All about Badgers
This is the first in a series of blogs celebrating some of the UK’s most iconic wildlife. With over three decades of experience with badgers, I am delighted to be able to share my insights into their ecology and behaviour in the wild. We will explore the way they communicate within their communities, how they forage for food, and how they work together to protect their stronghold territories.
Unfortunately, this celebration must also come with a warning about the dangers that wild badgers face – wildlife crime- such as baiting, the dwindling natural habitats due to development or destruction by humans, and the government-approved Badger Cull. In a separate blog series, we will touch on these issues as well as my experience working with wounded badger patrols set up in 2013 to help protect badgers from being shot under government license.
For now, let’s marvel at the resilience and beauty of these incredible animals.
Badger Ecology
The European or Eurasian Badger, of the genus Meles, is a native British mammal species and a member of the Mustelidae family, including pine marten and stoats. These slow-moving creatures are much maligned for their perceived grumpiness, but in reality, they are social animals that live in tight-knit groups called Clans.
Though members of the Mustelidae are large carnivores with fearsome reputations, badgers themselves are omnivores who love nothing more than to dig. They’ll spend hours burrowing intricate tunnel systems into the earth. All badgers, no matter if they live alone or with others, will always create two sets of tunnels: one main entrance tunnel and an escape tunnel leading from the entrance. Setts can have several entrances, but the number of setts doesn’t necessarily indicate how many badgers call them home.
Setts can be passed down from generation to generation within a Clan—some continue to exist for centuries without ever falling out of use. These terrestrial burrow systems provide shelter from predators as well as shade during hot days and warmth through cold seasons. Inside the sett, there are several sleeping dens and a nursery den for newborn cubs.
The largest recorded badger sett in Britain was found to extend over 15×35 meters and had 12 separate entrances. Just imagine all those twisting tunnels weaving beneath your feet! It’s truly awe-inspiring to think about these natural architects at work.
Badger species have been in Britain for at least 250,000 years, with now suggesting that Badgers could have been here for more like 400,000 years. That is way longer than humans!
Badger Biology
Adult Badgers are around 70-75cm long. They have short, powerful legs with long claws with a distinctive ‘wedge-shaped body that allows them to move around underground but also gives them a very distinctive ‘wobble’ at the rump when they run above ground.
Badger Head and face
Male badgers are known as ‘Boars’ and females are ‘sows’ Males are generally longer and heavier with a wider head. Adult badgers can weigh up to 12-15 kg
Badgers are easily identified by their black and white striped faces. They have very powerful jaws with their jaw muscles attached to a ridge on their skull, known as the sagittal crest. This is what gives them their distinctive shaped head.
An adult badger’s fur is dense and the individual hairs are thick. The hairs are predominantly white with a black band near the outer edge, giving the distinctive Black, grey-white colouring of an English Badger.
Badgers have a ‘loose fitting skin’ that helps them evade capture by potential predators, and the coat on their rump is very dense and coarse, making it look like it’s wearing trousers!
The badger will often bite other badger rumps. It is most prominent in autumn when the Sows drive the male cubs away from the sett by biting their rumps.
Badgers spend most of their time foraging for food or foraging for mates. Their territory is about 50-100 acres and consists of underground burrows and tunnels that the clan call home.
The badgers love the thrill of a good fight, and one badger will challenge another to secure mating rights with a female.
They have pretty poor eyesight, but a very well-developed sense of smell. They use this for communication between the clan members (including danger alerts and mating status) using a range of scents that they produce from glands on their feet and at the base of the tail. Badgers raise their tails while marking so that all individual clan members have a similar scent, this is called ‘allo’ marking.
Another scenting method is squat marking where they lift their tails and dip their rear end, which contains the subcaudal gland. When badgers defecate, they use specially dug pits, known as latrines, that are found around the edges of the territory. The faeces will be scented as a warning to other badgers. Badgers can also scent mark with their feet, leaving a message every time they walk one of their regular routes.
Reproduction
Badgers mate during the winter when most of the other animals are asleep or departed from the territory. Sometimes as many as three males will mate with a single female.
The embryos start growing in the autumn, when birthing is timed for February or March. At that time, she makes a nursery chamber lined with ferns and grasses under big stones; she selects an abandoned burrow or may dig her own if there’s not one available.
The babies are robust enough to survive underground until their eyes open at about seven weeks old, at which point they need their mother to bring them solid food, in addition to their milk, almost every night for another two months or so.
In early summer, they begin to appear above ground as most other animals are settling into their territories. They stay with their family until early autumn when male cubs are driven away from the main clan to find new females and the cycle of creating new clans begins again.
Diet
Badgers are best described as opportunistic omnivores. They eat a wide range of seasonal foods but they predominantly eat earthworms and insects.
In the spring their diet will include plant bulbs such as bluebells and daffodils and the eggs of ground-nesting birds. By summer they will be eating small invertebrates, and raiding bee and wasp nests for protein-packed larvae.
Autumn is a vital time and badgers will take advantage of the abundant natural harvest by eating nuts, grains, maize and fruits such as blackberries and apples. These are vital to building up their fat reserves for winter.
Badgers have poor eyesight, so hunting fast prey is rare, they use their amazing sense of smell to locate rabbit kits or grubs underground.
During the winter months, badgers will remain in their setts for extended periods. They do not hibernate but can stay underground for several days surviving on the fat reserves they built up during the autumn abundance.
During winter the ground will become frozen, often for several days and even these natural ‘diggers’ can’t find the worms they would normally eat. This is where their varied diet will assist them and they will take molluscs and any remaining fallen nuts and fruit they can find.
Just like other wild mammals in winter, badgers have to use a massive amount of energy to find and digest food so they need to be pretty sure of finding that food or they are better not to venture out.
Badgers in our culture, mythology and Folklore
Illusive, mysterious and engrained in folklore, the badger is a uniquely English animal. There are some fascinating stories from our ancestors and maybe a couple of things you may not know all about Badgers
The name ‘badger’ is from the white mark on its face that is said to resemble a badge, or maybe the name comes from the French word ‘bêcheur’ which means ‘digger’. In Wales, they are referred to as ‘moch daear’, which translates to ‘earth pig’.
The earliest written use of the word ‘badger’ was in 1523; however, it was likely known as ‘brock’ or ‘bauson’ before then. The term badger was originally used for an itinerant trader.
There’s an old superstition that states when a badger bites, it won’t let go until its teeth meet – scary – although this isn’t true.
Badgers have five toes with powerful long claws on their front feet and four claws on their rear feet.