Tales from the Wood – The Diary of a Badger Watching Man

Sorry about the poor quality phone pic.  Badger courtesy of the Natural History Museum in Tring – a fascinating Victorian menagerie of stuffed animals.

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I may be just a grumpy old man with a sore toe, but there are some things that I can’t let pass without comment. The government has announced that it will go ahead with the widely ill-advised badger cull.  The details of how the government proposes to go about this cull are even worse than [...]

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Sunday evening started off hot, humid and still.  The brisk walk up the hill to the wood left me sticky and winded, while the dark clouds gathering overhead showed that the breathless weather would soon break. The wheat in the wheatfield is ripening.  I was pleased to see a new badger dung pit with fresh [...]

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There have been rumours that, given my lack of success with badgers this year, I’ve been resorting to crudely faked pictures. I deny this completely.  I think this picture speaks for itself…

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I was driving to work early this morning, and there, at the side of the road, was what looked very much like a dead polecat.  It is true that most people don’t get excited by dead polecats, but I’m not like most people and this one was just a few hundred yards from my home.  [...]

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OK.  I may be busy at the moment, but that doesn’t of course mean that I’m not perfectly aware of what the government is planning to do to England’s badgers.  Not only is the proposed cull wholly unscientific, they’re planning to do it on the cheap by asking farmers to shoot the badgers on their [...]

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I got a pleasant surprise in the garden this evening.  I was checking my wasp trap (we have lots of wasps at the moment) when there was a frantic sound of wings flapping.  I looked up and there, not ten feet away on the lawn, was a sparrowhawk, a small bird clutched in its talons. [...]

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