Not For Shooting! (Meles meles)

I love that name Meles meles, Like the Fox, Vulpes vulpes and the Fallow Deer, Dama dama, Its easy to remember.

Meles meles is a Badger. I was hoping to have a lot more content by the time that I came to write this post but things haven’t gone entirely to plan.

At the beginning of the week I put the camera out and I was really pleased to get day time footage. This first video was taken at ten to nine and it isn’t getting dark until ten o’clock.

I use trail cameras, not for the quality of the pictures but as a way of collecting information. For quite a while I have been monitoring the setts hoping to see the Badgers out in the daylight so that I can go up there  and have a crack at them with my own camera.

The first night was great and they were out really early but the next two nights I got zip. They are coming out well after dark and that won’t work in this situation because it is so overgrown that the infra-red light is reflected back at the camera and I get an almost white out effect. Anyway it is not the information that I want to get back, I want to see that they are out and about in the daylight.

Come on and I will take you up to the sett and show you the big problem that we are having at the moment.

The sett is in the corner of this field at the end of that line of trees.

I will get Fizz to show you the problem. Keep your eye on the Dog.

The grass is up to my waist in places.

The field is being rented out and the person renting it decided to let the grass grow and mow it for the crop. He can’t mow it because the weather is so bad and until he does we are stuffed. So are the Badgers they like short cropped pasture for the earthworms.

Hopefully it will get mown soon and they will put Sheep in here. No, I am scared of Cows (Twelve people have been killed by Cows in  the UK in the last six years, imagine if Wild Boar did that) I am sensibly cautious.

So this is the entrance to the sett. The badgers have trampled the grass a bit but we are still working in a very small space.

Here are a few of the video’s that we got back on the best night. They are coming out for raisins that I have scattered about.

We haven’t reached the longest day yet which means the nights are still getting shorter and there is plenty of time to go up and see them again.