What, the fox?!

Mystery holes...

A while back, we noticed there were some pin-holes in the polytunnel plastic. We decided that they must have been caused by locating a fire-bowl a little too close to the polytunnel during our Lohri Festival, and thought nothing more of it when we noticed a few more. Then, on Monday, Tracey realised that from the outside, there are lots of dents in the plastic, and scratches, as well as more holes.

CSI Windmill have been in action this week, and we think we may have an acrobatic fox visiting the site! If you look at the pictures, you'll see that the damage seems to be made by 2 or 3 sharp objects acting together, starting with scratches, and then sometimes eventually finishing with punctures. This looks to us like something jumping up, scrabbling to get a purchase, and then moving up further. It's probably mainly a summer thing, as in winter, the polytunnel plastic is very tight, and probably quite hard to grip. It's possible it's a cat, but the size and height of the scratches mean it would need to be a whopper. We've heard of foxes climbing polytunnels elsewhere, but not locally.

Sadly, it's not something we can allow to continue, because the plastic will be weakened, so we've come up with the solution below. Let's hope it works!

The AAI - "anti-fox art installation"

Multiple strings should stop the fox getting the jump up, and the cd's will alert it to the presence of the string, and maybe the flashing will annoy it.