Animal of the Week February 28, 2011 -- Will you stop that bleeding gekkering!

Pawel Ryszawa

Snowdrops finally out, the first daffodils just in bloom, not seen much in the way of crocuses yet -- the harbingers of spring are a little late this year. Apparently it was the cold spell in December that's caused a little delay. But noisily making up for lost time are this week's animals of the week, Vulpes vulpes (red foxes), which have been engaging in the highly vocal activities of renewal well into the wee hours of the morning in my back garden, and I JUST WANT TO SLEEP!

Red foxes are the most widespread species of carnivore: naturally distributed across almost all of Eurasia (besides the far south of the landmass), North Africa, and Canada, Alaska and the northern and eastern USA, they have also established themselves throughout much of Australia where they were introduced to establish fox hunting, but instead have helped bring many species of native animals to the brink of extinction (doh!).

With over 44 subspecies, red foxes vary greatly across their range, from large, bulky, deep ginger brutes in the far north, to slight, light-furred, large-eared desert races in the far south.  This adaptability has enabled them to fit in with the changing environment created by humans, and urban foxes are now very familiar to many people. Most of the UK's several billion urban foxes live in SE17 London where they gather for enormous orgies in my back garden as the spring approaches, and throughout the rest of the year terrify locals making their merry way home late at night by staring at them, eyes shining out of the gloom, just staring, judging if there are enough of them to overpower you. It's only a matter of time.*

Meetings between just one male and one female can lead to the sort of noise you'd expect if you invited a bunch of centaurs to a Lapith wedding. Foxes greet each other with a "wow wow wow" bark; a subordinate approaches a dominant animal they produce a long squeal with additional barks and grunting; the process of reproduction will involve a range of barking, squealing, huffing, and then. When the two animals become locked together by their genitals after the mating (this really does happen), the increasing fractiousness of the couple leads to combinations of all of the above.

And then, when the meetings are less amicable, there's the gekkering. A strange, harsh, mechanical stuttering whir. I've seen a gekkering fox, what I presume was a vixen was rebuffing the advances of an unappealing dog and she was stood frozen, hackles up, head down, mouth fixed with teeth bared, body convulsing as she produced a noise a bit like a slowed down football rattle.  Whether the word really exists, or has simply been made up by a wikipedia wag, I'm not sure, but gekkering works for me -- I've often tried to describe it to people before and failed, so I think it probably needs it's own word, and gekkering does for me. But please, enough now foxes. Can't you give it a rest? Or just go somewhere else.

*foxes pose very little danger to humans, despite isolated attacks on babies in Hackney, they are unlikely to attack people -- happily dining on discarded fried chicken and dead pigeons.