When I moved to London, I didn’t know that I’d be trading a daily plethora of subway rats for the rarest sightings of tiny, and frankly pretty adorable, dormice who shiver as the train comes and then skitter away. Nowhere in sight are the NYC native rats (The Rats? Their dominance suggests they deserve proper nouns) that steal whole bagels or dropped slices of pizza while glaring at you and shaking off the haters. Respect to those Rats, but I don’t miss them.
Londoners treat The Urban Fox like New Yorkers treat The Rats, as something they grudgingly respect for their survival abilities but find to be a pest. In all my ex-pat shiny newness, I still get excited and a little bit scared when I see them. Will they bite me? Do something fox-y and crazy? TALK TO ME? (Please talk to me.)
For some reason, I have an overwhelming desire to converse with these foxes. I think this stems from reading (and rereading) Roald Dahl for the majority of my childhood and adolescence, and specifically Fantastic Mr. Fox. They just seem chill, like they’d be down to chat. After all, they are just roaming the streets back and forth with seemingly no purpose. Certainly they know that garbage day is Wednesday, so their big night is Tuesday after midnight, when rubbish bags galore await a good tearing open on the sidewalk. Any other day I spot them, they are not focused in hot pursuit of food or trash, but simply ambling about the neighborhood. The Foxes I’ve seen in my neighborhood are very clever, as foxes are often depicted to be: they know how to wait for traffic to cross the road, and do it every single time. They are territorial, so I see the same 3 foxes who patrol my street – and hear them having insane fights late at night that sound like sorority girls fighting each other with their nails.
Two nights ago, both I and a pedestrian coming the opposite way stopped in order to allow a fox to pass between us on the sidewalk, as he considered whether he wanted to enter that property (photo shown above). He approached, paused, and thought about it while we waited (perhaps cursing the broker who denied his offer, to sell to another?). Then he retreated back to the other side of the street, robbing me of the chance to ask him if he also hated Wes Anderson’s rendition of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
*For more on The Rats, read “Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants” by Robert Sullivan. It’s amazing and horrible and will haunt your dreams, but you’ll know so much more about rats.
The London Re-Pat 