vague idea of how far along the breeding has come this year, but nothing prepared me for what we would uncover by lamplight.

Within ten minutes of lamping, we spotted something decidedly suspicious, ducking back and forth from behind a thorn tree. In retrospect, it was obvious that it was a fox, but in the heat of the moment, I felt like I couldn’t be sure. Watching the eyes flickering through the telescopic sights, it could have been a lamb or a deer, but by the time it was obvious, only a white brush tip was visible, flicking through the bracken. We drove on for another five hundred yards and spotted a fox walking slowly through a pasture field above us. It stopped every ten or fifteen paces to rootle in the dewy grass and I waited for the gusty wind to settle. When the lull came, I thumped it squarely in the engine room with a 75gr hollowpoint. The vixen never looked up. She slapped onto her side as if she had been hit by a speeding bus, and we gathered her up and left her in a rushy spot where the crows won’t find her.

Just a mile further around the track, we spotted something glittering in the long grass around two hundred yards away. I got out and peered through .243’s sights, but everything was very indistinct. The eyes seemed very close together and whatever it was was moving very strangely. We drove closer. The eyes still twinkled and then it occurred to Richard that we might be dealing with a family of fox cubs. Sure enough, when we were eighty yards away, a tiny little head poked out of the rushes to peer at us. It was joined by another.

The shot was deafening, and although it flattened the first cub, it didn’t make any impression on the second. It sat down in the damp grass and was duly knocked for six seconds later. As I fired and reloaded, two more cubs came tumbling over a low rise behind the long grass, but they vanished beneath the remains of a wall where we couldn’t see them. As we sneaked up for a look with the torch, they suddenly seemed to cotton on to the fact that we meant danger and charged awkwardly off into the heather where we couldn’t follow. I tried a running shot with the rifle, but put the bullet a couple of inches high.

I had shot a dog and a vixen, and the difference in size was very noticeable. The dog was easily as big as a hare, while the vixen was still very downy and only about the same as a medium sized rabbit. By my book, fox cubs are now big enough to be shot, and their current naivete needs to be fully manipulated if the birds stand any chance of survival. They may never be so easily killed again.