6 December 2013

A badger looked out of the set at 18:02 and again 5 minutes later (it might have been two badgers, of course) but they didn't emerge until 21:36 (and 21:38). It wasn't cold or wet or windy. I'm not sure if anything in particular kept them in. I moved a camera so that it overlooked the entrance and might have been visible against the sky. Then again, badgers often look out and go back and snooze some more. And sometimes they can wait at the sett entrance sniffing the air for a long time (20 minutes or more, sometimes much more) if they are nervous. If the camera had not been looking straight down the sett entrance I wouldn't have known they'd looked out.

They knocked a couple of hours off the other end too, compared to the night before, and were last recorded above ground at 3:42.

They're getting used to finding their dish further and further away. I moved it another few meters last night and they found it as usual. They're now adept at finding little caches of peanuts on the paths, though they appear to find them only when looking for them. They can and do walk past them and then discover them later when nosing about looking for things to eat. Perhaps the sensitivity of a badger's nose depends on its appetite and on whether it's actively searching for food.

Their dish was at an intersection of two paths in the wood. Video footage revealed that the comings and goings in all directions were purposeful and not in the slightest tentative. Their confidence and familiarity with an exapanding, though still small, home range is growing. They're wandering over an area of at least an acre now.

A habit increasingly evident is their liking for stripping bark off dead trees. There was a dead tree standing in their former enclosure which they scratched the bark off as high as they could reach, and they've now ripped to pieces some dead stumps in the wood. Presumably there were tasty insects hiding under the bark.