LEAVES FROM A NATURE NOTEBOOK: July's Hunger Days

'Summertime, when the living ain't easy...'

These are notes about July days a few years ago. I have dusted them off, and I think they make a reasonable mirror to the month…

Eurasian collared dove. Photo: lruka on Wikimedia under a Creative Commons license

Long ago, I spent a year living on wild food, just what could be picked or caught on our 40-acre farm in the Welsh Borders. It was a time of revelations (detailed in The Wild Life, 2009) , none more so than the difficulty the apex predator has in filling its stomach in high summer; nearly all the easy game of the prey’s springtime births, the weak and the young, has long gone. So, this morning I was not unduly surprised to see a dead fox cub lying on the bank of the brook: at first sight she looked like a carmine fur muff dropped by a debutante returning from a ball circa 1910; on closer, prosaic inspection, she was wretchedly thin. Starved to death thin. Her fate prompted me to check on the rest of the fox family, and whether the other cub born in April, was still alive. So, at about 7.30 am I plunged into the wood on the top of the hill, and into the deep, drowning silence of July oaks; the fox's den is half way down a slope, and as I approached, I could see that the top entrance was clogged with leaves and sticks from a deluge. But the foxes were still in residence; fresh scat bristling with beetle wings was dolloped generously outside a lower tunnel. And that pissy, sour lemon smell of fox hung about the place.

There was neither hide nor bone of rabbit to be seen, however; the little warren, which supplies the foxes with their meat staple, was submerged in a May storm, and all the kits lost. Thus, in a catastrophic food-chain reaction, the dearth of bunnies has caused the death of the fox cub. I did glimpse the other cub, in the corner of my eye, as he and his mother were returning to the earth together; vixens teach their offspring the tricks of the poacher’s trade until September. They were both gaunt, and as they slipped into the trees on noting me, they were shadows of themselves. Walking back home, grey sky pressing down the swallows so hard that that they skirled around my legs, I realised how dire the fox diet had become. In the track-side hedge there is a Worcester Pearmain sapling. The foxes had dragged down a branch to eat some low hanging unripe fruit. Half-chewed bits of apple lay everywhere. And that pissy, citrusy scent of Vulpes vulpes hung about the place.

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