The Totem Series: Fox & Beech

Vulpes vulpes

Foxes are nocturnal creatures and I love them.  They are, pardon the pun, the underdog.  Villified by farmers for frenzied chicken killing and by urban dwellers for their noisy dustbin rustling and courtship they are superb survivors.  I think they are utterly beautiful brain and body, our red fox's latin name Vulpes vulpes just means extra foxy, it's as if they cannot be described any other way. This image is from the photograph Ice Fox by Henrik Lund,  Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 and encapsulates the bright intelligence of the animal, ears cocked, curious but unafraid.

Vulpes zerda

Teto and Princess Nausicaa

In the UK we live with the red fox and I love all foxes but have a very special place in my heart for the Fennec fox.  Living in the desert it comes out in the cooler night and uses those enormous ears to hunt for bugs and grubs.  Teto, the squirrel-fox like creature in one of my favourite studio Ghibil films: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind reminds me of a Fennec fox.  The name Fennec comes from the Arabic fanak meaning fox.  The latin name is Vulpes zerda, comes from the Greek xeros meaning dry hinting at their desert habitat.  By contrast, Teto is a forest creature.

My Fox & Beech Print

The second element of this print is the shallow rooted Beech Fagus sylvatica, another latin naming that shows that the tree is so iconic it is kind of named after itself.  Sylvatica means of the woods.  The beech is considered a native to the UK although it's thought that it only made it across Doggerland to the UK to Scotland during the Bronze age.  Always used extensively for the wood the beech nuts are used to treat respiratory problems.  I have summer asthma brought on by pollen so this chimed with me.  Also, I was raised in Cambridge and much of the Newmarket area of East Anglia was covered in beech trees that were brought down during the great 1987 storm, they are shallow rooted creatures.  One of my favourite places in the world is the beech wood Robert McFarlane (one of my favourite authors) starts out from in his book The Old Ways.  It is a wood I played in as a kid sitting on the chalk rise behind Cambridge at the start of an ancient road leading to the south Downs and coast.

Details on how to buy my happy curled up fox at https://www.facebook.com/CarnoustieDriftwood1/