Pregnancy lasts 53 days, during which time the vixen will select and clean a number of den sites or ‘ earths’ in which to raise her cubs. The chosen fox earth may be either self-excavated or an enlarged and disused rabbit warren or badger sett in the countryside, with favoured locations in the suburbs commonly being under garden sheds. Four to five cubs are usually born blind and deaf in mid- to late March. For the first two weeks, they will be constantly supplied with milk and attended to by the vixen; she, in turn, will be kept fed by regular provisions brought to the earth by the dog fox. When the cubs’ eyes and ears finally open they begin to stray much more until, after four weeks, they will eventually emerge blinking into the daylight as dark-chocolate-brown coloured fur balls.
Fox cubs playing. This is integral to honing their hunting techniques and sorting out a pecking order.
Manfred Danegger
Undoubtedly the best time to see the foxes’ social and playful side is the period between their emergence and the time when the cubs have to stand on their own four feet in the autumn. Initially they will then remain close to their earth, playing and engaging in mock fights. While they look like they don’t have a care in the world, these tussles are used to develop a social hierarchy and hone their hunting techniques, skills that could make the difference between life and death. As the cubs mature, they begin to spend their entire time above ground; they moult into their orangey-red fur, and their ears and snout elongate to produce the characteristic foxy appearance. The cubs are fed by their parents or other group adults at rendezvous points close to the den sites right up to July, by which time they will have started to hunt themselves.
The adults give the cubs very little training, so, initially, they are dependent mostly on easily caught food such as earthworms, beetles and small fledgling birds; if July is wet, more cubs will survive through to autumn as the worms will be easily accessible. As cubs begin to forage further away from the earth, their inexperience makes them vulnerable to predators such as other foxes, badgers, dogs and, of course, cars, so, where possible, they will try and use the centre of their parents’ territory where they feel most secure.
During each breeding season around 425,000 cubs are born, and, as the fox population remains fairly constant, this means that as few as four in ten cubs make it through to the following breeding season to replace the older animals. This could mean the average life expectancy of a British fox may be no more than a paltry 18 months. After being maligned in the countryside, where it does not get credit for keeping rabbit numbers in check, and undeservedly blamed for taking pets in the towns, is it now time to cut the fox some slack? Its resilience, adaptability and endurance in the face of an ever-changing Britain shows that, as a species, it has more in common with us humans than we dare to think.
While butterflies are popular, iconic and colourful daytime insects familiar to everyone, moths have something of a PR problem. There seems a widespread misconception that moths are dull, boring and brown, and put on this planet to do little else than to chew our clothes and carpets. While a tiny minority do unfortunately have this tendency, and many can be brown, they are certainly not dull and boring as any moth trap will illustrate.
Moths
WHEN
Between May and July for most resident species of hawkmoth
WHERE
The moth trap can be placed anywhere from the garden to a local nature reserve
The angle shades looking less like a pair of sunglasses and more like a crumpled leaf.
Robert Thompson
The differences between moths and butterflies are numerous, complex, indistinct, and include frequent exceptions. The most obvious difference is that butterflies fly during the day, while the vast majority of moths are either crepuscular – flying at twilight – or nocturnal by nature. A close look at the antennae of the two groups will also reveal that most butterflies have slender antennae with a club on the end; moths either have feathery antennae or a pair of simple filamentous strands without clubs. In resting state, all of the butterflies, with the exception of the skippers, close their wings over their backs; moths, with the exception of the thorns, lay their wings alongside their bodies. Most moths also possess a frenulum, which is a small hook on their hindwings that attaches to barbs on the forewing, whereas the four wings of butterflies all operate independently. Finally, most moths tend to have hairy or furry-looking bodies, with larger scales on the wings to enable them to conserve heat at night, while the sun-loving butterflies do not need this extra insulation so have more slender thoraxes and abdomens.
Moths are also sub-divided into two groups called ‘macro-’ and ‘micro-’ moths based on their anatomical structure, but, as a few micro-moths are larger than macro-moths, this division can be complicated to the untrained eye. Virtually all macro-moths can be distinguished by the patterning on, and the shape of, the wing, which makes identification easier; the micros, on the other hand, invariably and unfortunately need their pressed genitalia to be examined down a microscope. Macro-moths are also much more numerous than our 59 resident butterflies, with over 800 species recorded in Britain. During a good night’s ‘moth-ing’ in the summer, the ‘moth-er’ can be rewarded with at least 100 species and possibly as many as 1,000 individuals from a specially designed moth trap.
That moths are attracted to artificial lights has been known ever since man made fire, hence the phrase ‘like a moth to the flame’, but the reasons why this happens are complex and still not fully understood. When watching how moths become attracted to a light or moth trap, it is very noticeable that many of the individuals appear to fly around the light in ever-decreasing circles, and the most common theory to explain this behaviour is that moths use a technique of celestial navigation called ‘transverse orientation’. By maintaining a constant angular trajectory to a bright celestial light such as the moon, the moths can fly in a straight line. As the moon is so far away the change in angle between the moth and the moon’s rays will be negligible, the moon will always be in the upper part of their visual field and no lower than the horizon.
‘Have the lambs stopped screaming, Clarice?’ The infamous death’s-head hawkmoth.
Stephen Dalton
Evolutionarily speaking, human light sources have been around for such a short space of time that the moths have not yet evolved the ability to ignore the light pollution we create. As a moth-trap light may be so much stronger than that of the moon when the insects are close by, they become confused and instead use the artificial light for navigation. But, as this light is below the horizon and the angle of the moth to the light changes markedly after only a short distance, the moths will instinctively attempt to correct this by constantly turning towards the light, causing them to spiral down to the light until they either hit it or drop into the moth trap.
A quick glance at any guide to British moths will soon make the reader aware of the infinitely varied colours of moths, with a number of species being easily as coloured and