I think it’s time I got back to some serious badgerology.
I was up at the wood on Saturday, and an interesting evening it was too. Firstly, the badgers have started feeding on the wheat in the wheat field. This seems to become a regular food source as soon as it ripens. The badgers seem to have a simple way of getting at the wheat – they trample down the stalks and then pull off the grain. You can see the patches where they have been feeding.
These feeding signs are accompanied by fresh dung, full of wheat. In this case, there is quite an impressive amount.
The badgers use this field all year (I see their tracks), but the latrines only appear when they are feeding on the wheat. Now, it could be that wheat has an effect on their digestion that makes latrines necessary, but my guess is that it is probably territorial. The wheat fields are a major food resource, so it makes sense that each badger clan will try and claim it as their territory, marking it out with latrine sites. When there is no food, there is no need to mark it, hence the latrines only occur when the wheat is ripe. I must get round to some more of the latrine sites to see which ones contain wheat. That would be interesting, to find out which badgers have been feeding here.
When I arrived, the local buzzard was flying from tree to tree, calling all the time. I could see it through binoculars, perched high up on a branch. I don’t know why buzzards call like this. It is too late for mating, so perhaps it is a territorial display.
I tried to record the sound using the video function on my camera. You can’t actually see the buzzard on the video, but turn the volume up and you should hear its cry. It kept this noise up for over an hour!
At 8.30 a badger emerged briefly from the western sett entrance and then almost immediately went back underground. Ten minutes later the cub did the same. They seemed nervous. It sounds strange, but badgers seem to be afraid of buzzards. A buzzard would have no chance of carrying off even a half-grown badger, yet I’ve seen an entire family of badgers dive for cover when one passed overhead.
Five minutes later a badger came out and trotted off to the west, followed five minutes later by another, and then another and another, all at five minute intervals. None of them stayed near the sett entrance. This means that there were at least four badgers in this half of the sett.
Another ten minutes passed and badgers five and six emerged from the same hole. As they did so, the badgers at the east end of the sett came out into a clearing, foraging, playing and, amusingly, trying to climb trees. I counted five badgers in the group, which, plus the two at the west, gave a total of seven badgers visible at the same time.
One noteworthy behaviour was a fight that developed between two adult badgers. Badgers will usually engage in some rough and tumble play or play-fighting, but this was more serious. It ended with one badger running off, hotly pursued by the other. I could hear their noises at least a hundred yards off; for them to go this far meant it was serious. Perhaps this was an issue about dominance being acted out.
The other interesting event of the night was a fox that trotted past. This must one of the cubs from earlier in the year. I tried Pablo’s trick of calling in a fox by making a high-pitched squeaking noise (see here for a very impressive video), and blow me, it worked! The fox changed direction and came trotting up to the base of my tree!
It obviously felt that something wasn’t right, but I was sitting very still and was well camouflaged. So the fox did a very cunning thing – it walked round my tree in a big circle.
I’ve read about this behaviour but never seen it before. It happens when an animal such as a fox is not sure about you, so they circle round to get downwind so they can check you out. Clever little fox! Since I was in a tree and there was virtually no wind I must have passed the test, for the fox carried on wandering about. It was too dark for pictures, but I watched through the binoculars. The fox was young – its coat sleek and perfect, quite unlike the scruffy urban foxes we got in London. I know that foxes aren’t everyone’s friend, and I know the damage they can do, but they’re still beautiful creatures when you see them in their element.
Hi Badgerman,
Thought I would add this comment before you get a torrent of angry emails from farmers.
A farmer friend of mine, George, who also happens to like badgers, occasionally got calls from other farmers when they noticed that badgers had been eating wheat or oats (oats are the badgers favourite, also eat wheat but not so keen on barley). He used to visit each farm, listen to the outraged farmer point out the damage and then get out a piece of paper and a calculator and work out the actual (tiny) cost of the wheat eaten. He would then offer to pay the farmer for the damage and reach into his pocket for some loose change. There would then be an embarressed silence and shuffling of feet as the complainant farmer would then realise that he was acutally make a fuss about virtually nothing.
George always told me that loads of grain gets lost in the harvesting process and that the amount badgers consume is paltry in comparison.
I have also observed that badgers do an excellent job of digging up rat & mouse nests, so that they can gobble up the contents i.e. nestling rats & mice. Consequently I think that badgers probably save far more of the crop than they eat!
Hi Badgerman,
Its me again, Josie! Just had to say I have just heard a discussion on the Jeremny Vine show, Radio Two, about Buzzards attacking people.
A jogger in Kent was attacked by a Buzzard whilst out for the daily run. He felt something fairly large hit him in the back of the head and saw the buzzard flying off. He had no warning of the imminent attack, but was realatively unshocked by it and only decided to walk home when blood started trickling down his face.
He sustained a few superficial scratches to the back of the head and got a tetanus jab as a precaution.
A 19 year old girl was also ‘swooped’ by the same buzzard. A bird expert rang up to say that they were defending the nest and obviously say the jogger as a threat.
His advice to stave off Buzzard Attack was to wear a hat and if you are lucky enought to see the attack coming raise astick above you head – apparently the buzzard always attacks the highest point. Some one suggested it would be more humane to use a stick of rhubarb 🙂
So no wonder the badgers are a bit skittish around the buzzards!
Hopefully you should be ok Badgerman, what with your hat and tracking stick!
Hi Josie
Yes, it’s good point well made about the wheat. The amount involved is insignificantly small compared to the other wastage that goes on between growing and harvest. The damage done by wind and rain is far, far greater, to say nothing of the accidental damage during the harvesting process. I like your friend George’s approach though. It puts it all in perspective. I’ll keep it in mind if I ever find myself in that situation.
As for the buzzard, yes, that is quite scary. I saw the pictures of the chap with the blood on his face. Having seen buzzards pretty close up I’m definitely keeping my hat on in the future!
LOL ;-0
Oh dear, I think I am addicted to the badger blog!
Just wanted to say how brilliant the blog is and how excellent the pics & vids are.
Looking again at the pic of wheat above, I realise just how good it is as it really shows the zig-zag track that badgers can make through the crop. I think it was Earnest Neal who said that this happens because the badgers bend down some stalks of wheat with one paw at a time and use alternate paws.
When I have watched them eating wheat and oats in the field I have noticed that they keep one paw on the bent stalks of wheat whilst they munch and the second paw seems to go up before the other paw is really ready to relinquish its grip on the flattened wheat. Typical badger gluttony!
The absolute best bit about watching badgers eat oats is the noises they make. I remember badger watching with my friend Hazel and on the way home from the sett we came across a group of three badgers eating oats. The noises they made; the grunts of delight, the smacking of lips and appreciative munching were so comical that we had trouble stifling our giggles, I had tears of laughter rolling down my face!
If you get the chance to follow your badgers into the wheat fields with some sound recording equipment, Badgerman, you wont be dissappointed!
Interesting stuff about the badger latrines. I’m convinced that these act as territory markers.
There’s a number of seperate latrines (up to eight scrapes) in one small 10 meter by 10 meter area very near a wheat field. My guess is that a number of clans are trying to claim this area.
Well done on the fox call. Now try it with a Barn owl. It should have the same effect. I noiced the circling bit as well. The fox in the video was going to do that until I moved.
Pablo.
Thanks Pablo. We seem to have a shortage of Barn Owls around here, but we’re full of Tawnies. I may try it with them and see what happens (probably the same thing that happened to the jogger and the buzzard…)
As for the badger latrine, yes, it does sound like a territory marker. I’ve got the same sort of thing on the boundary of territories here.
And Josie – thanks as ever for your comments – I think you should be writing this instead of me! I value your badger experience very much.
You suggest watching the badgers as they feed. Well, I’ve only managed fleeting glimpses of the badgers as they forage, but all that is about to change. Keep watching this space…!
Aww, thanks Badgerman – but I love to hear your badgering tales – keep them coming.
Good luck with following badgers on their foraging trips, can’t wait to see what you get up to .
I have found that the trick is to only move when they have got there heads down snuffling or munching stuff. When they are doing that they are making so much noise that they are less likely to hear you!
I recently walked along the edge of a cornfield and remembered how, as a child, I would love plucking the heads off and throwing them like darts. My mother would chastise me for ‘wasting the farmer’s money’. Even at that tender age I knew it made no sense whatsoever.
This time around I decided to get a rough estimate for the number of stalks in the field. I counted the number of stalks – roughly – for ten strides, then worked out how many that would be squared. Then I did ten lots of ten strides and took a rough guess at how many stalks were in the field.
There were over a billion. For a moderately sized field (moderate for Buckinghamshire anyway).
Now, this is me being extremely rough and ready in my calculations but even if I were a factor of ten or a hundred out, we’re still talking millions if not hundreds of millions.
I doubt that field would account for even a million pounds of income for the farmer. So yes, damage to a small part of that field would undoubtedly be worth just a few pence. And a few stalks wouldn’t be worth the admin to recoup!