Newbury, Berkshire: From tracks in the snow to musky scent markings to vixens screaming in the night, it is hard to ignore fox mating season

The sensory presence of foxes is woven through my days and nights lately – sightings, sound, smells, evidence. It is the mating season and, being largely solitary creatures, they are advertising their presence to one another in a manner hard to ignore; in a way that carries across dark, silent miles or cuts through the fumes of urban traffic. Foxy scent markings – musky notes of singed fur, sandalwood, spice and hawthorn flowers – bring me up sharp at a hole in a hedge, by a gatepost or anywhere down the lane.

In snow, or in the creamy chalk soil that has washed out of gateways in recent storms, tracks give away encounters. Paw prints, narrower than a dog’s, that you can draw a kiss through without touching the pads, track slightly sideways, printing a straight, tacking running stitch across the land. Occasionally, tracks cross and run alongside one another for a while, or pool in a coming together.