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

Baby carrier - this season's must-have outdoor accessory

The weather has been beautiful for the past couple of weeks – dry and warm during the day, with a pleasant, cool crispness in the evenings.  Perfect autumn weather.

To celebrate the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, we’ve been making cider in the village.  It turns out that a lot of us have got surplus apples that tend to go to waste, so we’ve got together and formed a cider collective.  Everyone has pooled equipment, knowledge and labour.  A couple of days of enthusiastic effort involving a garden shredder (!), two cider presses and many willing hands have given us 240 pints of home-made cider brewing away nicely.  It’s been a great way to bring people together and use the local produce, although I suspect there’ll be some sore heads when we have our Cider Festival at some point in the spring.

As predicted, I haven’t had much time for the badgers lately.  Having a young baby (that feeds every three hours, regular as clockwork) takes up a lot of my free time.  However, one of my duties is to give mummy some time off at the weekend, so I’ve been taking some gentle strolls outside.  Nothing too strenuous, you understand, just around the local fields and footpaths near the house.  For obvious reasons I don’t want to be going too far away just yet.

The baby carrier makes it easy to walk around and Scarlett is quite happy in it – she just falls asleep and stays asleep, even though I point out interesting things such as muntjac deer, badger tracks and fox poo.  Not to worry – I have a nice walk outside, the gentle rocking motion of walking seems soothing for Scarlett, while Mrs BWM gets some time to unwind and relax with the rest of us out of the house.