Heidi
Some six years before I was given my first dog as a 35th birthday present, a gangly Scottish Deerhound puppy I named Clan, I had an unexpected encounter with the first of four orphaned red foxes who would come to share my life . In 1984 I'd just started working as a cameraman on my first major BBC natural history series, The Living Isles, when one of the producers called me one day and asked “How do you feel about taking on a fox?”. Several of the 10 programmes in the series were to feature a red fox and word had just come in that a tame vixen had been brought in to Bristol Dogs Home. Her previous owner had found her abandoned as a cub but was finding her too destructive as a house pet and Heidi, as she was named, was in urgent need of a new home.
I'd recently moved back to my home town of Andover in Hampshire after four years of living and working in London and was renting a large outbuilding on a farm in a little hamlet, Picket Twenty, just outside of town which I was using as a filming studio. The owners of Lower Farm, Ken and Liz Richardson, bred greyhounds and Belgian shepherd dogs and were very happy for me to keep a fox on the property as long as she was kept clear of the dogs. I constructed a living enclosure in a barn next to my studio, and a smaller enclosure to fit in the back of my vehicle and the following week I travelled to Bristol to collect Heidi.
I'd first encountered a tame fox while working on the feature film Tarka the Otter in the mid 1970's but had forgotten just how small a fox actually is when seen up close. Heidi was little bigger than the cats my father had at home, with a thick russet coat and an incredibly bushy tail or brush that I would come to love burying my face into during the months to come.
Heidi was obviously tame but hand reared foxes tend to bond with just one or two humans and as a total stranger she looked upon me somewhat suspiciously. Over the next few days I spent every spare moment I had sitting inside Heidi's enclosure. I'd sit in one corner reading a book and quietly talking to her. She'd sit or lie in the opposing corner and watch my every movement. Offers of food treats were steadfastly ignored. One day I was reading and took a bite out of an apple I had in my pocket. I was aware of movement on the opposite side of the enclosure as Heidi slowly got up, walked towards me and gently took the apple from my hand. From then on everything changed - she would take food from my hand and let me stroke her and even pick her up.
I filmed at the studio on most days during the week and would let Heidi roam free as I worked. Mostly she'd sleep on a dog bed in the corner but if I was filming one of the small mammals on my shooting list for The Living Isles, which included harvest and wood mice, bank and field voles and hedgehogs, she'd jump up on to the bench to take a peek. Nimble as a cat, she never dislodged any equipment or lights and remarkably never tried to eat any of my filming subjects.
My girlfriend had recently bought a ground floor flat with garden in Hornsey, north London, and at weekends Heidi and I would travel there by car from Andover. The garden was totally secure with high fences and Heidi could wander there and throughout the house at her leisure. The front room of the flat had large bay windows and Heidi liked to sit on a chair I placed by the window, looking out onto the street outside. I'd see people walk by then take a step back, do a double take and say "Is that a ....... , no it can't be!", and walk on bemused. In Andover I'd fit a harness on Heidi and take her for walks around the fields or the nearby forest, Harewood. I never tried walking her in London. I'd seen a man with a pet fox on a lead walking the Tottenham Court Road on numerous occasions and the poor animal always looked terrified. Foxes are not dogs and should never to treated as such. Heidi had a weakness for feather dusters and we lost several during her stays in Hornsey, shaken and torn apart until the last feather floated to the ground.
Heidi was to appear in five sequences in the film, in countryside locations, and although she was tame I worried that she would wander off during filming. Many of the shots would be wide-angle so nobody could be close by while the camera was running. My friend and assistant Philip Lovel and I came up with a plan of surrounding the whole filming site with black garden netting, supported by bamboo rods and held to the ground with tent pegs. The netting could be hidden behind natural backdrops such as a hedgerow, or the action of the scene could be focussed in the centre of the arena where the netting wouldn't be visible. Although the netting was only 4 feet high Heidi, and indeed none of my future foxes, tried to jump over it. The urban foxes that now come into my garden in Birmingham can scale a 7 feet high fence with ease.
We filmed Heidi patrolling a hedgerow in Autumn and during the winter of 1984-85 filmed her supposedly hunting field voles in their icy tunnels beneath the snow. Heidi and the voles never actually met on their snowy set but while catching up the hand reared rodents after one bitterly cold filming session, Philip had a vole-in-the-mouth experience when one jumped up out of his cold hand. In the spring of 1985 we took Heidi to a woodland in Bristol to film her amongst bluebells, a shoot which incorporated a photo session for a photographer from the Radio Times. It had been planned that Heidi would appear on the front cover of the magazine when the series was broadcast in 1986, but the image was eventually used in the Living Isles hardback book that accompanied the series.
Filming the 4th sequence took place in the summer of 1985, on Bluebell Farm in Penton Grafton near Andover. My father knew the farmer, who'd given us permission to fence off a section of a barley field. Heidi would be filmed walking the lines of barley, and finding the nest of a harvest mouse. I'd already filmed a sequence on harvest mice, and baby mice in the nest, in my studio. The nest Heidi found would be empty of mice but have an enticing treat inside. We filmed Heidi wandering the field and I planned to return the following day to film her with the nest. For reasons I can't recall I was working alone that second day and after setting up the camera and mouse nest I released Heidi into the enclosure. Minutes later I realised that she was in the barley, but the wrong side of the netting. I ran to where I'd last seen her and to my dismay saw a large hole at the base of the netting. Something, probably a badger, had broken through during the night and I'd stupidly omitted to check the integrity of the enclosure before letting Heidi in. By now Heidi was a hundred yards away and heading towards woodland at the far end of the field. I called her but got no response and after watching her vanish into the distance drove to a public phone box in the village ( this was way before the age of mobile phones ) to call my father and Philip, then my girlfriend in London. Over the next few days the four of us searched a wide area and distributed leaflets in surrounding villages, and the Andover Advertiser printed an article offering a reward from the BBC if she were found, but I never saw her again. I did get an irate telephone call from someone wanting compensation for his chickens that had been killed by a fox, but he lived 20 miles from where Heidi had got loose so I guessed she wasn't to blame.
I'd first encountered a tame fox while working on the feature film Tarka the Otter in the mid 1970's but had forgotten just how small a fox actually is when seen up close. Heidi was little bigger than the cats my father had at home, with a thick russet coat and an incredibly bushy tail or brush that I would come to love burying my face into during the months to come.
Heidi was obviously tame but hand reared foxes tend to bond with just one or two humans and as a total stranger she looked upon me somewhat suspiciously. Over the next few days I spent every spare moment I had sitting inside Heidi's enclosure. I'd sit in one corner reading a book and quietly talking to her. She'd sit or lie in the opposing corner and watch my every movement. Offers of food treats were steadfastly ignored. One day I was reading and took a bite out of an apple I had in my pocket. I was aware of movement on the opposite side of the enclosure as Heidi slowly got up, walked towards me and gently took the apple from my hand. From then on everything changed - she would take food from my hand and let me stroke her and even pick her up.
I filmed at the studio on most days during the week and would let Heidi roam free as I worked. Mostly she'd sleep on a dog bed in the corner but if I was filming one of the small mammals on my shooting list for The Living Isles, which included harvest and wood mice, bank and field voles and hedgehogs, she'd jump up on to the bench to take a peek. Nimble as a cat, she never dislodged any equipment or lights and remarkably never tried to eat any of my filming subjects.
My girlfriend had recently bought a ground floor flat with garden in Hornsey, north London, and at weekends Heidi and I would travel there by car from Andover. The garden was totally secure with high fences and Heidi could wander there and throughout the house at her leisure. The front room of the flat had large bay windows and Heidi liked to sit on a chair I placed by the window, looking out onto the street outside. I'd see people walk by then take a step back, do a double take and say "Is that a ....... , no it can't be!", and walk on bemused. In Andover I'd fit a harness on Heidi and take her for walks around the fields or the nearby forest, Harewood. I never tried walking her in London. I'd seen a man with a pet fox on a lead walking the Tottenham Court Road on numerous occasions and the poor animal always looked terrified. Foxes are not dogs and should never to treated as such. Heidi had a weakness for feather dusters and we lost several during her stays in Hornsey, shaken and torn apart until the last feather floated to the ground.
Heidi was to appear in five sequences in the film, in countryside locations, and although she was tame I worried that she would wander off during filming. Many of the shots would be wide-angle so nobody could be close by while the camera was running. My friend and assistant Philip Lovel and I came up with a plan of surrounding the whole filming site with black garden netting, supported by bamboo rods and held to the ground with tent pegs. The netting could be hidden behind natural backdrops such as a hedgerow, or the action of the scene could be focussed in the centre of the arena where the netting wouldn't be visible. Although the netting was only 4 feet high Heidi, and indeed none of my future foxes, tried to jump over it. The urban foxes that now come into my garden in Birmingham can scale a 7 feet high fence with ease.
We filmed Heidi patrolling a hedgerow in Autumn and during the winter of 1984-85 filmed her supposedly hunting field voles in their icy tunnels beneath the snow. Heidi and the voles never actually met on their snowy set but while catching up the hand reared rodents after one bitterly cold filming session, Philip had a vole-in-the-mouth experience when one jumped up out of his cold hand. In the spring of 1985 we took Heidi to a woodland in Bristol to film her amongst bluebells, a shoot which incorporated a photo session for a photographer from the Radio Times. It had been planned that Heidi would appear on the front cover of the magazine when the series was broadcast in 1986, but the image was eventually used in the Living Isles hardback book that accompanied the series.
Filming the 4th sequence took place in the summer of 1985, on Bluebell Farm in Penton Grafton near Andover. My father knew the farmer, who'd given us permission to fence off a section of a barley field. Heidi would be filmed walking the lines of barley, and finding the nest of a harvest mouse. I'd already filmed a sequence on harvest mice, and baby mice in the nest, in my studio. The nest Heidi found would be empty of mice but have an enticing treat inside. We filmed Heidi wandering the field and I planned to return the following day to film her with the nest. For reasons I can't recall I was working alone that second day and after setting up the camera and mouse nest I released Heidi into the enclosure. Minutes later I realised that she was in the barley, but the wrong side of the netting. I ran to where I'd last seen her and to my dismay saw a large hole at the base of the netting. Something, probably a badger, had broken through during the night and I'd stupidly omitted to check the integrity of the enclosure before letting Heidi in. By now Heidi was a hundred yards away and heading towards woodland at the far end of the field. I called her but got no response and after watching her vanish into the distance drove to a public phone box in the village ( this was way before the age of mobile phones ) to call my father and Philip, then my girlfriend in London. Over the next few days the four of us searched a wide area and distributed leaflets in surrounding villages, and the Andover Advertiser printed an article offering a reward from the BBC if she were found, but I never saw her again. I did get an irate telephone call from someone wanting compensation for his chickens that had been killed by a fox, but he lived 20 miles from where Heidi had got loose so I guessed she wasn't to blame.