Part of our morning walk takes us a long a short section of footpath between a couple of minor roads. The path is heavily wooded, and bound by small schools and farmland.
Over the years, we often see excavations in a bank along onside of the path. The burrows have a wide entrance, fronted by a lot of soil. It is often difficult to ascertain how old the excavations are and whether the burrows are in use.
Although the Memsahib often attributes these burrows to badgers, I've been a bit more skeptical. There are a lot of rabbits in the area. The soil is soft, bordering on sandy, therefore prone to erosion. A small rabbit sized hole can easily be eroded to quite a large hole. The burrow entrances were no more than two or three footsteps from the footpath, making me dubious about them being made by badgers.
Until I saw this...
Lovely, 'fresh' grass and straw scattered outside the front of the hole.
Next morning, we returned with a trail cam, which I set up on the holly tree to the right of this photo. I've been reluctant to put out a trail cam until now due to the lack of cover for the camera from the footpath. Some enterprising oik is bound to steal my trail cam if they spot it. Anyway, apart from it being a little bit painful getting past the holly leaves and briar thorns, this was a perfect spot for a trail cam - if a little close to the sett's entrance.
After a couple of nights out, I retrieved my trail cam to find it wasn't pointing downwards enough. Still, I got this footage of one badger coming out of the sett.
I must admit I a very surprised to see a badger sett so close to a public footpath. Granted, it isn't the most heavily used of paths. In fact it is a rare event for us to encounter anyone on the path on our morning walks. Nevertheless, it is used by pedestrians, cyclists and dogwalkers. Then I read up about badgers and discovered that they do live and dig up setts in close proximity to human habitation - sometimes even in gardens!
My old girl and I are very pleased to have a badger sett; and on our daily morning constitutional to boot.
90% luck, 5% field craft, 5% camera skills.
My 'Inspector Clouseau' investigations (as Catlady said, though I'd prefer Marlow or Sam Spade or Morse, even) has yielded a crucial piece of evidence. One of our badgers is setting up home. I'll start this week's update with this exciting piece of news. Though there has been plenty of other action around our sett this week; which I'll put in follow up posts.
Here's the sequence. Again, I aplogise for a YouTube entry. The mp4 file exceeds the 5MB limit of this forum.
Looks a little empty, but keep your focus on right of photos.
Note badger coming in frame backwards.
It is dragging in bedding.
Now the good bit.
Ta da. Badger setting up home in an old sett.
I'm about to dash out of home, to leg it back to where the sett is, and put out my trail cam, before the heavens open up. Netweather's rainfall radar shows about an hour of light rain. Just enough time to get there and back.
Oh, exciting Angus, look forward to the story unfolding about your Badgers.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I'm still baffled as to why the date stamp on photos and videos are incorrect. The day is correct. The time is correct. But the month and year are not. I did make a special effort to set both correctly, and did not turn the machine off; so no reason why the date should change.
Continuing our saga. A Song Thrush has been knocking about the entrance to the sett for a couple of weeks now. I haven't posted photos or video until now.
Firstly, this is what our Song Thrush has been doing uptil now. Just mooching around looking for interesting invertebrates to eat.
Our Song Thrush decides to live a little dangerously. Odd, considering how wet it has been, and the amount of leaf litter around. Why go into the jaws of death when there is so much safer hunting territory around?
Arrrgh! This may not end well.
Although it survived, my trail cam did not pick it up again. Perhaps next week.
Like a detective story in reverse (i.e. solution an culprit revealed in the opening scenes, with the remainder detailing how the case was solved), here is one of the badgers checking out the sett. A rather wet badger. It rained earlier in the week - thereby sabotaging my efforts to dry out waste decking material, to make it easier to cut into manageable pieces to cart down to our local tip.
Bit of scent marking either to claim this territory or leaving a calling card.