Bog Myrtle & Peat

Low Airie, Glenkens – 12/4/20

On the matter of foxes, I spoke too soon. In failing to find a single shred of evidence to show that foxes were using Low Airie, I began to wonder if they were there at all. So it was a comforting rebuff to look up from my work and find myself staring into a pair of familiar amber eyes. He had been asleep in a mound of moss and flowering blaeberry, and looked up at my intrusion with an expression of dazed drowsiness.

Under normal circumstances, a startled fox would freeze or shrink away. They do not like to be caught unawares, and they consider surprise to be an insult to their vigilance. But this fox sat and watched me dozily from a distance of around thirty yards. He yawned, and in yawning revealed a row of glossy white teeth like a set of pinking shears. I was downwind of him, but he could hardly have failed to make me out as a human being.

It’s hard to express the far-flung remoteness of Low Airie. There have been times when I have worked at the dykes and fences and been certain that I was the only person for three or four miles in any direction. I found this fox at an awkward corner of a very obscure place, and it occurred to me that I might well have been the first human being he had ever seen. He was wary, but he had no innate reason to fear me.

Flip the scenario to the streets of Anderston or Yorkhill in Glasgow. Foxes there live cheek by jowel with human beings and show little in the way of fear at being found. I began to wonder if I have always based my understanding of foxes on those animals which have first-hand cause to fear me. Looking back over almost twenty years of chasing foxes, there are often marked differences between individual animals. Some are easily gathered up, while others would try the patience of Satan himself. The reality is that some foxes understand that a human being signifies danger, and others simply do not. To be clear, the fox I found at Low Airie would not have allowed me to walk up and scratch his ears – but perhaps much of that proverbial “cunning” and “wariness” is simple habituation to threat. I meant nothing to him, and he was content to sit and watch.

After fifteen minutes, he stood and performed a luxurious, spine-arching stretch. He sat and scuffed his ear, then he walked away into the forest. And at least in that I felt vindicated. Because while I had found a fox at Low Airie, he was nowhere near the dense, thickety grass where the black grouse lie. He followed the needly strand line beneath the spruce boughs where mice are easily found and the living is relatively easy. It remains to be seen he will depart from the forest to hunt across the moor itself, and I maintain that, given the current state of the open ground, it seems unlikely. My trail cameras are still running, but I think my original theory still stands.