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

Winter Oak

On Monday it snowed.  We had about 4-6 inches of snow, but it was enough to paralyse the whole of the UK.  Everything ground to a halt – the roads jammed up or closed, the trains were cancelled, and even the London buses stopped running for the first time ever.

I woke up at 5.30am as usual, saw the snow and decided to work from home, which I’m luckily able to do.  But once again my thoughts were on tracking, with visions of following badger trails across the pristine fields of snow.  By 9.30 in the evening I’d got dressed up and slipped out into the freezing night.

You may think that I’m eccentric for going out in the middle of the night during the worst snow the UK has seen for 18 years.  You may find it difficult to understand my excitement and wonder why I didn’t sit by the fire in the warm like everyone else.

Let me explain.  I’ve been watching badgers for three years now, and I’ve got closer to them than most people ever do.  I’ve sat by their setts and watched them come out in the evening, and I’m starting to understand their behaviour.

But there’s a whole big part of the badgers’ life that I know very little about.  Every evening they leave the sett and spend the night foraging.  I’ve caught brief glimpses of them as they range about their territory, but the truth is that it’s still a mystery to me.

Tracking has helped me fill in some of the blanks.  An animal’s tracks are an enduring record of its movements, so they help you to piece together its activities.  As well as being a fascinating pastime in its own right, tracking adds to my overall picture of badger behaviour.

But if tracking is like reading a book, then it’s a book with only one or two legible words on each page and most of the pages missing.  You can only track in areas of soft ground, so most of the picture remains hidden.

But snow, now!  Snow gives you the chance to see the whole picture, if only for a night.   Imagine spending months and years trying to understand a book from a few isolated words, and then imagine having the chance to see the whole story, page after glorious page.  Given the chance, wouldn’t you want to get out there for a look?  Isn’t that worth a walk on a snowy night?

So – out into the cold night I went.  Actually, it wasn’t too bad.  Because of the snow it was light enough to see without a torch, and it was exhilarating to be out when the rest of the world was tucked up in bed.

When I got to the pasture field, it was everything I had hoped for.  There were tracks of rabbits, and a fox, and some people with a sledge; but there amongst them were the clear tracks of badgers, no more than an hour or two old.

Thinking about it afterwards, Monday night reflected my development as a tracker.  When I first started tracking, I was excited to find tracks and identify the animals that made them.  So it was on Monday, and I was delighted to find clear badger tracks in the snow.

Here’s a badger forepaw – note the claws, the big pad and the toes like peas in a pod:

Track of badger's forepaw - note the claws

Here’s a badger track as you often find them, showing the rear foot superimposed on the front one:

Badger tracks showing registration

But recognising tracks is only the first part of learning to track.  The interesting thing is using the tracks to tell you about the behaviour of the animal.  I spent two hours in the field, following the tracks of four different badgers.  This was a priceless experience – for the first time I was able to get a real understanding of their movements.  I could see where they had dug into the snow for food:

Following the badger as it foraged

I could even see where they relieved themselves:

Badger urine (makes a change from pictures of dung!)

Mind you, with badgers nothing is simple.  This is just as likely to be scent marking as anything else (see my post on why badgers use paths for more details).

The next level of tracking is not just understanding the individual animals, but understanding how they interact with each other and with their environment.  I followed the tracks of each badger as they meandered across the field, but where the tracks crossed an interesting thing happened.  You could clearly see where the second badger had come across the tracks of the first – it would double back or walk in parallel for a short distance.  This happened on every occasion the tracks crossed, so the badgers were obviously aware of each other, presumably by scent, and checked out each others’ tracks.

Badger tracks interacting

It was absolutely fascinating to see how the different trails interacted.  At one point in the field the tracks of four different badgers converged.  One of these trails came out of the wood, went to this very spot, turned round and went back again.  This cannot be coincidence – this was obviously an illustration of some badger behaviour I don’t yet understand.

Four badger trails converging

Wandering around a snow-covered field in the middle of the night with a torch is probably not everyone’s idea of a good time, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  I learnt more about the foraging activities of my badgers than I have done in years.  I learnt about the routes they took and the way in which they interact.  By following the tracks I’ve revised my ideas about the size of their territory (bigger than I suspected) and the boundary markers they use.

Two hours went by quickly, and then it was time for bed.  While the rest of the country ground to a halt, I had a wonderful evening of tracking.  Like I always say, this sort of thing is out there for anyone willing to take a look.

Frosty fields

Well, we’re ten days into 2009, and so far the only way to describe the year is ‘cold’.

The temperatures have not been much above freezing for two weeks, with night-time temperatures as low as -10 degrees Celsius.

I spent the New Year on the North Wales coast.  Normally this part of the country is quite mild, as the sea acts as a huge storage heater and keeps the temperatures up.  This year, however, the sand on the beach was frozen solid, and even the rock pools had a thick layer of ice.   It was really cold.

Chinese Water Deer in a frosty paddock

Back in Bedfordshire, the weather has been even colder.  Since most of our house has no heating we’re regularly having to scrape the ice from the inside of the windows in the morning.  We go out each day with a kettle of hot water to defrost the water in the chicken’s drinker, as it freezes solid overnight.

I’m not complaining,
mind you.  It’s quite fun to dress up in warm clothes and get outside, and I’d much rather have this sort of cold, clear weather than the murky drizzle we get so often.

Tracking is almost impossible at the moment, as the ground is like stone.  I came across a fresh fox track on December 27th, just before the frost started.  It is still there today, and looking almost as fresh, fossilised in the hard, icy ground.

The best thing that happened this week was on Monday, when it snowed.  It was only a couple of inches or so, but it got me more excited than you can imagine.  This is the first snow since I started learning tracking, and I was itching for the opportunity to go out and look at the tracks.  I had visions of being able to follow perfect crisp tracks for mile after mile, and to see the full pattern of animal movements written across the snowy ground.

I was working for a long day on Monday, but on Tuesday I managed to get out for an hour or so in the early morning before work.  There were already thousands of tracks from the previous 24 hours.

Here’s an easy one to start with.  Here’s the tracks of our cat, Mayfield.  She was originally a farm cat, and she’s not at all put off by cold weather.  Here you can see the print of her back legs as she sat in the snow.

The cat sat on the... snow

Our local fox has been quite active lately.  As long as he keeps away from my chickens then I’m happy to have him around.  Since the chickens have a de-luxe high security run (which they still escape from every now and then), there isn’t much danger to them.

Here’s the fox’s tracks.  Note that the fox, unlike the dog, has an almost perfect register.  This means that the rear feet go into the tracks left by the front feet, so the track looks like they have two feet rather than four.  You can see here that there is only slight overlap to show that there are two prints on top of each other.

Fox tracks

The vast majority of tracks were from rabbits.  In fact, there were so many rabbit tracks that they obscured almost all the others.  Here is a classic rabbit track.

Rabbit track

The direction of travel in this case is from left to right.  The two small prints close together on the left are the front paws, and the larger tracks on the right are the rear paws.  When hopping, the rear paws ‘overtake’ the front paws, leaving a track that seems backwards.

Some of these rabbit tracks are quite impressive.  Look at the tracks immediately above the stick.  There are two sets of rabbit tracks – one at either end of the stick – representing a single bound.  Ignore the trail going from bottom left to top left, and the one across the top of the picture.

Bounding rabbit tracks

The direction of travel is from right to left, with the rear paws quite far ahead of the front ones. This rabbit was obviously bounding along at a fast pace.  The stride length was 120cm, which is a big distance for a rabbit to travel in mid-air.  Actually, the guidebooks give a stride length of 80cm for a rabbit, so this one must have been really sprinting.  It may even have been a hare, as hares have strides of up to 250cm, but the tracks themselves looked like the other rabbit tracks, so perhaps I’ve got a record-breaking rabbit on my hands.

Frustratingly, there were no badger tracks in the area.  I was longing for the chance to trail a badger through the snow, and to try and build up a picture of it’s nightly movements, but it was not to be.  Perhaps badgers don’t like snow.  The hard frost would mean that even a badger would find it difficult to dig up food.

I decided to have one last try at finding badger tracks before the snow melted, and after work I set off for the wood where the main badger sett is.  I had an idea that I might be able to find tracks in the pasture field, as I know they forage there and I’ve seen them in that area before.

I walked up to the wood at about 10.00pm (I worked late!).  The half-moon and the snow on the ground made it quite possible to wander around without a torch.  Unfortunately, by the time I arrived, the pasture field had been trodden over by the resident sheep, countless rabbits, and a solitary human.  Finding individual tracks was almost impossible.

On the borders of the wood though, I came across a trail that looked right for a badger, and I was able to follow it into the wood itself.  There, on the undisturbed snow, were two lines of badger tracks – one going away from the wood and one going back into it.

Badger track in snow

And there they were – a little distorted, but unmistakeably badger tracks.  It seems that only a single badger had been out foraging – the others probably had more sense and stayed warm underground.

I didn’t get the chance to follow badger trails as they wandered across a pristine field of snow, but it was fun to go out and look for them.  I hope that we get more snow this winter – ideally at the weekend – so I can go out and spend hours literally following in the footsteps of the wildlife.  In the meantime, may the Protector of All Small Beasts look after the animals and birds and see them safely through the cold spell.