My British badger safari
When I first spied a black-and-white nose bobbing in the entrance to a sandy tunnel, I thought it was my imagination. But the trembling nose turned out to be an animal every bit as exotic – and black-and-white – as a zebra. My first badger sighting was as surreal as any safari, and not merely because it was in the unlikely surroundings of a canalside near Wolverhampton. Like most Britons, I’d never seen a live, wild badger. This secretive creature seems almost as alien to us as a bear or a wolf. While these more fearsome mammals have long fallen extinct in Britain, the badger has survived and is now our biggest carnivore, probably because it is so elusive.
We think we know badgers because we’ve grown up with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows and a great collection of fictional animals from Bill Badger to the badger on the House Of Hufflepuff’s coat of arms in Harry Potter. But when we see the real thing, it can astonish us.
My failure to encounter a real wild badger for so long was a shame because my grandma, Jane Ratcliffe, had a passion for the animal whose names are written into our landscape – from Badger’s Mount to Brockenhurst [Badger’s wood] and even Pately Bridge (‘pate’ is an old northern term for badger). I can recall the thrilling acrid pong of the garage at Grandma and Grandpa’s home in Cumbria. My sister and I would tiptoe across the floor, heave open the lid of the chest freezer, and stare, repelled and fascinated, at the yellow chicks, sticky with frost, that lay inside. Twice a day, the dead chicks would be fed to injured owls and falcons Grandma nursed back to health, alongside foxes, hedgehogs and grass snakes. The kings and queens of this menagerie, though, were the badgers.
Grandma was an ordinary housewife, but she had an extraordinary gift for nursing animals. In the 1960s, she watched badgers in the wild and was horrified to discover that men would dig them from their setts, often ‘baiting’ them with dogs that would rip these brave creatures apart. She began looking after injured badgers – not as pets but with the aim of returning them to the wild – and joined a campaign to force Parliament to pass a ground-breaking new law. Grandma travelled to the Royal Albert Hall and persuaded 7,000 Women’s Institute delegates to support a motion calling for badgers to be given legal protection. Eventually, the badger became the first wild land mammal in Britain to be given protection from persecution thanks to the 1973 Badgers Act.
By the time I was a child, Grandma no longer nursed badgers, partly because this law caused a steady decline in persecution. She passed away 13 years ago after a lifetime dedicated to wildlife and I didn’t give badgers much thought until the government announced that it would cull badgers to reduce bovine TB in cattle. I wondered what Grandma would have made of this, and began seeking out badgers in the countryside.
She would have been amused by my lack of success. Despite staying still and silent in the dark, I never saw a badger as I lurked outside setts in Somerset, Shropshire, Wales and Devon. Grandma perched up trees for hours, like an owl, because the best way to fox a badger’s super-sensitive nose is to climb a tree so your scent is lifted from the ground. When I tried, I realised tree branches are fiendishly uncomfortable after five minutes. I needed help to encounter badgers and so discovered people for whom these secretive animals are far from strange. I’d entered a parallel universe – Badgerlands – where these animals and people with a passion for them live unnoticed by most of society. Some farmers have good cause to dislike these animals but all we hear in the news are arguments about badgers, bovine TB and the controversial cull. Of course we need to fi nd a solution but this debate neglects the complexity of the badger’s life and the pleasure it gives to many people.
Jane Ratcliffe, Patrick Barkham's grandma
Finally, I found badgers: I spent an evening on a canalside in Wolverhampton; admired enormous urban badgers by a cemetery in Bristol; and met Don Hunford, an elderly resident of Benfl eet, Essex, who had studied badgers since the 1950s and remembered my grandma. I also visited badger scientists in Wytham Woods near Oxford, home to a denser population of wild badgers than anywhere else in the world. Even here, I still failed to see a badger.
Best of all, I became friends with Judy Salisbury, an 80-year-old who lives alone in a remote house in Cornwall. ‘People think I’m mad until they see the badgers,’ she said as we sat by her patio window in twilight. Every night for the last 25 years, Judy has prepared a banquet for her badgers – a washing-up bowl and old ice-cream tubs filled with sandwiches, grapes, peanuts and sausages (badgers love everything we do – even curry). After sunset, badgers began thrusting through her hedge and trotting on to her patio. Watching nine badgers as they ate Judy’s feast was enchanting. Here was a deep bond between an isolated person and a family of badgers ‘People say, “Aren’t you lonely down there on your own?”’ Judy told me.
‘I’ve never been lonely in my life. How can you be lonely down here?’
Badgerlands by Patrick Barkham is published by Granta, priced £18.99.
He described the badger, which he named Josiah, as ‘a small, at mattress, with a leg under each corner’.
But when this bottlefed mattress nipped too many prestigious ankles, it was donated to the Bronx Zoo.
Another politician who kept badgers, Owen Paterson, the British Environment Secretary, looked after two, called Bessie and Baz, as a boy. Naturalist Chris Packham also kept badgers as a child but one attacked his Subbuteo set. As he has stressed, the badger is a wild animal and cannot be domesticated in the same way as a dog.
We think we know badgers because we’ve grown up with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows and a great collection of fictional animals from Bill Badger to the badger on the House Of Hufflepuff’s coat of arms in Harry Potter. But when we see the real thing, it can astonish us.
My failure to encounter a real wild badger for so long was a shame because my grandma, Jane Ratcliffe, had a passion for the animal whose names are written into our landscape – from Badger’s Mount to Brockenhurst [Badger’s wood] and even Pately Bridge (‘pate’ is an old northern term for badger). I can recall the thrilling acrid pong of the garage at Grandma and Grandpa’s home in Cumbria. My sister and I would tiptoe across the floor, heave open the lid of the chest freezer, and stare, repelled and fascinated, at the yellow chicks, sticky with frost, that lay inside. Twice a day, the dead chicks would be fed to injured owls and falcons Grandma nursed back to health, alongside foxes, hedgehogs and grass snakes. The kings and queens of this menagerie, though, were the badgers.
Grandma was an ordinary housewife, but she had an extraordinary gift for nursing animals. In the 1960s, she watched badgers in the wild and was horrified to discover that men would dig them from their setts, often ‘baiting’ them with dogs that would rip these brave creatures apart. She began looking after injured badgers – not as pets but with the aim of returning them to the wild – and joined a campaign to force Parliament to pass a ground-breaking new law. Grandma travelled to the Royal Albert Hall and persuaded 7,000 Women’s Institute delegates to support a motion calling for badgers to be given legal protection. Eventually, the badger became the first wild land mammal in Britain to be given protection from persecution thanks to the 1973 Badgers Act.
By the time I was a child, Grandma no longer nursed badgers, partly because this law caused a steady decline in persecution. She passed away 13 years ago after a lifetime dedicated to wildlife and I didn’t give badgers much thought until the government announced that it would cull badgers to reduce bovine TB in cattle. I wondered what Grandma would have made of this, and began seeking out badgers in the countryside.
She would have been amused by my lack of success. Despite staying still and silent in the dark, I never saw a badger as I lurked outside setts in Somerset, Shropshire, Wales and Devon. Grandma perched up trees for hours, like an owl, because the best way to fox a badger’s super-sensitive nose is to climb a tree so your scent is lifted from the ground. When I tried, I realised tree branches are fiendishly uncomfortable after five minutes. I needed help to encounter badgers and so discovered people for whom these secretive animals are far from strange. I’d entered a parallel universe – Badgerlands – where these animals and people with a passion for them live unnoticed by most of society. Some farmers have good cause to dislike these animals but all we hear in the news are arguments about badgers, bovine TB and the controversial cull. Of course we need to fi nd a solution but this debate neglects the complexity of the badger’s life and the pleasure it gives to many people.
Jane Ratcliffe, Patrick Barkham's grandmaFinally, I found badgers: I spent an evening on a canalside in Wolverhampton; admired enormous urban badgers by a cemetery in Bristol; and met Don Hunford, an elderly resident of Benfl eet, Essex, who had studied badgers since the 1950s and remembered my grandma. I also visited badger scientists in Wytham Woods near Oxford, home to a denser population of wild badgers than anywhere else in the world. Even here, I still failed to see a badger.
Best of all, I became friends with Judy Salisbury, an 80-year-old who lives alone in a remote house in Cornwall. ‘People think I’m mad until they see the badgers,’ she said as we sat by her patio window in twilight. Every night for the last 25 years, Judy has prepared a banquet for her badgers – a washing-up bowl and old ice-cream tubs filled with sandwiches, grapes, peanuts and sausages (badgers love everything we do – even curry). After sunset, badgers began thrusting through her hedge and trotting on to her patio. Watching nine badgers as they ate Judy’s feast was enchanting. Here was a deep bond between an isolated person and a family of badgers ‘People say, “Aren’t you lonely down there on your own?”’ Judy told me.
‘I’ve never been lonely in my life. How can you be lonely down here?’
Badgerlands by Patrick Barkham is published by Granta, priced £18.99.
THE PRESIDENT’S UNLIKELY PET
Theodore Roosevelt, the US president, was such a fan of The Wind In The Willows he wrote a thankyou letter to Kenneth Grahame from The White House. No wonder, because during a tour of the Wild West, Roosevelt had been handed an American badger cub (Taxidea taxus, a di erent species from the European badger) as a gift from a small girl.He described the badger, which he named Josiah, as ‘a small, at mattress, with a leg under each corner’.
But when this bottlefed mattress nipped too many prestigious ankles, it was donated to the Bronx Zoo.
Another politician who kept badgers, Owen Paterson, the British Environment Secretary, looked after two, called Bessie and Baz, as a boy. Naturalist Chris Packham also kept badgers as a child but one attacked his Subbuteo set. As he has stressed, the badger is a wild animal and cannot be domesticated in the same way as a dog.