Firkin
With Heidi now gone and hopefully managing to survive on her own in the wild we needed a fox to step in and complete the film sequences. Dr Stephen Harris ( now Professor ) is one of the UK's leading authorities on foxes and at the time had been working on a famous study of urban foxes in Bristol. He was often called in as an advisor on BBC natural history projects and through his work with urban foxes was a first port of call when orphaned foxes were found. Dr Harris knew of a young dog fox from that year which, while not exactly as tame as Heidi, was of a similar build and would probably match the shots we had already filmed.
Not exactly as tame was an understatement. Firkin, as I named the fox, bit me on the day he arrived and tried to bite me on pretty much every day thereafter. He had been a few weeks old when first found and by then his distrust of humans was already well established. It wasn't possible to film Firkin in wide open locations as it had been with Heidi so to complete the barley field sequence I recreated a section of field in the studio and filmed him rooting around in the harvest mouse nest, supposedly finding the baby mice I'd filmed weeks earlier. As well as filming for The Living Isles I was also preparing for a future film on red squirrels and with the help of family and friends had constructed a huge enclosure measuring some 10 metres wide and 5 metres high on a private estate on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire. I'd brought 2 hand reared red squirrels down from Dundee a few months earlier and it was hoped that they would breed in the enclosure. The owner of the woodland lived on site in a house he'd built himself and Gerry would care for the squirrels when I wasn't around. It was obvious by now that Firkin would never become as tame as Heidi and would be much happier living as a wild animal. So, in the autumn of 1985 we released him into the forest, leaving Gerry with food to leave out for Firkin's first days of freedom.
My father & grandfather at the New Forest red squirrel enclosure