Friday 29 April 2011

Feed the Family


The fox (Vulpes vulpes) got a Guinea Fowl last night. I don’t mind, really. The fox killed to feed her or his family. They are efficient assassins – I heard one brief, strangled, squawk, and then silence.

I have only ever seen the fox once here – some years ago, on the track from the house to the village. Unlike the well-filmed urban foxes of Northern Europe, their Catalan country cousins are highly secretive. They are also slimmer and taller than the foxes that I have seen in the UK.

There is a kind of poetry in this. The fox, in Catalan is “Guineu”, and the prey, last night was a “Guinea.” So, “el guineu ha mengat la guinea.

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