Some sad tales but a as always there is hope.

For many years I have been monitoring a number of badger setts. The cull which came late to our part of the world had a devastating effect. Of the six setts that I regularly monitored only one currently is occupied and that until recently by a solitary sow. But activity has increased around the sett. Perhaps it’s last year’s cubs being moved out, it’s rare that badgers let their young stay more than a season, space has to be found for the cubs that are born in late January and February.

Ten years ago there were eight badgers occupying the sett. Four adults and four cubs. Gradually the numbers diminished partly naturally and partly because of some interference, and in the end I suspect that it was the cull that did for them.

For a while during the pandemic I was diverted to the plight of another badger in a different sett that had for one of its front paws caught in bailer twine. For a week I watched him hobble about. I decided to call on some help and the late and much missed Debbie Bailey along with Sheila Stubbs stepped in. I had observed that there were four badgers in the clan. The injured boar, his sow and two cubs So we set four traps and baited them over a period of a week.

The setting the traps itself was a task and a half. The sett was in what had become a popular gathering place and as the first lock down came to an end and the weather got warmer, crowds of feral youths and drunk middle aged men gathered and littered and generally despoiled the place. But more of that in a later post perhaps.

Amazingly on the first night that we set the traps to activate when a badger attracted by the peanuts strategically placed within the cage, the injured one obliged, and so at 3.30 am on a warm but gloomy morning, we were able to untie his paw and administer painkillers and antibiotics. What was remarkable was how calm he was, almost as if he knew we were helping. Either that or resignation to his fate. Badgers are stoic creatures.

He survived albeit with a limp for another two years until over the space of two weeks all four badgers disappeared and the sett became inactive. Perhaps it was the cull that took them? Perhaps it was old age that took the injured badger? We will never know.

Even now when I think about him or talk about him I feel a sadness, that is even more profound when I go and check on the sett. It remains abandoned, overgrown. A sad place even when the Spring sun filters through the trees. A place that once was full of life, now silent with just some Spring flowers, a memorial, a legacy for the family, the little clan, of badgers that lived there quietly and peacefully for so many years.