I went for a pee and had a vision of transcendent beauty. I had managed to get my fair share of prosecco at my sister's house in Mortlake and found it necessary, as my grandfather used to say, to “make a call”. And a moment of glorious revelation from the bathroom window.

The outlook was wonderfully and suburbanly verdant, my sister's garden playing a full part in the landscape of intricately compartmented green. And there, on the roof of the neat little shed that stood hard against the wall - just before it disappeared behind the branches of a stupendous lilac in full purple bloom - a fox.

Not just any fox. A fox of beauty and charm and elegance, apparently freshly groomed, lithe and gleaming red. The white tip of his brush vanished into the lilac and then for a moment I saw him continue his journey along the top of the wall, a creature at home in his world, unstoppably self-confident and positively glowing with health.

It is always a deeply cheering thing to come up against the wild world deep in the haunts of humankind. It is a message that we haven't concreted over every last square inch; that we haven't buggered it all up quite yet; that there is a way in which human beings can live alongside the wild world. Never mind the prosecco, that was a champagne moment.

Urban myths

You are much more likely to see a fox in Mortlake than around my place in Suffolk. Urban foxes are not only a fact of modern life, they are also, by the nature of their chosen lives, a great deal more visible than country foxes. Now hear a strange fact: just about everything you know about urban foxes is a myth.

They are not “coming in”. They are not increasing, either. They have an established and stable population in most towns and cities in this country. Foxes started being seen in towns after the First World War, and have been there in substantial numbers ever since the Second. Towns expanded into the countryside and the foxes changed their behaviour and adapted, thrived and made the most of this new opportunity - so much so that foxes have been seen in Downing Street and Buckingham Palace gardens.

Another myth: urban foxes do not represent some pitiful scavenging underclass. What's more, they are not invariably mangy. The talk of mangy foxes mostly comes from sightings of foxes during their annual moult, when they do indeed look deeply unprepossessing. But the point is that a thriving and stable population of any creature cannot be dominated by sick, ill-fed and diseased animals. There are plenty of urban foxes, therefore they must be healthy. If they weren't, they would die out.

Yet another myth: they don't survive by raiding dustbins. Quite apart from anything else, there aren't many left. As a species, dustbins are more or less extinct. Towns are more or less dustbin free. And foxes can't open wheelie bins. A study on the feeding of urban foxes carried out by Professor Stephen Harris, of the University of Bristol, showed that more than half the food of urban foxes is deliberately put out for them by human beings. For the rest, foxes take mice, insects and other invertebrates.

One more myth is that all urban foxes are skinny and underfed. True, they are thinner than most of the canids we are used to seeing in towns, but then most domestic dogs are overfed and under-exercised. Foxes, urban or not, are lean, pared-down survival machines.

Yet urban foxes arouse huge hostility from some people. They find it disturbing, rather than the reverse, to have wild things playing an intimate part in human life. Foxes are sometimes shot and generally seen as vermin. Newspapers play up the scary aspects and, besides, the pro-hunt people always cast foxes as anthropomorphic villains. In truth, foxes are just mammals trying to make a living, same as you and me.

There are a few legitimate complaints about urban foxes. They like to leave aromatic reminders of their presence, and they can dig up lawns when looking for worms. Me, I'm inclined to say, so what? But even if you resent this, there really is not a lot you can do about them. Foxes can get through the smallest gaps and exterminating them is difficult, expensive and never successful. If you shoot up your local foxes, you are merely creating a vacancy.

Here's a fact rather than a myth: foxes like a good class of neighbourhood. They prefer leafy suburbs populated by middle-class property owners.

Cherish your local foxes. They are not pests but status symbols.

Out for a gull

I am writing these words from Lord's, where I have been covering the Test match for this newspaper. You will be excited to learn that my match list now stands at six species of bird. Not many, I know, but the famous media centre is poorly designed for bird watching - you can't see enough sky. So here it is: mallard, feral pigeon, wood pigeon, herring gull, pied wagtail, cormorant. There were sundry other ducks and a Swann.

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