By Mike Swan, GWCT Head of Education

6 minute read

Many years ago, I met a man from southwest Wales who claimed to have shot a hundred and fifty foxes on his two hundred acres in a year. By any stretch, this amounts to a very impressive total, but what does it mean in terms of predation control? The truth is, we will never know, because we have no idea about how many were still out there, or what impact they were having.

Here is a crucial point to understand; whatever the predator, how many you nail is not the measure of success. The key question is how much predation are you stopping? Further discussion with my Welsh friend told me that he was in operating in the watershed of two valleys, with loads of urban foxes coming in from each one. His annual tally was probably making a huge difference to the wildlife in and around his patch, but maybe no more than that of a grouse moor keeper on a remote hill, who works hard to get a tenth as many from a much larger area.

Why are foxes so important?

The answer lies mostly in the term subsidised predation. Foxes are great all-rounders; they will make a living from a very wide range of resources, switching their attention to whatever is easiest or most abundant, while still on the lookout for other possibilities. This, in turn, means that no one item in their diet is crucially important, and this is what allows them to pose intolerable pressure on scarcer prey species. It matters not a scrap to a fox raiding a curlew nest if it never finds another, but if that is the last curlew nest in your area, then its loss is a conservation disaster.

This problem is further compounded by the fact the human activity makes our country a perfect land for foxes. We provide abundant food all year around, from sandwich scraps at New Forest picnic sites, through road-kill, urban bins, and maybe released gamebirds, to active feeding by folk who love to see them in their gardens. This in turn, means that you could argue that we have a moral duty to exercise control, for the sake of vulnerable wildlife, as well as our game.

What is your issue?

Its all too easy to set out to knobble some foxes without thinking through what you are trying to achieve. Just killing the odd fox when the chance arises, or spending a few cold winter nights out with a rifle, is unlikely to make much difference. To be effective you need a strategy that has been thought through carefully to address the problems that you face.

So, if your main interest is the protection of wild game, a winter and spring programme of control is essential. You need to reduce the level of fox activity on your patch before the birds begin to nest, and keep it that way at least until they hatch, and preferably until they are flying strongly. After that you can relax a bit, but do not be complacent; foxes catch healthy gamebirds every night of the year. On the other hand, where protecting released birds is the main worry, the key thing is to get the foxes reduced before your birds go to their pens, keeping it that way until they are strong on the wing, and in the case of pheasants, roosting safely off the ground.

Measuring success

One of the hardest things to find out is how effective you are being. Ultimately, the answer has got to lie in being happy with the results of your efforts, because it will be well nigh impossible to have any handle on how many foxes are left out there. Even if you try to count how many you see when out night shooting, and in some way relate that to the effort you are putting in, you will struggle to get meaningful data. And then the question is still “So what?”, how does this relate to impact on predation?

Back in the early 2000s, the GWCT carried out one of the most comprehensive and expensive predation control experiments ever, on the moors near Otterburn in Northumberland. The Upland Predation Experiment as it was called included regular searches for fox scats on both keepered and unkeepered beats, using the numbers found as an index of fox abundance.

This showed a 42% reduction in fox activity where the keepers were active; a figure that would probably seem horrifyingly small to most keepers. But, when taken alongside crow control producing a 78% reduction, and tunnel trapping to keep weasels and stoat numbers steady, this resulted in a dramatic improvement in the success of ground nesting birds like curlew, lapwing, golden plover and black grouse, as well as the red grouse themselves.

A suite of measures – there is no one right way

Many people get huge satisfaction from night shooting foxes, and without doubt make a big contribution to damage prevention and wildlife conservation in the process. The use of night vision and thermal imaging equipment has revolutionised this too, to the extent that there is a strong temptation to rely on shooting alone. I would always consider this a mistake, at least if conservation of ground nesting birds is your aim. The move away from lamping may mean that the near missed fox that becomes lamp shy is no longer a problem, but you still need to see the fox against a safe background in order to shoot it.

In many habitats this is just not possible; deep heather moorland, the flush of spring growth on arable farmland, or too much woodland; they all hide foxes from view. Add in foggy nights when the best equipment is no help, and you need to embrace other approaches. Those who go out all night after the foxes may consider themselves to be heroes, but so are the people who get up early every morning to check their snares. The modern humane cable restraint is an essential tool for fox management, and I would hate to be without it. It works right through the nesting season, keeping predation pressure down when the birds are at their most vulnerable, but when the chances of seeing and shooting a fox are small.

Do not relax

One of my other mantras is never think you have done the job. I have lost count of the number of times when a question about fox control during one of my GWCT advisory visits has had a reply along the lines; “Oh, we sorted them when we started the shoot here last year.” In these circumstances it usually only takes a few minutes walking along a track to find a fox print, a scat, or even both. As an amateur part timer on a little wild bird shoot, I feel I can ease off once the wild broods are flying well, but what I do is still an annual job, and quite an intensive one at that.

What I do is also entirely sustainable; I am not trying to achieve a permanent reduction in the Dorset fox population, just a decent impact on predation pressure on my wild pheasants and partridges. Twenty-five years of records show that I kill much the same number each year, so I am clearly not denting the population at a more regional level.

One very important last thought is not to think that fox control alone does it. Other predators will be quick to grab some of what you have freed up, and guilds of predation being what they are, smaller ones may well benefit from not being eaten by foxes too (see box). All the science that GWCT has done on predation control shows that you need to address a suite of common predator species to be properly effective; anything less is half hearted.

The GWCT Upland Predation Experiment – some surprising statistics

With fox predation reduced, the weasels and stoats would have had a heyday, feasting on other species that were doing well, and being less prone to predation themselves. Autumn numbers went up on the keepered ground, but efficient tunnel trapping solved this, equalising numbers again each spring. Raptors and owls had a bonanza too, becoming 80% more abundant on the keepered areas, and demonstrating that good gamekeeping is good for them too. Find out more here.

This article first appeared in Shooting Times