A pint of badger

For the first time in my life I came nose to nose with a wild badger last week - just a thin pane of glass between us. My partner had organised a surprise outing to celebrate our anniversary and it was going to be down in the woods at dusk.

The hide was sunk into the earth at the foot of a hill in the woods: a hill riddled with badger holes. Once a large sett, it was now home to one sow and two boars. A cub born early in the year, after an exceptionally hard winter, had disappeared and is thought to have died.

A ranger sprinked peanuts in front of the window and we waited for the badgers to appear. A frog hopped over the woodland floor under some bracken, a wood mouse scurried nearby and tawny owls hooted from the tree tops.

A black and white mask flashed from the top of the hill. The sow lifted her snout repeatedly to scent the air and after a few minutes followed a round-about trail down to the peanut larder in front of the hide. Eventually she was joined by one boar, then the other - both with broader shield-shaped heads.

I'm sure they sensed our presence behind the glass, even though their eyesight is poor and we were sitting in darkness. From time to time, one would stop suddenly and look up in our direction, disturbed by a slight noise - their hearing and sense of smell are very acute. But mostly they busied themselves snuffling in the leaf litter for precious peanuts.

One of the boars stood up on his back legs and reached up with his front paws onto a half hollow tree stump directly in front of us. With surprising agility and lightness of movement, he pulled himself onto the stump and spent ten minutes picking nuts out of the hollow with his snout and claws. Somehow he looked very pleased with himself.

As the darkness thickened, the badgers made a final sweep of the area for any overlooked nuts, then trotted off into the woodland for their nightly forage. What a privilege to watch them from a front row seat. We retired to the pub over the road and ordered a round of Badger ale.

Badgers

Yesterday was a black and white-letter day for badgers when the Badger Trust won their appeal to stop the cull in Pembrokeshire. It reminded me that I've neglected this blog for far too long and prompted me to write up my badger-watching evening in early June.

It was pouring with rain as we headed uphill through woodland on a chalk scarp to a rudimentary bench positioned above an old sett. These holes are no longer in use as the badgers have moved along the hill, but they still remember the peanuts scattered by the local ranger and return to forage regularly.

Badgers are not the least bit bothered by a bit of rain, especially when it brings worms and other delicious morsels like slugs out into the open. Two badgers were rooting around on the edge of the slope when we arrived, but shot off on hearing our footfalls. A little later a shy rural fox eyeballed us from the meadow below, decided we were dangerous to know and trotted off.

After an hour, three badgers (an adult and two cubs) appeared in the field at the foot of the hill and two emerged from the woods higher up. Slowly they hoovered their way around the piles of nuts, snuffling audibly. They didn't even look up when a large herd of Ayrshire cattle trudged past the fence, mooing loudly and reaching up into the trees for new shoots.

My closest encounter came when a young badger popped up a few metres to my left from behind a large tree stump. He was so near, I could hear him munching peanuts and I'm amazed it took him ten minutes to catch my scent and make his exit.