An interesting article from the Irish Times, 13th Feb 1999- part of which is reproduced below. Research has shown that the % loss of lambs on Scottish Islands without any foxes remains the same as on those islands where foxes are present. It is true that foxes will take dead, dying or weak lambs- but much more rarely healthy ones. Poor husbandry, isolated locations with bad weather, snow, cold too much rain and no protection or extra feed, is the mainb culprit. And modern artificial insemination also means that there are more and more multiple births- with the second or thrid lamb being weaker, and the mother unable to protect it/them if singled out by a fox (like all wild animals, they will observe and look for the weakest). Which does not mean that there are NO instances of a fox taking a live healthy lamb- but these are overall rare indeed.
Foxy Study
Michael Viney
Topics:
News
Sat, Feb 13, 1999, 00:00
First published:
Sat, Feb 13, 1999, 00:00
A favourite sound-effect for makers of television thrillers these days is the weird night-wail of a vixen calling up a mate: nothing like it for setting the mood as the killer edges through the laurels.
There have been a lot of phoney wails in the night in the west these past few weeks, and a lot of flickering will-o-the-wisps around the borders of the spruce forests. The vixen-cries come from fox-calls of the sort bought in gunshops, or the squeal of polystyrene rubbed across a windscreen, and the willo-the-wisps are the beams of lampers' spotlights, aimed to light an opal glow in the eyes of a questing dog-fox. Sometimes, one will walk to within a dozen metres, but 50 metres will do, even with a shotgun.
From now until April, when the western lambing begins, a midnight patrol to shoot foxes will be routine for many big sheep-farmers. "My ewes are too scared to lie down for long," says a friend in Co Sligo. "If they die after dark, there'll be only skin and bone left by morning." Last year he shot 54 foxes coming up to lambing. Out after woodcock the other Sunday, he saw another seven.
He's a shooter, but one who loves wildlife. He takes visitors to see badgers digging up his fields at night, and his wife puts out food for a pine marten. There's a family of foxes he doesn't shoot because he's never found lamb bones at their den (and, luckily for them, he thinks he knows their faces).
But, in 1997, he lost more than 100 lambs from twins, some of them a week old, and last spring another 34. He has a vixen's footprint in cement from the time she sneaked into a new shed and stole a triplet, three days old.
Some ewes, especially first-time mothers, are apt to run off with one lamb when danger threatens, leaving the other to its fate. Perhaps this is a price to be paid for giving ewes twins and triplets - but this is not, perhaps, a good time for putting arguments of this sort to a farmer. Certainly, my friend's experience has to be set against the sometimes glib, green view of foxes as natural cullers of a "doomed surplus" of weak and sickly lambs, or as mere scavengers of afterbirth.
What it does suggest, however - and this is scarcely news to ecologists - is that shooting adult foxes indiscriminately in the winter has very little to do with "control". An expert study in the western Highlands of Scotland in the late 1980s monitored what happened on the 70 sq km Loch Eriboll estate when the foxes were left alone for three years, and compared it with another big estate where shooting went on as normal.
The result was no obvious difference in lamb losses (0.6-1.8 per cent) and no increase in the number of foxes. This has been the only systematic European study of its kind, carried out in a region with a deep-seated hatred of foxes, rather like Connacht. But Scottish islands with no foxes lose just as many lambs as mainland areas with fiercely active gun clubs.
Available food - mainly rabbits, voles and sheep and deer carrion - was the key to fox population in Scotland. In Ireland, a decade of carrion littered across the hills from a gross overstocking of sheep must have had its impact on fox numbers. My Sligo friend reckons average litters of two to four cubs have now risen commonly to five to seven.
