The next time you’re at Chris Packham’s house, rifling through his kitchen looking for a snack, for God’s sake, don’t look in the freezer. That’s where Packham keeps his “enormous quantity” of roadkill.
What exactly is Packham doing with an enormous quantity of roadkill in his freezer? It’s a fair question. Should a nationally renowned wildlife presenter be running over wildlife in the first place?
Actually, there’s no suggestion Packham is doing the killing himself. He is merely helping those foxes that can’t help themselves by feeding them up, because Britain’s overall fox population appears to be in sharp decline.
This goes against the common wisdom of city folk, who find their bins increasingly tipped over, their barbecue chicken wings scattered, as an emboldened vulpine mafia takes over their towns. Can foxes really be falling in numbers? The surprising answer is that we don’t really know.
Certainly, the Breeding Bird Survey suggests the number of foxes overall is in decline, with a drop of 41% since 1995. But then, that survey works by polling bird-watchers on what they see while out in the countryside. Hardly ideal for nocturnal animals.
“I’m unaware of anyone currently making objective population estimates for foxes,” says Oxford University zoologist Sandra Baker.
“It’s not desperately clear, because we don’t have very good numbers in general,” explains Dr Philip Stephens, a reader in the department of biosciences at Durham University. “Attempts to estimate densities happen every few decades – but they are wild extrapolations,” he says.
The national Breeding Bird Survey supports the idea that the number of rabbits, foxes’ habitual dinner, has declined just as sharply – 60% in the past 20 years.
“One possibility,” Stephens suggests, “is that landowners are shooting foxes much more commonly. People who were enthusiastic about hunting with dogs would often encourage fox populations for the good of the hunt. But I suspect that there’s less incentive to do that now.”
Is it an inevitable feature of monoculture? As yields-per-acre pressure bears down on farmers, are the foxes being squeezed along with the rest of the ecosystem?
“I wouldn’t like to speculate. If we were to see that, then we would see a straighter trend line – intensive agriculture has ramped up since the second world war, but fox populations appear to have dropped specifically within the past 15 or 20 years. I think that is the scandal … we have obligations to our wildlife under several international conventions. But we don’t put much effort into collecting the data.”
While government dithers, for anyone who wishes to help, Stephens suggests logging on to Mammal Web, where the Durham Wildlife Trust and scientists at Durham University are enlisting the public to deploy camera traps and classify images at home.
Sadly, for the contents of Chris Packham’s freezer, classification will come only in the form of a best before date.
