Messed-up garden is worth it for a glimpse of badger

ANOTHER LIFE: THE HARES I'VE been meeting on my morning walk remind me which month we're in. Nothing very mad, so far – no boxing matches, anyway, between males and not-quite-ready females. But there's an extra electricity in their pose as they freeze in the middle of the field or on the boreen ahead of me. They were all going somewhere, fairly urgently, when the dog and I came round the bend. The same could be said, I suppose, of the frogs, squashed star-shaped on the road while hastening late to mating rendezvous in ponds and drains.

Early spring can conjure other, less predictable, encounters. A friend who lives next door to a badger sett, and whose lifestyle leaves the animals the freedom of his garden at night, has been satisfied for years with the rare glimpse of his neighbour’s tail, disappearing at dawn into the mound at the heart of a willow thicket.

But, walking out after breakfast the other morning, he met the badger in broad daylight, trotting home across his vegetable beds. Indeed, by freezing, hare-like, he persuaded it to linger within a few feet of him.

An extra sniff at last picked up his scent and it loped off into the willows, leaving him in a gentle ecstasy.

There are, no doubt, many suburban readers who live with badgers on an even more intimate basis, feeding them peanuts every night or letting them in through the cat-flap to watch television. But my friend has no such ambitions and was just thrilled to have met the real wild animal who, notably in February, makes such a mess of his garden.

Mention of a badger sett can produce images, fed by wildlife television, of animals living in busy groups and roaming abroad to hoover up earthworms abundant in cattle pastures.

Indeed, over much of Ireland that has not been systematically “depopulated” in cattle TB eradication programmes, the typical badger clan is a group of about six adults, living in a main sett of interconnecting burrows, excavated in a deep, dry bank and with half-a-dozen entrances, sometimes many more. Forty-four holes was the record in the national badger survey conducted in 1995.

But in wilder, less productive country, as here on the west coast, the animals revert to a more solitary and wide-ranging lifestyle. A study by ecologist Hans Kruuk found the badgers of coastal moorland of the Scottish highlands much smaller than their farmland counterparts and roaming between small setts or even sleeping under boulders.

They were eating sheep carrion, rowanberries, beetles and the slender worms of meagre soils. “If there had been elephants in [pre-farming] Europe,” wrote Kruuk, “it is likely that, sooner or later, they would have turned up as an item in a badger’s diet.” The badger that fled across the ditch from my friend’s garden was, indeed, small, grey and dusty, and no bigger than his springer spaniel.

Let out for a pee at bed-time, she often goes howling into the night in vain pursuit of the intruder. What the badger was doing at the time has been touchingly betrayed by large bunches of dry grass and twigs, or the dead leaves of monbretia (once – not so touchingly – of my friend’s best daffodils, in bloom), left abandoned on paths or the lawn.

All this was intended as fresh bedding for a spring-clean of the sett, gathered in a manner well observed by Ernest Neal, pioneer student of badgers: “When bringing in leaves, a badger will gather all it can find within a small circle, using its forepaws to collect them. Having got a good heap, it will cuddle it with its front legs, using its snout to keep it in place, and proceed to shuffle backwards, pausing at intervals . . . With bracken, much more portable bundles are made . . . the animal more or less sliding on its elbows as it goes.”

With all that trouble, one might expect the badger to come back for its bundle when the dog has gone, but no, it is left still, perhaps, 20 or 30 metres from the sett – as if the action of gathering, once interrupted, has been entirely forgotten.

But this is not the mess I referred to – not even the raking-out of every hedge-bottom in the quest for beetles. It is the tearing up of lawn, the excavation of flower and vegetable beds in pursuit of grubs and worms. How does my friend put up with this? Things get better from now on, he says, as he takes out the mower and gets busy gardening. The badger, he thinks, moves somewhere else for the summer, perhaps to a sett among the rabbit holes in the dunes.

Or she may, of course, decide to stay put and lead forth a cub or two to romp among his parsnips.

EYE ON NATURE

On a builder's gate closing off a partially completed site, I found that a sparrowhawk had flown straight into the fence and was dead with its wings still spread out and stuck on it. It seemed to have thought it was flying under the heavy bars but never saw the thin bars underneath the frame.Leo Condron, Kilcolgan, Co Galway.

The sparrowhawk must have been pursuing a small bird through the bars.

Redpolls visit our peanut feeders regularly, eat their fill and move on. Recently a little bird has started to visit which looks exactly like a redpoll but the usual red forehead is a dull rusty colour.  Anne McCabe, Ratoath, Co Meath.

It could be an Arctic redpoll, rare migrants to this country. If so it would have distinct white wingbars.

On Carne Golf Links in Belmullet in mid-February I observed hundreds of frogs on the course. Some seemed to be in the process of mating, but others seemed to be lifeless.
Maurice McFarland, Carrickfergus, Co Antrim.

They were on their way to ponds or water flashes to mate. Ardent males grab females on their way and the females may not be able to carry the weight on land, and many perish.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Please Include a postal address .