The great outdoors: On the trail of fact after the mysterious departure of our badgers

There had been a badger survey. When it alighted on my neck of the woods it concluded that the badgers had gone. I was stopped one day by a casual acquaintance and told the surveyor had been and did I know there were no badgers left? This was bad news, but only if it were true.

There are two ways to respond to such news. You can trust the source and take it at face value, or you can distrust the source. The survey found nothing and concluded there was nothing to be found. I find fault with that particular methodology.

National survey like that one produce a snapshot of a moment in time in many different places.

I incline towards the opposite way of working. I produce many snapshots in one place over many years. I believe the results are more trustworthy, not least because if I discover a well-established presence has become an absence, I cast around to see if it has simply moved somewhere else in the neighbourhood.

I have chosen to work a territory for many years now, crossing and re-crossing the same landscape, compiling and constantly revising a mental map. So the survey’s conclusion surprised me.

The sett is an old one and has been continuously occupied for more than 40 years to my certain knowledge, and quite possibly for several times longer than that. This one was both old and undisturbed, and it was well hidden. So, unless the landowner had taken a sudden dislike to badgers, it was difficult to explain their absence. On the other hand, it does sometimes happen that a sett “goes cold” but when it does, the explanation is usually obvious and man-made. So I went in search of an explanation.

The sett lies in a woodland clearing. The wood itself is a thing of beauty – oak and ash, beech and birch, sycamore and Scots pine, rowan and willow.

I sought out the beginning of a path the width of one walking badger, which I know of old.

I evolved a theory as I walked. If the survey was correct, I guessed the little path would have been consumed and would be difficult to find. But if it was still clearly defined, that would mean that, at the very least, there were still enough badgers in the area to maintain one of their oldest routes.

Not all badgers from the same sett use all their paths all the time, and a sett like this one radiates paths to almost every compass point. Even a single badgerless week at could be enough to diminish the path’s imprint.

I looked down the bank. A holly tree stood before me and I remembered the badger path veered away just beyond it. So I skirted the tree and there was the path. But its appearance was inconclusive. There was not a scrap of bare earth, but I remembered was a path of bare earth.

Perhaps there had been a hiatus, or perhaps now there were too few badgers to maintain a path so far from the sett, or perhaps they mostly avoided it.

I descended the far side of the bank and closed in on the sett. Its clearing was gently domed and the heart of the sett was just below the crown of the dome where a single rowan tree provided a marker. I studied the clearing through binoculars. At that distance it did look as if it might have gone cold.

The entrance holes were hidden but if the sett was busy there would have been spoil heaps of freshly dug earth lolling down the slope and shaped like the panting tongues of big dogs. There was none.

An old wall and a line of beech trees defined the clearing at its nearest edge. I was 50 yards from the nearest beech, 150 from the solitary rowan. I was intent on the rowan and its surroundings when I felt an awareness, as tangible as an itch, one of the fruits of hundreds of badger-watching hours.

It is among the most priceless of the tools of my trade, that impulse to stop what you are doing and change direction.

So I looked along the line of the wall and there, at the base of the third beech trunk, was the head and chest and forepaws of a substantial boar badger, sitting upright and staring at me. In this kind of situation, my job becomes almost laughably easy, for it demands of me that I do nothing. The badger has the difficult job – to decide what to make of my shape’s intrusion into his landscape. Perhaps he had just caught sight of me at that moment as he stepped beyond the beech tree. Or he may have been watching for some time. The wind would not help him for the moment, as it blew towards me, not him.

He looked relaxed. He sat back like a bear and scratched under his chin and in his chest fur. He stood and shook himself like a wet dog, then sat again. His eyes had never left me, but badger eyes only tell a badger so much. They are not the keenest of his senses.

He advanced a few paces out into the open. My guess about this gesture was that I should be left in no doubt about his size and his power. He raised his muzzle and sniffed the air for some time. If my presence troubled him, he had a choice: go back underground or circle behind me for a clearer scent.

He did neither. He appeared to dismiss my threat, turned on his own length and trudged away so that at once he was hidden behind the wall and the big trees.

So I followed a hunch.
I crossed the slope above the wall with all the discretion I could muster until I could see the area where he had been. He was still there. He had only moved a few yards and he was still grooming. More importantly, I could see he was sitting in the midst of a very well populated badger village. There were holes everywhere, heaps and heaps of fresh earth, many flattened by the hijinks of new cubs. The centre of activity was near him but there were three more entrances near me, each with its own doormat of excavated earth.

So the survey had got it wrong. The sett had not gone cold. It had just gone 100 yards uphill and was thriving. I watched for another hour. That boar badger eventually wandered off into the woods. My initial thought was he could have been the first to emerge, for I had arrived early. But after a badgerless hour, I concluded he had been the last to emerge from the sett.

But I didn’t care. I had found what I came for. It was enough to know that all was well, and to know that in an east wind there was a fine seat on a fallen tree trunk where I could watch whenever I chose.

I still don’t know why they moved uphill. I do know now they have beaten a new path between the two setts and at least two of the old holes have been reopened. And I know why they didn’t move far, thanks to an old friend who explained why some setts appear to have gone cold and then suddenly revitalise. He simply said, “Once a badger sett, always a badger sett.”