Comings and goings. 30th June 2025

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.

 I can't work out how many badgers are around or if the sett complex is interconnected, but there are at least two badgers lurking around these setts.  Though in honesty, I reckon at least three. I suspect one maybe Itchy.

These two badgers appear to know each other as they didn't fight or hare off in different directions. Though one was immensely nervous.

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.