![\"Fox](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/4902905_4_articleinline_fox.jpg\" "\\"Fox")
Fox mating season typically runs from December until February. Female foxes then gestate for approximately 52 to 53 days<\/p>\nWe\u2019re now in a period when people may hear strange, eerie calls in the dead of night. Plaintive sounds like a woman wailing can carry for long distances across quiet countryside, and chill people.<\/p>\n
Sitting around winter firesides (not too long ago!), our ancestors would tell tales of the banshee\u2019s haunting call \u2014 the fairy woman only heard from when somebody was about to die in a locality.<\/p>\n
Such stories might still be told when people gather during the festive season. I knew some who fully believed in the banshee\u2019s cry as a portent of death, and that hearing it around the time of somebody\u2019s passing was definitely not a coincidence.<\/p>\n
Likelihood is that it was a fox\u2019s mating call. Their mating season runs from December to February, and if you listen on a calm, tranquil night you might hear repeated shrieks.<\/p>\n
Fox mating season typically runs from December until February. Female foxes then gestate for approximately 52 to 53 days<\/p>\n
By the way, a recent column on the campaign to ban fox hunting<\/a> elicited feedback with a common theme \u2014 a general folk belief that foxes are exceptionally intelligent, cunning animals, well able to outwit human beings when necessary.<\/p>\n This is well recorded in the National Schools Folklore Collection from the late 1930s:\u00a0<\/p>\n The fox ate so much that it just lay on the ground. The farmer thought it was dead and instructed a workman to throw it over the wall until they had time to bury it. But, wrote Mary, the fox was only pretending to be dead and ran off as soon as the man turned his back.\u00a0<\/p>\n “This is a true story,” she proclaimed.<\/p>\n\n