Badgertime REV

Badgers on  a summer evening   

People often ask me if having such a large numbers of badgers regularly in my small back garden causes destruction and mess. Don't these filthy, verminous animals spread pestilence and smear your garden with their mess, threaten your children and pets, undermine your foundations and threaten the future of civilization as we know it, they inquire. 

No, I explain with a smile, the worst that the badgers have done is to unearth a few recently planted flowers (they deftly move them out of the way to find the worm that they somehow know lurks beneath - the worm being their main form of sustenance); and there is the occasional small 'whiffle-hole' (more worm hunting) in the lawn. But these holes are small and easily fixed.

And as for mess, the badgers use a communal latrine (I don't know where it is) but they leave no mess whatsoever behind (which is more than you can say of the local cats). 

As an additional bonus the badgers have kept the snail and slug population at an all time low - and my hostas and other plants are thus doing exceptionally well.

Below badgers in the rain. These two minutes of badgertime were taken over successive nights and the third film shows what these area of lawn looks like in the day time and the arrival of the first day-time visitor.