WANTED! Huge urban fox terrorising chickens in Barton and Tredworth.
The not so fantastic Mr Fox has been eating chickens at will, with some reports suggesting he has gobbled up to 25 in one night.
The City Farm, in Tredworth, has also experienced the tyrant first hand.
Manager Karen Bicknell recently saw the normally nocturnal animal.
She said: "It is absolutely enormous! I have never seen a bigger fox. It climbed up a really high fence, got its way through two other fences, before killing a turkey of ours.
"It then tried to get the turkey out of the enclosure but it wasn't quite strong enough so it left it behind.
"It has had a couple of our chickens before too, and I have heard of it taking 25 in one night from one garden in the area and 20 from another.
"It needs to be stopped really, it's getting a bit out of hand."
Wildlife enthusiast Frank Tunbridge, from Podsmead, says it is not uncommon for urban foxes to be seen in the daylight at this time of year.
He said: "There are two times during the year when you will see foxes in urban areas, and that is in frozen conditions when their usual prey of small mammals are all hibernating underground so they need more food, and also this time of year when they have cubs to feed.
"Their cubs are hungry so they need to get more food for them, this will see them taking more risks and wandering into urban areas to hunt. They will often venture out at around 5pm.
"More and more people are keeping chickens too so that encourages them to come into the towns and cities.
"They can get really large. Usually a fox weighs around 15lbs but the biggest one in the UK was 45lbs. I've seen some on my remote cameras in Newent which are bigger than a springer spaniel."
In Britain, foxes were first established in cities such as Bristol and London during the 1940s.
More recently, cities such as Cambridge and Norwich have been colonised.
There have been calls for a cull of urban foxes after a four-year-old boy was attacked by one in his South East London home back in February.
