A fox and a magpie have forged an unlikely friendship at Camberwell Old Cemetery.
Former Dulwich councillor Robin Crookshank Hilton snapped the duo feasting on nuts and seeds yesterday afternoon (Sunday, July 16).
She started feeding ‘Freddy’ the fox and ‘Maggie’ the magpie during lockdown and has watched their relationship blossom since.
She said: “The magpie always comes when the fox is there. I was a bit nervous at first thinking the fox was going to eat the bird but they seem to like socialising.
“They kind of look stand there looking at each other. Then the fox looks at me as if to say ‘it’s okay, Maggie can eat with me – she’s my friend’.”
Robin began visiting Camberwell Old Cemetery with a friend in her bubble during lockdown. “It’s absolutely beautiful and has a rarely interesting atmosphere,” she said.
They’d bring bags of nuts and seeds to feed the wildlife – bird nuts for foxes, monkey nuts for crows and sunflower hearts for magpies.
“There are these little humps in the cemetery. I poured the nuts on them, they came, and it became a pattern. Animals get used to these things,” she said.
She said a robin was also a regular visitor although it prefers not to mix with others. “He prefers to have his own pile of seeds,” she laughed.
In a study on interspecies friendships called The Evolutionary Origins of Friendship, researchers Robert Seyfarth and the late Dorothy Cheney found: “Friendships often involve cooperative interactions that are separated in time. They depend, at least in part, on the memory and emotions associated with past interactions.”