All About Badgers – Badgers in Springtime
Badgers in Springtime
Badgers in Springtime. Over the last few weeks, I have been immersed in woodland, watching my local badgers. The Cubs are being born about now, and I enjoy checking my local setts, which are still occupied.
Thankfully, in Surrey, most of them still are without a badger cull (yet!), and it is always exciting to find signs of badger activity, including fresh digging. Other indications of an active sett include discarded bedding, comprising grass and bracken, removed from their underground chambers during spring cleaning.
This year, one of my trail cameras captured a sow badger bundling grass and other vegetation under her chest. She held the material in place with her forepaws and then moved backwards in jerky motions to carry it underground into her sett. It’s fascinating how fastidious these creatures are when it comes to changing their bedding.
Wandering through these badger woodlands brings many other rewards, with song thrushes and blackbirds now singing their beautiful spring songs. Great spotted woodpeckers are also making their presence felt. I adore their machine-gun-sounding ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ that resonates as they furiously drum their bills against hollow tree boughs to advertise their presence to other woodpeckers.
Apart from snowdrops, the first spring wildflowers are only beginning to show. Spring appears a little sleepy and unable to get going this year. It will do so in the next few weeks, with lesser celandines and wood anemones being the precursors, especially on sunnier south-facing slopes. In the darker, damper woodland areas, opposite-leaved golden saxifrage is also starting to carpet the ground. Each flower is subtle and small. It’s complex to discern them individually. Still growing together, they form a distinctive floral tapestry that sweeps across the forest floor like a golden sea.
During April, when the food supplies are plentiful again, badger cubs are now exploring the sett entrance and may emerge, tempted by many new scents and sounds outside. The sow protects her cubs and ensures they stay close to the sett.
Although badger cubs are born at a time of year, that maximises their chances of survival, on average, only one of every three cubs survives to its first birthday. Male and female cubs become sexually mature at around 11-15 months and may mate before the end of their first year, in areas where food supplies are plentiful.
Badger Family Groups
European badgers are unusual among the mustelids because they live in highly social family groups, called clans, yet they show little sign of cooperative behaviour within the clan.
I’ve noticed that clan formation is usually in areas with abundant food resources and high population densities. For example, areas with low badger density, such as the Scottish Highlands clans tend to consist of a dominant male and female, sometimes with a couple of related individuals.
I’ve read that Badgers don’t have subordinate, non-breeding females to help their parents, where as foxes will often have an ‘auntie’ or ‘daughter’ to help their parents raise the cubs but have badgers helping the sow by cleaning the bedding from the sett, gathering new and building sett extensions.
It reminds me of something Prof Rosie Woodroffe highlighted when she observed babysitters rounding up cubs that strayed too far from the sett, chasing a fox and in one instance a boar that had bitten one of the cubs, I’ve also seen mutual scenting, where the ‘babysitter’ scent marks the cubs and, I’ve seen cubs scent marking the ‘babysitter’.
On three occasions, Woodroffe observed a mother and a subordinate carrying the cubs from the chamber where they slept with their mother to one where the babysitter slept. This is known as alloparental behaviour.
During early spring, badgers drag their bedding out of the sett and leave it in the entrance to ‘air’. This helps to kill any lice, ticks and fleas in the bedding that could parasitise the badgers. The airing of bedding appears to be an important part of maintaining hygiene within the sett. I have heard that the badgers have even moved setts in certain situations due to a build-up of parasites in the bedding.
May is an excellent time to start watching Badgers. As the days get warmer and longer, the badgers will begin to emerge in daylight. The Cubs are now three to four months old and come above ground to explore around the sett and to play with other badgers.
I’ve been told that Badgers in setts situated in open areas may emerge later than those living in the cover of woodland, but I have not seen any direct evidence of this.
Badger Behaviour
Arthur Jollands suggested back in the 1960s that some badgers may listen for specific sounds upon waking up and use them as cues for emergence “and become dependent on them, as we might on an alarm clock”. Jollands provided three instances to support his theory. Firstly, he noted that badgers consistently emerged only after the last train of the day had passed the sett at 21:18 in the Meon Valley, Hampshire. Secondly, he observed badgers at a sett in Warnford, Hampshire, apparently taking the call of a male pheasant going to roost every night as the cue to commence nightly activities.He mentioned his local sett in Elmbridge, where he claimed the badgers wouldn’t leave until they heard the first evening hoot of the resident tawny owl.
This intrigued me, as today, sixty years or so later, my local badgers are still waiting for the local tawny owls to call before they begin to emerge! Perhaps this is a learned behaviour passed down many generations.
Anyone who has spent time watching badgers at their sett will know that they spend a significant amount of their time grooming. The most prolonged bouts of grooming tend to occur shortly after emergence from the sett, but it is not uncommon to see a badger sit down and scratch in the middle of feeding. As well as grooming themselves, they also groom other clan members, a behaviour known as allogrooming.
When badgers groom themselves, they tend to do so sitting down or lying on one side or the other, particularly to groom that side. While self-grooming, a badger will focus on its stomach, legs, tail and face.
Some attempts are made to groom parts of the rump, back and shoulders, but badgers can’t contort themselves to groom every part of their bodies.
This is where allogrooming becomes vital to a badger’s grooming and, subsequently, its health routine.
Badgers direct their attention to the areas that the badger being groomed cannot reach during allogrooming, which results in different proportions of grooming directed to each segment of the body. One thing is clear, though, that badgers have the “responsive rule, which dictates that grooming can be initiated generously but rapidly withdrawn”.
In other words, one badger will start to spontaneously groom another and, if the recipient reciprocates, will continue until one stops. If the recipient doesn’t return, the initiating badger will stop! One thing I have noticed with mutual grooming is that the shoulders are frequently the initiation site when grooming a new partner.
Badgers in the wild can live for as long as 15 years. However, most badgers die young, and the average life span is just three years.
Earlier this week, I watched the Badgers during a short but intense thunderstorm. Although some noises can disturb badgers and delay their emergence, thunder, lightning, and even hailstones did not seem to bother them. It seems that badgers associate thunder with rain and humidity, which can bring earthworms to the surface, providing a feeding opportunity. I believe that no wild animal is too perturbed by wet and stormy weather when there is a potential abundance of food to be enjoyed.
As June begins, the badger cubs have been weaned and have become familiar with their surroundings. They now possess enough confidence to scavenge for food alongside other members of their clan or even independently. During this time of the year, badgers frequently sleep in day nests above ground.
Scratching is another cleaning behavior that badgers perform, and it’s very entertaining to watch. Badgers may scratch fence posts or other suitable objects in addition to tree trunks. When they scratch, they get up on their hind legs and reach as high as they can with their front paws, then bring them down and scrape against the wood. This improves their muscle tone and cleans mud from their claws. Some people believe that it is one way of marking their territories, and all of these reasons are probably true.
Another change is that the badgers will now travel much further at night. The male badgers can be gone for many hours and have been seen in neighbouring villages, up to 4 to 8 kilometres away from the sett.
The females tend to stay closer to the sett. They tend to move slowly and cover a similar area to the males in spring.
I hope you enjoyed spending time with the Badgers this spring. Please check out our Badgers in Winter or Badger Ecology and Biology articles. Wildlife Matters will return to watch our local badgers again later in the year.