Badger Diary

19 March, 2024

The badgers haven't returned for food and I suspect it's unlikely we'll see them again. More accurately, we wouldn't even recognise them if we did. Even badgers recognise each other by smell. Ordinarily our chances of recognising one is quite small. I

18 March, 2024

My hope that adding a branch and making some other changes to the enclosure would disrupt V's repetitive behaviour and help the badgers to settle down proved misplaced. This video clip reveals that she reverted to her "zoochotic" behaviour and, sadly, it became much more pronounced.

17 March, 2024

What a difference adding that branch apparently made. V's repetitive running back and forth was disrupted almost completely and for the first time the two badgers interacted as one would expect, chasing each other playfully for minutes at a time, which was both a relief and a delight

16 March, 2024

Only one badger emerged on the night of the 14th, at 1AM (on the 15th) and only for about 15 minutes – just long enough to knock the slate off a dish of food (including a fresh egg). It was an inclement night, wet and windy. Last night the weather was

14 March, 2024

The badgers emerged just after midnight on an initially dry and windy night. They first stuck their heads out from the depression visible to the left of the white rock beside the "bath" (at 11 o'clock) below, like striped periscopes, then surprising bulk of the rest

13 March, 2024

The badgers are still with us. The first emerged at about 1AM and the second about 20 minutes later. They stayed out, on a dry but somewhat wild windy night for about three hours. During that time they found their dishes, which I had moved away from the sett, and

12 March, 2024

Still no sign of the badgers. It was a wet night. Female badgers, especially pregnant ones, are known to often just stay underground at this time of the year in bad weather. Sometimes even for weeks if they have enough body fat, which these well fed badgers surely do. It

11 March, 2024

No sign of the badgers overnight. I checked the CCTV until well past the small hours. This morning revealed that their food was untouched and the rest of their used bedding straw left out for them before dark was sodden with some overnight drizzle. A trailcam I put on a

10 March, 2024

The ideal arrival begins with badgers simply going straight underground. To help ensure this, we made a "tent" of an old blanket over one of the sett entrances and put the crate in which the badgers were transported in it. To make the sett more inviting some old

9 March, 2024

This, in today's Irish Times, says a lot about the familiarity or lack of it with badgers in Ireland. Most people have never seen one and, as illustrated here, haven't a clue what a badger looks like. Meanwhile, our badgers have arrived this evening and been

2 March, 2024

A wet night, like the night before, which showed no badger activity on either the trailcam or, as far as I could tell, on CCTV. I deployed some additional trailcams to see if I could determine if the badgers are entering and exiting the wood where I think they might

29 February, 2024

One more visit for February: a dash into the wood – too fast for the trailcam! And back again later I wonder if they're last year's cubs whom we saw with adults when they were much smaller?

28 February, 2024

It's been some time since we had any resident badgers, and even longer since this site had any updates, but now we are ready for two new badgers, both females. One from Cork and one from Monaghan, both summer cubs now in the care of our friends at

25 November 2019

19th November A filthy wet night with continuous rain for 8 hours. I switched the camera on the sett to photos only but ... no photos. It seems Roger was in and out too quickly for the camera, but his food disappeared alright. 20th November Another wet night, but not so

18 November 2019

We had no visits to our end of the wood from wild badgers for several days (since the night of the dog on the loose). Naturally, whenever badgers don't visit one hopes it's just bad weather or random factors at work, not a cull or road

17 November 2019

4th November The cameras showed that Roger was out at 5PM. A few days ago it seemed there was more time to prepare his food in the evening but the clocks changing and the shortening days seem to compress the time available. Overnight he at all of his food except.

2 November 2019

I moved the cameras last night, having seen a few too many clips of a wet badger's fluffy rear end at one entrance. One badger on his own is unlikely to provide much interesting "footage" (like this [https://www.badgerdiary.net/christmas-2015/]), but it's

1 November 2019

It was raining hard last evening when Roger's dish was left out for him, so he was introduced to the idea of a board placed on his dish for the first time. As expected he knocked it off and ate the lot, including a generous handful of acorns

31 October 2019

Fresh batteries in the cameras and a warmer night resulted in good collection of video clips overnight. Roger was out and about from 17:30 to 02:12. Naturally, one question for anyone keeping a social animal in, in effect, solitary confinement, is whether its behaviour is normal. Badgers can

30 October 2019

Monday 28th Roger appeared at the rear entrance close to the fence at 6:25pm just as I was turning on the camera. The sudden appearance of black and white stripes in the corner of one's eye in the fading light always gives a jolt (not as much

27 October 2019

Last night was the coldest yet this autumn. The temperature dropped to 0.7 C. Perhaps because of this, Roger didn't venture out for long. Just a brief foray to eat and then he disappeared underground again, taking the bundle of barley straw with him.

26 October 2019

Roger is not just your average lucky badger – lucky to be found and handed in to an animal shelter. He was > so sick when he arrived, late on a cold wet night, it didn't look like he'd live more than a few hours. He was

25 October 2019

This blog hasn't had an update for some time, mainly due to a lack of badgers. Our badger "supplier", the Kildare Animal Foundation [https://animalfoundation.ie/], has successfully released many rehabilitated adult badgers back into the wild–mainly animals injured on the road. Invariably, and rightly,

18 June 2017

The bluebells of May have given way largely to the bracken of June. No badger has appeared in our bit of the wood for some time. We found one dead on the nearest main road not so far away, possibly one we've seen on camera just over the

9 March 2017

We've gone from having occasional visits once or twice a week to nightly visits in the last few days, and last night the first with two badgers in ages. The cameras are still on photo mode to save batteries. The image quality isn't great. The Night