The Silva Fox Whistle ...

[onetrack]

This video is just amazing - I've rarely seen foxes in daylight, let alone have them come up to you in broad daylight, and jump on you, trying to grab your fox whistle!!

 

 

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

That is pretty cool. I know they are a pest, in Aus and here, but they are cute animals.

 

Darned things lazy here, though. I live in a rural village and there are more rabbits per acre than I have seen anywhere.. nary a fox to be seen. In London, you see them everywhere - nice and fat, as they are protected there - scavenging the rubbish. Rubbish days in London is an eyesore of strewn litter and food recycling containers. They have worked out how to life the lids and pull out the bags.

[onetrack]

They're a curse here. My stepdaughter has a 5 acre (2Ha) property in the hills above Perth, where the native vegetation is still pretty thick, despite houses and sheds every couple of hundred metres. She's lost one chook to a fox (her partner forgot to lock the henhouse door and the chooks walked out in the evening) - but she said just last week, there's about 200 chooks and ducks and other assorted animals that have been eaten by foxes just in the last 12 mths, at other properties around her property.

 

They got sick of them down South a few years ago, and organised a major fox hunt over a long weekend, I think it was, out of just one small country town. I seem to recall they had about 60 shooters roll up, they went out in small groups at night, and bagged over 800 foxes in total over the weekend, just from farms surrounding the town.

 

The authorities estimate foxes kill about 300M animals here annually. They decimate the small native animals - and the worst part is they kill for thrills. I've seen them go through a henhouse and kill every chook, with no effort to eat most of them.

[Jerry_Atrick]

I recall when I was working at power stations in Gippsland, the stories of how much of pests they are.. A farmer's wife worked in the office a couple of days a week, and during calving season, she was spitting chips at them.

 

As to how despised they are - my flight instructor at Coldstream, decided to commandeer the C150 as we started our takeoff roll to try and hit the fox running across the runway..  'twas a learnikng experience for a city boy.

 

Actually, I recall as a young-an, neighbours kept chooks in what was an outer Melbourne suburb at the time, and evey so often a chook would go missing they managed to break into the chicken run...

[Yenn]

It is not only foxes that take chooks. Stray dogs are also doing their share and more.

[willedoo]

I remember as a kid, the foxes used to dig burrows in the red soil paddocks. They didn't like the heavier black soil. The burrows had more than one entrance, so our dachshund used to go down the hole and flush them out. We'd try to shoot the foxes as they came out the other entrances, but they were often a bit too quick for us.

 

There was a bounty on them, around 5 bob or 50 cents per scalp if my memory is right. After skinning one, and one only, I gave up all ideas of getting rich from foxes. The smell when you skin them is not good.

[spacesailor]

The was a bounty on possums, ( opossum  ) in NZ ,

A friend would stop for every " road kill " he saw. Chucked into a pollybox in the boot. Made a good return on them.

Something to do with the' hat ' trade, same as rabbit fur, for 'felt hats'.

Same reason donated ' wool ' blankets don,t go back into service.

spacesailor