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

Damp, still nights aren’t the best for badger watching.  The moist air carries your scent further, and since badgers rely heavily on their sense of smell there’s a greater chance of them detecting you.  Nevertheless, 7.30pm found me in my favourite tree.

It was good to be back again, to put on the camouflage jacket and assume my secret identity.  There’s something liberating about it.    I was the Badger Watching Man once more.  I imagine that Superman must feel the same way when he casts away Clark Kent and becomes himself again.

At 7.58pm a fox appeared from one of the holes in the middle area of the sett.  This is an interesting development.  I wonder if he’s taken up residence permanently?  I’ll see if this is a regular occurrence.

At 8.20pm the first badgers appeared.  Two adults ambled across from the eastern end of the sett, joined almost immediately by three others from what looks like a very active entrance on the west.

I am pleased to say that I still get a thrill from seeing badgers.  This is my fourth year of badger watching, but the sight of these big, bold beasts still impresses me.  The idea that such animals can exist almost under our noses is amazing.

In no time at all there were at least seven adult badgers outside the sett (badgers are notoriously difficult to count).  There were at least ten badgers last year, including cubs, so I’m curious to see how the number has changed.  This time of year is when the male badgers tend to leave the sett, so I’ll see if I can get a better idea of numbers and try and work out if this has happened.  I’ve got a better understanding of how badgers leave and join other setts since reading Hans Kruuk’s The Social Badger, so when I get a chance I’ll put a brief summary on here.

As well as the usual scratching and rolling round, I was treated to a view of badger sex.  At the risk of being labelled as some sort of wildlife peeping tom, I watched this with interest.  Badgers have a complex reproductive life, but the females are fertile very soon after cubs are born, and badgers can mate at any time of year.

Badger under my tree

By now it was getting dark, and I had badgers all around me.  It was still just possible to see them using binoculars (binoculars gather more light than the naked eye, hence you can often see more with them when the light is failing). I took my first ever picture of a badger using the flash on my camera.  I’ve never done this before for fear of spooking them, but after taking a few flash pictures in the pasture field in November without any serious impact on the badger, I decided to give it a go.  Luckily, the badger didn’t seem bothered.

The badgers were still snuffling around me quite happily, which put me in a dilemma.  My number one rule of badger watching is ‘don’t disturb the badgers’.  Unfortunately, if you’re up a tree with badgers all around, this means that you’re pretty much stuck there.  To climb down and appear in the middle of them would be very bad style.

By the time the snuffling and scuffling sounds had moved away it was pretty much dark.  If you’ve ever been in a rural wood on a dark and misty April night then you can imagine just how dark it gets.  Of course, it is just these occasions that make it a good idea to take a torch when badger watching.  I had one with me, but out of a perverse desire to avoid disturbance I didn’t use it.  Climbing down the tree by feel wasn’t elegant, but I got down in one piece.  Luckily I know these woods very well, but even so there were a few Blair Witch Project moments as I crept out, using my tracking stick in front of me like a blind man.

But that’s the joy of the whole thing.  To be out in a wood at night, with the deer barking and the tawny owls crying – I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

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It’s been a beautiful spring day – warm and sunny.  It’s a great feeling after the cold winter we’ve had.  The daffodils and the blackthorn are blooming, the hazels and hawthorns are in bud, and the first butterflies are up and about.  There was even a skylark up in the clear blue sky, giving a wonderful summer feel to the day.

I decided that today would be the perfect day for my first badger watching session of the year.  It is still a little early, as the badgers will only be emerging just as it is getting dark, but I thought I’d give it a go and see.

It was good to be back in the wood again.  A small herd of fallow deer crossed the path a hundred yards or so ahead of me, and the buzzard was flying round the trees.  I can never tire of watching the buzzard when it does this; there is is something truly wild about seeing and hearing such an impressive bird of prey at close quarters.

The wind was blowing from the right direction for me to sit in my favourite tree.  The good thing about watching badgers at this time of year is that the undergrowth has not yet grown up to block the view, so I could see the whole sett from my perch.  It looked like a number of sett entrances were in regular use, and the paths and play areas looked well trodden.  The badgers have obviously been busy.

I sat in the tree from 6.30pm until just after 8.00, but sadly the badgers did not oblige.  I did not see so much as a whisker on a stripey nose.  I guess they are still emerging after dusk.

By 8.10pm it was getting too dark to see, even with binoculars, so I called it a night.  Even without the badgers it was good to get out again, to just sit in a tree in a wood and do nothing.  And besides, it shows that even after four years of watching badgers I still can’t guarantee anything.  I’ll try again in a week or so.

Note to self: even though it’s a warm day, and you’re too hot when walking, after the sun has gone down and you’ve been sitting still for an hour it gets bloody freezing.  Wear your waistcoat or an extra jumper next time!

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I don’t know what it is, but I always find this time of year a bit melancholy and dreary.  The leaves are gone from the trees, the woods are quiet, the vegetable garden is sleeping and there is a cold, damp stillness over everything.  Summer seems a long way off.

Because of this, I decided that I needed to shake off the urge to sit in front of the fire for the next three months and get out and do something.  Over the last week or so the lack of badger-watching has been nagging at me, and I made up my mind to try and get a peep at the stripey devils.

As I’ve said before, I am not keen on the idea of using artificial lights by the sett for fear of disturbing the badgers, so I hatched a plan to try and see them as they foraged in the big pasture field.  There would still be a risk of disturbance, but not so great as there would be by shining lights on them as soon as they poked their noses above ground.  So – it was time for another late night excursion to the fields.

I’d seen a badger here the last time I tried it (see Fieldnotes: 2nd August 2008) so I was at least partly confident.  The problem was that sitting in a field for half the night in August is one thing.  Doing it in November is quite another.

As anyone who has spent time outdoors will know, it is perfectly possible to keep warm when you’re walking around.  Indeed, the challenge is often to avoid getting too hot.  When you’re just sitting in one place though, the chill seems to seep into your bones and even a mild night can be very cold.  Tonight was a cold night to begin with, with a sharp wind and a damp mist hanging over the fields.

What every badger watcher is wearing this season...

In anticipation of the cold, I dressed up in almost every article of clothing I possess – fleece trousers, thermal T-shirt, mountain walking fleece top (which I never wear when mountain walking because it gets too hot), army extreme cold weather shirt, jumper, waterproof jacket, mittens and fleece neckwarmer.  To top everything off I put on the furry Russian hat that my wife gave me.  I was all dressed up with somewhere to go, and at 10.30pm I headed off towards the fields.

God only knows what I looked like.  A couple of cars passed me as I walked through the village.  To the drivers I must have appeared in the headlights like a cross between a German soldier in the last days of the siege of Stalingrad and some strange Bedfordshire sasquatch!

Sitting on a log at the top of the field I was surprisingly warm and cosy.  As well I should have been, given the amount of gear I was wearing!  In an odd way it was nice to be there in winter, especially after having spent quite a bit of time on the same log over the summer.  It seemed to be taking things full circle in some way.

Night-time badger

I sat there for an hour or so, occasionally shining a torch around the field.  And then, just before midnight, a badger appeared.

It seemed quite unconcerned about me being there as it snuffled about finding worms in the grass.  I turned on my red torch and crept closer, until I was about 20 feet away.  This is the first badger I have seen for a few months now, and it was good just to stand there and watch it.  It was particularly interesting to watch it feeding, working methodically across the field with its nose to the ground, obviously sniffing out the next earthworm.

I took a couple of photos.  They aren’t the best badger pictures ever taken, but they are a first for me.  The badger didn’t seem too put off by the flash, but I didn’t want to make a nuisance of myself.

Night-time badger 2

After about five minutes it ambled off and I let it go.  For me, it was enough to have been out and about on a winters night, and to get a glimpse of one of these fascinating creatures.  I had satisfied my badger cravings for the time being.

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