Update on badger watches. 17th October 2025

I've been somewhat tardy in updating this blog. Any number of reasons, which although small and inconsequential, soon add up.

We have had a badger visiting our garden for about 2 months. I noticed small marks in our lawn. I attributed them to Green Woodpeckers hunting for ants - you'd be amazed how many ant nests there are in a lawn without any signs of them being there. The only qualm I had about my proposed identification was that the marks didn't look quite right. I put out a trail cam to see if my assumptions were correct or not.

They were not. We had a badger snuffling around, presumably looking for worms and grubs. The marks were shallow groove in the soil, roughly 5cm long, 4cm wide and 0.5-1cm deep. Green woodpecker holes tend to be about 1-2cm in diameter and go straight down for a couple or so centimetres.

The badger is an intermittent visitor, coming around roughly once a week. However, it has not visited our garden in 11 days, suggesting that it is either dead (road kill), found a new territory or regards our garden as not worth visiting.

Back to our wild setts. After several weeks of little activity, except for foxes and badgers passing through, a badger has decided to explore these abandoned setts as a possible place to stay. Don't get too excited about a badger setting up home. I've seen the following behaviour before.

A badger walks past a sett for a number of weeks. Sometimes just walking past quickly, sometimes taking a brief sniff of a sett entrance before running off in apparent disgust. Then, after a while, a badger sticks its head into a sett hole, but then typically withdraws quickly and scurries off.

Finally, a badger will enter a sett and will typically excavate it a bit. The badger will then either set up residence or wander off never to return.

One badger has got as far as excavating both the main and outlier setts. Starting with the main sett.

Now the outlier sett. I have less confidence in a badger ever setting up residence in this sett.