I must admit to be unsure of how many badgers occupy this area, and how many sett entrances are in use or if chambers are connected.

I have seen badgers enter the sett area from the footpath, and turn left immediately. They avoid the 'main' sett entrance i.e. the entrance I have three trail cams pointing to. I even have videos of badgers taking bedding past the main sett entrance.

I do know there are 'upper' sett entrances, i.e. sett entrances slightly uphill from the main sett, but having scouted them once (they are not easy to get to) I concluded they were not being used.

I think this was a silly assumption.

A couple of weeks back, my side trail cam got videos of a badger bringing in truly prodigious amounts of bedding. I have other videos showing Scrawny tail bringing bedding into the main sett, but not on the scale of this badger.

The badger makes it look easy, backing around the slender tree trunks. It isn't easy for a human adult.

As I said, I had taken a peek at the sett entrances on the other side of the tree trunks some weeks back, but took a closer look after this badger's exertions. Sure enough, the badger had dragged the bedding into a sett entrance - the very same one that looked unused some weeks back.

Getting a trail cam onto this sett entrance is going to be tricky. Firstly the terrain. It is awkward. There is a dip in front of the entrance, and the dip is full of tree branches from earlier bouts of coppicing. Secondly, the area is somewhat visible from the footpath.

However, now that vegetation has grown up a bit, particularly some ferns, I might have a better chance of putting a trail cam on to this sett. Only I am running out of trail cams. I'll have to use one of my old Apeman trail cams.

Apeman video and photo quality is rubbish - very grainy, but they are surprisingly reliable. They have chugged on when others (e.g. GardePro) have failed. I'll try putting an Apeman out this Saturday - but first I need a little running repair on a post/support I made out of an old tree branch. At least it will disguise the trail cam a bit from prying eyes of nefarious sorts walking along the footpath who may decide to nick the trial cam.

I've been somewhat remiss at updating this blog. 'Remiss', you say, 'try extremely tardy, neglectful, lackadaisical...'

In my defence, I would say I've been rather busy: a final push to get the landscaping done, taking part in dementia research, and, believe it or not, coding for a certain recording organisation to extract animal sighting information from survey documents. Yep, me, coding, in my retirement. Whatever next? Actually, Natural Language processing, using python and spaCy, is what next. Had to teach myself both. EXCITING!!!

Anyway, before I go too far off piste... I'm compressing about three weeks videos into this one posting, as more or less the same thing happens every week.

We'll kick off with a slightly interesting one.  Keep watching the bottom right hand corner of the video.

Could the nervous badger be Scrawny tail, our female? Anyway, the boar was spooked as well, but not as much.

I've noticed this following behaviour quite a bit. Badgers have a go at digging out a sett, but then seem to lose interest.

However, I do notice that a badger or two will visit a sett several times over several weeks, inspecting it, before taking up residence.

This is what the badgers use this area for. Squeezing under the fence. I've have lots of videos of this behaviour.

This one wasn't sure what it wanted to do.

Sett areas attract a wide variety of wildlife. A variety of domestic cats visit the setts. Surprising considering the remoteness of the sett from sizable numbers of housing.

This cat appeared over the past couple of weeks. It seems a bit of a bruiser, almost as large as the badgers.

On Thursday 11th June 2025 the Memsahib and I set out late for our walk. As school run was approaching its end, we decided to turn left instead of right after our little mid-walk break. This route takes us past our sett. Ever hopeful, I took a look at the sett area just in case a badger had returned.

We were rather excited to see extensive amounts of disturbed earth extending out from the sett entrance. I swapped SD cards this morning, as per my usual routine of leaving the trail cams running for a week. I found a badger not only digging the sett but also dragging lots and lots of bedding material.

Closer inspection of the badger seems to indicate that it is neither Itchy or Scrawny tail.  It is too lithe and has too thin a tail to be Itchy, plus it doesn't scratch itself a lot. It is too heavy set plus has a neat, long thin tail to be Scrawny tail. So it looks like a new badger.

It brought in vast amounts of bedding, but not to our main sett. It took it further up the hill, along the path. Now, I have seen a badger take bedding along this route, but I haven't found the sett yet. I did have a look once, but it was fairly impenetrable, plus the sett holes I did see look very old and unused. Hmm, a mystery to solve - out with my bill hook for a bit of path clearing.

Another mystery is why it involved itself in very extensive excavations of our main sett, but didn't seem to take up residence. I have no videos of it entering or exiting this entrance after its excavations. This situation was not helped by the trail cam facing the sett ran out of battery charge the day I swapped cards. Sheesh. New batteries were inserted this morning.

On with the show
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Finally able to catch up with postings. I've been somewhat busy.

After all this hard work, the badger never entered this entrance again!!! I think I have a video of it poking its nose into the entrance hole for less than a second, then shooting off. Very strange.