Website Content

Jump to footer

Keith Graham's Country View

STIRLING OBSERVER
16 Sep 2011 by Jean Pedder,

AS long as I can remember, badgers have fascinated me. Yet for years they eluded me.

Of course this is an animal that always works the night shift, shunning broad daylight and only becoming active as the sun goes down, so if you want to watch badgers it is either a very early morning or an evening pastime.

I have always favoured the latter and as you might guess the best time of the year to watch badgers is in the months of May and June, when daylight hours stretch on and on into the night.

Yet curiously, my first sighting of a badger was in broad daylight.

I was travelling along a lakeside (in the Lake District) and suddenly spotted a badger, seemingly curled up in the middle of a field rising steeply from the waterside.

I immediately assumed the creature was either injured or dead, scaled the dry stane wall and climbed up to the animal.

To my amazement, the badger – he was a boar – was simply fast asleep, snoring his head off and clearly not in any way injured.

I leaned forward and touched him and in an instant, he awoke from his slumbers, jumped to his feet and quickly departed, lumbering off towards the nearby woods.

I have often wondered what possessed a boar badger to take a siesta in the middle of a field and in full view. To this day I cannot come up with an explanation but there it was; the first badger I ever encountered I actually stroked! Bizarre!

My best badger watching days were however, to come. A year or two later I was driving home quite late one night when, just as I was approaching the cottage I had recently moved into, my headlights picked out a badger, almost but not quite in my garden.

Further investigations during the next few days led to the discovery of what were clearly a series of well-worn badger highways in an adjacent woodland.

Following the paths as they converged, brought me to the inevitable source, the sett, situated in a little dell. And it was a sizeable sett with many entrances, some clearly in regular and current use, others not.

It wasn’t long before I had worked out the best vantage points, making sure that I would be downwind (of the prevailing breezes at least). Soon I had taken an old pair of stepladders down there to give me easy access to a tree, which gave me an overview of the complete complex.

I spent many happy hours up that tree and gradually became quite well acquainted with that sett’s residents. My first ‘viewing’ was on a delightful May evening.

Indeed, I was pretty sure that what I witnessed that evening was the very first time three young cubs had come to the surface.

First the sow emerged, carefully testing every eddy of the gentle breeze before signalling with a low pitched “whicker”, that it was safe for her cubs to at last leave the confines of their underground sett.

First one little black and white face appeared out of the darkness, then another and finally, a third. I could almost feel the tension and clearly the youngsters were very nervous about this first venture out of doors.

Indeed almost before they had put a single foot outside, something spooked them and they disappeared below ground again to re-emerge several minutes later.

For a week or two, I visited that sett on a nightly basis and watched those three cubs gradually become bolder and bolder.

As the evenings passed, I was able to log their development and became fascinated with the games they played.

I was pretty sure that there were two sow cubs and a boar and it was the slightly larger boar cub that as the days passed, asserted himself at the top of the pecking order, although one of the sow cubs was clearly quite strong willed too.

The third one was obviously more timid and always came out of the mock scraps as the loser!

I even found I could watch these badgers right through the year and to my utter surprise, by direct torchlight too. Their woodland home was situated to the rear of the grounds of what had once been a small manor house, now a guest house with a reputation for good food and it just happened that the driveway leading to the front door was in direct line with the sett.

Thus the headlights of approaching cars played directly on their home territory, so even on the darkest of nights I could simply flick the beam of a powerful torch on and providing I stayed down wind and silent, watch the badgers with impunity.

I enjoyed many close encounters with that family of brocks and indeed, became quite intimate with their lifestyles. Badgers are in my experience, as regular as clockwork.

On one occasion, I realised I was running late and whilst hurrying along one of the badger paths towards my vantage point, realised that coming the other way was a badger ... with the wind behind it! I stood stock-still whilst it kept coming.

Crashing

It came right up to me before realising I was there at which point it shot off in great haste into the brackens. I could hear it as it went crashing through the undergrowth.

I have watched badgers on many occasions since.

Sometimes they can be rather like bulls in china shops as they make noisy progress during their nightly excursions. But they can also be sleuthful and at times surprisingly swift, disappearing into the night quickly with hardly a sound.

They are above all else, benign creatures that generally keep themselves to themselves, feasting for the large part on earthworms and other invertebrates.

Yet to some they are seen as opponents in the sordid, desperately cruel world of badger baiting, an activity which very rightly is highly illegal as well as being utterly contemptible.

It was with great interest therefore, that I read last week that police forces throughout Britain, are launching a major, co-ordinated campaign to come down hard on the perpetrators of these ghastly events.

The poor old badger seems to be the victim personified these days, for the culling of badgers in parts of England and Wales has also been a part of the strategy employed to eradicate bovine TB.

It is not a policy that appears to work, for where such culls have taken place, incidence of the disease has been seen to increase rather than decrease.

This is not a surprising outcome to anyone who understands the lifestyles of badgers or for that matter, of most other animal species, for the effect of culling serves only to move badgers around.

Emptied territories are automatically filled by badgers from neighbouring areas and clearly if they are carrying disease, they are much more likely to spread it.

Here in Scotland we were of course declared a bovine TB free area a couple of years ago and indeed, most of Europe is relatively free of this virulent infection.

Any incidence that might occur here could therefore hardly be blamed upon badgers for badgers, left to their own devices, are very sedentary animals. Any bovine TB outbreaks here could therefore only be as a result of cattle being imported from infected herds.

There seems to be several problems contributing to the spread of the disease.

It is now clear that the current method of testing cattle is at best inadequate. As a result, many animals failing the tests are destroyed even though they turn out to be free of infection. Not so long ago cattle generally changed hands very much more locally than is the case now.

The modern trend of the countrywide transportation of cattle is without question at the root of the spread of the disease but a better testing regime is desperately needed.

Incidentally, a very high percentage of culled badgers on post mortem, show no signs of bovine TB at all. Experts now suggest that the aim should be to control not eradicate the disease. But now at last it has been announced that trials of vaccination programmes are to be run next year.

Of course I understand the concern of farmers over the loss of valuable and cherished livestock but for far too long the badger has been accused of being the main source of a disease which has undoubtedly in the first place, been passed to them by cattle.

That’s why it’s called BOVINE TB! If vaccination is shown to work maybe at last the pressure on our beleaguered badgers will be eased. And if the police are as good as their word maybe the evil practice of baiting will become history too.

 

Past News

brianmay.com
Bookmark and Share