In Praise of Badgers

Raw awe-inspiring jagged shorelines juxtaposed with meandering streams coursing through gently rolling hills. For once, I am not referring to Cambridgeshire. We recently took the opportunity to roam further than usual from our local patch and spent a wonderful week in (mostly) sunny Dorset.

It came as no surprise that we found it to be abound with excellent habitats for all manner of creatures. From the fox who slinked across the path in front of us on our first evening to the common lizard who posed for us in the sun on our final morning, we were treated to a display of Britain’s wildlife at its finest.

It is hard to choose a favourite wildlife moment from the holiday but if I had to decide, for me, it came in a waddling, snuffling, black and white quadrupedal form. Badgers!

The tell-tale signs of the presence of badgers were there from the start. Although badgers are elusive nocturnal creatures, with a little bit of detective work, it’s easy to tell whether they have a sett somewhere in the vicinity. We first noticed that there were small tufts of wiry black hair dotted along the road beside our cottage and, on closer inspection, we saw that there were intermittent tracks of five-toed footprints stamped into the dried mud. So we knew they were around, but where?

We heard that there was a place nearby with hides on site which were known to be visited by a clan of badgers. We went along just before dusk with high hopes but acutely aware that you just can’t predict wildlife. The hides were set in the middle of farmland in front of a small, thickly wooded hillock. As the sun dropped gradually to the west, leaving a magenta blur hanging in the sky, we sat in silence, knowing that even a cough or a shuffle could startle the badgers into staying away. I have recently been practicing my wildlife filming so I set up the camera ready, hoping that I might be able to catch some badger antics on film.

Then, as the last of the light was fading, a streak of white appeared from the undergrowth on the hillock. A sturdy badger poked his head out from the darkness, paused while he decided that the coast was clear and then bumbled into the open in front of the hide and began busily rooting around on the ground for the peanuts which the owners of the hide had scattered. Shortly afterwards, another two badgers appeared, their silvery hair and dazzling white stripes almost ghostly in the dusky light.

  

We watched for some time as they scurried around, snuffling the ground with their stubby snouts and feeding eagerly. Sometimes one would retreat into the undergrowth for a few minutes, before re-emerging ready for another course. Badgers are on average about 75cm long but the five we saw came in a range of sizes, making it relatively easy to distinguish individuals.

One of the best moments came when we saw a badger gathering new bedding for the sett. She ripped up grass with her sharp front claws and jumped backwards into the undergrowth, dragging it with her. The sight was both comical and incredibly impressive. Badgers regularly collect grass, leaves, bracken and other plant matter to line their underground setts.

Badgers are not only excellent housekeepers but excellent house builders. Although some setts are relatively simple, some can be intricate networks of interconnecting underground tunnels and chambers which can reach to hundreds of metres long. These setts are usually developed by the powerful claws of many generations of badgers from the same clan and their ingenuity puts our building developments to shame.

After a couple of hours of watching the escapades of these fascinating mustelids, we were left alone as the badgers wandered one by one up the hillock, not to re-emerge. They often roam over quite a wide area in search of food to sate their omnivorous diet, so perhaps they had exhausted their supply of peanuts at the hide and had decided to forage further afield.

It is sad that the experience of seeing these beautiful social animals has been tainted in recent times by the controversy surrounding the UK culling trials. The idea that we would use a method to control bTB which has not been proven to be humane and is reinforced by circumstantial unbalanced evidence is incredibly worrying. The sooner that politicians start listening to and collaborating with scientists the better. Amongst other issues, it has been shown that culls carried out on small to medium (financially viable) scales serve only to increase movement of badgers due to disruption of the social structure and, if anything, this increases the transmission of bTB in the area. Vaccinations for badgers, together with the development of an authorised vaccination for cattle, and a rigorous programme of biosecurity measures for cattle will lead to the best outcome for badgers, cattle and farmers.

Nevertheless, we owe it to these beautiful animals not to let the political issues mar the experience of watching and studying them. To the badgers we were nothing, they did not even know we were watching them, but to us they were ingenious and sociable, graceful yet lumbering. They provided us with a night we will never forget.