It was two o’clock in the morning. Having just arrived in England mid-afternoon of the preceding day, I was severely jet-lagged and just drifting off to sleep in a farm-field facing room of the Berkshire countryside hotel that would be my lodging for the first half of my stay in the UK. Suddenly, out of the darkness and seemingly just outside the half-opened window, a hair-curling scream tore through the night. I immediately sat straight up in the bed. Another scream – clearly a woman was being attacked right behind the hotel! I leapt off the bed, grabbed my trousers, and rummaged through my bag for a flashlight. Finding one, I scrambled to the window, threw it open the rest of the way, and shined the torch out into the night, where I saw… nothing moving whatsoever.

I scanned the visible area with the beam of the torch, back and forth over the hawthorn hedgerow that bordered the field, but still saw nothing. I turned off the light and waited. Silence. After I know not how long, I finally gave up and returned to bed. In the morning, I mentioned the incident to the manager at the desk. “No, no other reports of screaming, sir,” he said politely, followed by an irritating wink-wink-nudge-nudge sort of “We do get a honeymoon or anniversary couple here occasionally…”

Fortunately, it didn’t take very long that day to determine the source of the mysterious scream in the night. “That’s a Fox, that is,” said the first person to whom I recounted the experience. A Fox? Impossible. Not that I had much experience with foxes at that time, mind you, living as I do in one of the few locations in North America that is outside of their range on that continent. Foxes are canids after all, related to dogs; I wasn’t exactly certain of what they sounded like, but it couldn’t have been like that.

As it turns out, yes it could – and was. In fact, the Fox (Vulpes vulpes; also known as Red Fox in North America), is capable of a remarkable, and to our human mind unlikely, number of sounds, all of which, as Adele Brand so deftly explains in her The Hidden World of the Fox, have particular significance. In fact, there are quite a lot things about the Fox that don’t quite line up with what most of us think we know about them, including where they live, what they eat, how they interact with one another (as well as other creatures), and a host of other important elements of their life history and ecology.

Which is what makes Ms. Brand’s book such an important one. While foxes have been the subject of a number of recent books, from the informative RSPB Spotlight: Foxes to the lyrical Foxes Unearthed, The Hidden World of the Fox does something no other work about them I have read has done – it presents its readers with not only the what’s, why’s, and how’s of foxes, but also a deeply insightful, ecologically informed way to think about them as well.

Perhaps more so than any other commonly identifiable creature, foxes have been the subject of a wealth of misunderstanding and misinformation – the latter all-too-often propagated for the economic or political benefit of those spreading it. Tabloids in the UK scream out about the threats foxes supposedly pose to the safety of humans and other animals with a similar level of over-wrought agitation to that of American television stations when each “bed bug scare” season comes around. The difference, of course, is that bed bugs are actually a source of potential harm to us. Not that foxes are perfectly harmless – they are, after all, always going to do what makes the most sense for their own fox lives; which, when it is counter to what we would want them to do (digging in our gardens), or as a result of our own cluelessness regarding their normal behaviors (nipping is one of their methods of communication amongst themselves), is ascribed moral culpability and incorrectly deemed “malice” or even hyperbolically “evil.”

This is where Ms. Brand’s particular skills come into play. Combined with her vast knowledge of foxes, acquired as the result of her extensive research work on them undertaken all around the world, her beautiful, remarkably succinct prose draws the reader in to not only what may very likely be a largely new body of information to them, but also a method of mentally processing and organizing it. Indeed, as she explains, telling someone who may have a negative opinion of foxes many interesting facts about their lives or how many ways they are useful to the environment is unlikely to convert them into a pro-fox position. Honesty and a modification of perspective is far more likely to succeed in reducing feelings of misattributed malice toward foxes – the result being the achievement of a “live and let live” position, one within which both foxes and humans can each peaceably exist.

The amount of general good, for foxes and humans alike, that this relatively short book is capable of achieving in its potential to correct uncountable misunderstandings about one of the planet’s most intriguing and highly adaptable creatures cannot be overstated. For its wealth of biological information about its subject, its author’s innovative focus on encouraging the development of a more ecologically informed perspective about them, and its exquisitely succinct “le mot juste” prose, I highly recommend The Hidden World of the Fox to all readers, be they presently interested in foxes specifically, wildlife generally, or simply enthusiasts of well-written, eye-opening books.

Title: The Hidden World of the Fox

Author: Adele Brand

Publisher: Harper Collins UK / Harper Collins

Imprint: William Collins

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 224 pp., w/ many B&W images

ISBN: 9780008327286

Published: October 2019

In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the publisher.