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Badgers at bluebell time We took advantage of a brief thaw in last month's snow and ice to visit one of our favourite badger setts. It's on a well drained slope in the middle of a patch of mixed woodland adjacent to pasture, just the kind of site which badgers prefer - easier digging and a variety of food sources readily available. The pasture is particularly important, as the main item on their menu is earthworms, which they gobble up in great quantities on damp nights when the worms come to the surface. Badgers live in small interrelated groups, or clans, in a territory well defined by scent-marking and defended vigourously against other clans. Within this territory there will be a main sett and probably a number of small subordinate ones. Our favourite is a main sett in which generations of badgers have lived and died - possibly for hundreds of years! There are about eight burrow entrances, easily distinguished from rabbit holes by their size, especially width, and by the huge platforms of earth which have built up outside, the result of the continuous home-improvements and extensions carried out over the years. These give a rather terraced effect, and the badgers will congregate to groom and socialise there on summer evenings before going off to forage. If there has been recent digging the fresh earth may have a badger-wide groove running outwards from the tunnel mouth where the animal has backed across to kick loose earth over the side of the platform. The entrances are connected by a network of pathways, some leading away into the wood and clearly definable among the emerging bluebell leaves. This is an important time for badgers, the season when the young are born. It was exciting to think that the tiny naked cubs were perhaps lying curled up together in one of the many chambers just beneath our feet. They would be well insulated in a nest of vegetation which the sow had gathered in preparation for their birth. Once their eyes open and they grow stronger they will begin to explore their underground home and later play in the maze of passageways. It will be the beginning of May before they are allowed above ground, carefully supervised, and we shall have a chance of seeing them. Something to look forward to. [Back] |