Badgers

Image: Orland

Unless you are observant and spend plenty of time out and about in the woods and fields, it is unlikely that you will ever suspect the presence of one of the most charming and yet most ancient of Britons – the badger. For, despite a disturbing increase in the depraved and sadistic practice of badger-baiting, the badger is by no means rare in many parts of England, including our own.

Because of this persecution, it would be irresponsible to name the places where badgers may be found. What safely can be said is that the badgers now have, in the shape of the Hertfordshire and Middlesex Badger Group, a body of dedicated and knowledgeable champions. One of the aims of the Group is to survey the badger population of the two counties, and I was fortunate indeed to be invited by one of the members to accompany her on a badger-watching expedition.

Badgers are sociable and gregarious and live together in a burrow, or set, often excavated on sloping ground. They are industrious workers and can shift surprising quantities of earth. If a set has been established a long time it may become quite a feat of engineering – one in the West Country had 12 entrances and 94 tunnels with a total length of 310 metres, and it was estimated that 25 tonnes of soil had been moved in the process.

The set we were to visit is also well established; according to one nearby resident, it has been in continuous occupation for at least 60 years. The situation of the set is pretty well ideal, in a quiet, little-frequented wood not far from fields which provide a further source of food.

Radiating from the tunnel mouths is a system of narrow, well-defined trackways leading to favourite feeding areas and drinking places, or to other sets in the vicinity, for badgers are fond of visiting their neighbours. Where much used, these trackways become so well worn that they look like human paths, and in fact many of our paths through the woods probably originated as badger-trails.

To a badger, the trails are an informative amalgam of scents: each animal has its own distinctive musk, secreted from glands beneath the tail. Furthermore, badgers of the same social group will put their scent on each other, so that the whole group acquires a unique and corporate musk, quite different from that of its neighbours.

Territories are marked with scent, and with dung, which is often placed in shallow, specially dug pits placed at strategic points on the boundary or beside main trackways. Badgers are fastidiously clean animals, spending much time grooming and scratching, and have in addition special latrines well away from the set.

They also regularly change their bedding, which consists of dry leaves, bracken, and so on. In winter, when fresh bedding is hard to come by, the badgers will wait for a sunny day and leave bedding outside the set for a few hours to air.

The badger is mainly nocturnal, emerging at dusk or shortly beforehand, spending the night feeding or playing, and returning in the morning to sleep. Where undisturbed, as here, the badgers tend to come out earlier, and to be on the safe side we arrived at the wood about an hour before sundown.

Heavy rain had fallen during the day, and the air under the trees was warm, humid, and heavy with the odour of fresh earth and bluebells. The sky had cleared, and there was hardly any wind – a good omen, for even the slightest breeze can carry a trace of human scent to the set. Selecting a place to sit, 25 yards or so from the main tunnel, and with our silhouettes disguised by the background of vegetation, we settled down to wait.

Successful badger-watching demands two things – fortitude and patience. The watcher must keep quiet and still. In winter he or she must endure the cold, in summer the attentions of midges. Then the time of emergence can vary a great deal; the badgers may not even come out at all.

As a newcomer to this activity, I was keeping my fingers crossed and anxiously watched the mouths of the tunnels for movement. None came.

Time passed. The light began to go, and still there was no sign of the badgers. My companion whispered her misgivings. With badgers, as with all wild life, nothing can ever be predicted.

By now we had been quiet for so long that our ears were keenly attuned to the slightest sound. From the dense undergrowth between us and the set came the high-pitched squeaking of a shrew; as the air cooled, condensation dripped from the canopy of trees. Still no badgers. It was beginning to look as if we had drawn a blank.

Then, from the field edge thirty yards away, came a faint rustling, followed by silence. A minute or two later came another rustling, further to the right, and another. There was definitely something moving about. Presently we heard a brief, whickering cry. One of the two cubs – there are two in this particular family, both well grown – was calling. This was followed by a sort of quick bark, made by one of the adults.

The light was now so bad that it was impossible to discern detail with the naked eye. With binoculars, though, a little could still be seen.

Suddenly, there were the badgers, on the bare, worn soil near the main entrance to the set. There were at least four, probably the two cubs and their parents. Obviously, contrary to all expectations, they had emerged even before our arrival. They must have been in the fields all evening, perhaps feeding on earthworms, one of the staples of their diet.

In the gloom, the black and white facial markings stood out plainly. Moving about, attentive to one another, the badgers appeared a ghostly silver. To be seeing such genuinely wild creatures was a privilege; it gave meaning to that overworked word, “thrill”.

Unhurriedly, at their ease, the badgers vanished into their labyrinth.

The light had now gone altogether. There could be nothing more for us to see. The badgers had been in view for only a few minutes, but the long wait had been well worth it. Standing up, aware at last of our aching limbs, we reluctantly started for the path.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Weasels

Image: Keven Law

It has been noticeable in the past ten or fifteen years that the rabbit population is recovering after myxomatosis, and numbers must now be approaching something like their pre-1953 level. The new breed of rabbit seems not only more resistant to the myxoma virus, but also more enterprising in choosing a site for a warren.

Along part of Under the Heavens Lane, a deep and narrow thoroughfare running the length of a dry glacial valley, the northern hedgebank is riddled with rabbit holes. The rabbits themselves are multiplying as only rabbits do, and may often be seen sitting by their burrows basking in the sun, or making excursions into the adjoining field for titbits of salad.

The lane is fairly quiet, and the warren, now that farmers have more profitable things to do than set snares, is reasonably safe from disturbance.

Recently, though, this paradise was violated by what must seem to a rabbit like the Angel of Death. From my bicycle this morning I glimpsed a lithe, upright form seated arrogantly on the sawn surface of an old fence post. Its fur, as soft and luxuriant-looking as anything at Harrods, was marked with a pattern of umber and champagne, and made a bandit’s mask round the eyes, which had the fierce, mad gleam of the professional murderer.

In the first instant the word “polecat” flashed into my mind; but this animal was too pale to be that, and besides, there are no longer any polecats in this tame, thoroughly domesticated region of the Home Counties. No: it was an escaped ferret, and it had taken up residence in the rabbit warren, to the terror and consternation of all those within.

Now the ferret was living the polecat’s life, a far cry from guest appearances at the village pub or spending the evening in someone’s trousers. On taking its freedom, it had immediately gone native, true to its nature and ancestry, for the ferret and the polecat are members of one of the most bloodthirsty groups of carnivores there is – the genus Mustela.

We have two more members of this genus living hereabouts, the weasel and the stoat. The landscape may be ordered and manicured now, and entirely dominated by man, but their independence remains intact. They are both killers, at or near the top of the food chain, and their style is unmistakably that of the assassin.

The weasel is about seven inches long, three-quarters the size of the stoat. In general pattern they are both, like the ferret, short-legged and long-bodied, built for pursuing their prey through tunnels and burrows. Both have brown upperparts and white underparts, and small, rounded ears which are usually held at an upright and inquisitive angle.

The stoat can always be told by its longer tail, tipped with black. In winter the stoat usually turns white, and then its fur is called ermine, but the black tail-tip remains. In more northerly climes than Britain the weasel turns white in winter too.

Despite rigorous persecution, they both manage to survive in fair numbers, and the weasel may even be said to be common. The most that is usually seen of a weasel is a rapid, low blur as it streaks across the road from one hedge to another. But if you have the time and patience, it is not a difficult animal to observe.

Occasionally you will disturb one in the act and it will drop the mouse or vole it has just killed and flee. Keep absolutely still, wait, and the weasel may very well return, giving you the privilege of perhaps half a minute’s clear view.

The best place for observation, though, is at the nest, if you can manage to find one. Weasels breed twice a year, giving birth in April-May and again in July-August to a litter of about half a dozen young. The nest is placed in a hollow tree-trunk or a burrow speedily vacated by a family of rats. Now, at the end of May, the first litters are beginning to be weaned.

The female alone usually rears the young, and she decides when it is right for her brood to leave the nest and take their first lessons in hunting. She will show them what is edible and what is not, and how to deliver the coup de grâce with a quick, savage bite through the back of the neck.

The main prey of weasels consists of small mammals, especially mice and voles. After man, the weasel is the worst enemy of the mole, as is shown by the number of weasels caught in mole-traps. Shrews, though, seem hardly to be taken.

The appetite of a hunting weasel is prodigious. As it is so small, the animal’s surface area is large compared with its volume, and it will eat anything up to a third of its own body-weight a day. In practical terms, that means a family of weasels can put paid to two thousand mice and voles a year.

Besides small mammals, weasels are not averse to the odd bit of carrion, to birds’ eggs, and to the birds themselves – having been known to attempt one the size of a lapwing. They are fearless, invested with the same instinct as the tiger or puma. In the weasel, and the stoat, there is another element of ferocity too, bordering on the insane.

The cause might be traced to a nematode, a parasitic worm with the unpronounceable name Skrjabingylus nasicola, which is present in 10% of young and 70% of adult weasels. The worm progressively attacks the bones of the skull. It may be that stoats and weasels are driven by their own private demons.

I don’t know whether ferrets, gone wild, suffer the same fate. If so it would account for that mad gleam in the eyes; and if so, it does not augur too well for the rabbits of Under the Heavens Lane.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Hares

 

A Young Hare by Albrecht Dürer (1502)

April is still ten days away, but out there, across the broad expanse of dark-brown furrows, the air is already shimmering with heat. Seen from this low angle, from this quiet vantage place beside the hawthorn hedge, the heat haze seems concentrated and condensed; the white geodesic dome of the Chenies weather-radar looks misshapen and wobbling on the shaky substance of its tower.

The air is filled with the song of many skylarks, and from the asterisked lines of barbed wire by the bridle path come, over and over again, the same jangled notes of a corn bunting. A thrush is singing, and just now a woodpecker drummed from the direction of Baldwin’s Wood, but otherwise the place seems devoid of life. The fields here are too open, the hedgerows too sparse. The arable is a desert, a harsh and unpromising place for wild creatures.

Earlier this morning, though, when the sky was still grey with dawn and the light was only just good enough for the human eye to perceive detail, these same furrows were the scene of a prolonged and spectacular contest. Two buck hares, mad March hares, were fighting, either for territory, or for possession of a doe which remained unseen and, more than likely, indifferent to the outcome.

The contest, or ritual, was enacted as a chase in which the two hares displayed to the full their agility and powers of running, dashing across the clods, the subordinate animal doing most of the giving way. Occasionally, however, it mastered its timidity and stood its ground, rearing up on hind legs at the approach of its antagonist. Often as not it would think better of this tactic and again resume running, but once or twice it held firm and a few rather ineffectual sideswipes were exchanged.

These boxing matches are seldom seen nowadays. Changes in land use and farming methods have made the hare very scarce. Once it was a common animal, a feature of all landscapes such as this. It was included in the traditional list of the five beasts of the chase – the Hart, Hind, Hare, Boar, and Wolf – and occupied an important place in the tradition and lore of the countryside.

Nevertheless, for such a large animal (it can weigh upwards of seven pounds and is considerably bigger than its relative, the rabbit), the hare is adept at keeping a low profile. It can remain unsuspected in a district for many years, known only to those who are out and about at dawn and dusk, when hares are chiefly active, or who are lucky enough to glimpse one at some other time or find its traces.

This stretch between Flaunden and Chenies remains ideal hare country, with a fair amount of open and semi-permanent pasture, arable land, and a substantial amount of woodland, for the hare is just as much at home under the trees as it is in the open. Formerly there was a small but constant population of hares on the golf-course and in the adjoining Whippendell Wood at Watford, but human disturbance there is now too great and all but a few have gone.

The hare’s main requirement, besides a supply of food, is a quiet, safe place where it can lie up during the day. Such a place is called a form and is usually a mere depression in the turf, preferably with overhanging grass stems or other vegetation to keep the hare out of sight. One hare may have many such forms in a small area, and when flushed from one will run to another to hide.

It is usually very difficult to flush a hare from its form, and it will remain there until the last moment, almost until you tread on it. Like most vegetarians of its size, it relies on being overlooked by predators. The eyes are so placed that it sees better to the rear than to the front; the eyes themselves are large and efficient and designed to give early warning of danger. Together with a very acute sense of smell and sensitive hearing which is enhanced by the large and controllable external ears, the eyesight makes it all but impossible to approach a hare undetected. You can be sure that if you can see the hare, the hare has long ago known all about you.

Once it does start running, the hare can cover the ground at up to thirty miles an hour, making short work of rough terrain. For preference it will run uphill, to get the best from those long hind legs. It is an able swimmer and will not hesitate to cross even quite wide rivers.

Unlike the young of the burrow-nesting rabbit, the newbom leverets are fully clothed and can see almost immediately. Two to five in number, the brood is placed in a special form by the mother and left alone while she goes off to feed; she suckles them at night.

Waiting here at the edge of the field, it seems that the hares are not going to reappear today. The bucks are in their forms, and so is the doe. Perhaps she is already pregnant, and, as you start for home at last, you wonder whether there will be leverets again this spring in the same place by the edge of the wood, where the grass is sweet and tussocky, under the resinous young branches of the Scots pines. As long as there are, all is not lost for our countryside.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

The Red and the Grey

There was a dead squirrel in the road this morning. It had been run over, a broad, shallow trough left by the tyre across its back. From the look of its legs the squirrel had been stopped in mid dash; it had played the game of chicken once too often.

Such a game would be second nature to the grey squirrel. It has its own special brand of lunatic daring, leaping from branch to branch and tree to tree, sometimes across six feet or more of empty space. Occasionally it has to scrabble madly to stay on, or desperately abandon its grip and aim for another, safer, branch lower down.

And once in a while it makes a complete mess of things and misjudges altogether. Then there is nothing to do but go loose and, crashing earthwards through the twigs and branches, hope the ground isn’t too hard below. One squirrel I saw fall hit the ground with a thump that made me wince, but the leaf litter was fairly thick and the animal, though a bit dazed, soon recovered and seemed none the worse.

They have a trick of keeping the tree trunk between you and them, slowly circling as you circle, coming back again, sometimes peeping out to see where you’ve got to. There is good reason for them to fear human beings, but dogs – which are never known to carry guns – are treated with impudence. Labradors in particular seem to get very excited when they see or smell a squirrel. The chase ends at a tree: the dog, barking loudly, tries to make itself taller, while the squirrel, having selected at leisure a comfortable fork some ten or fifteen feet up, sits back and virtually thumbs its nose.

The grey squirrel, even before the rabbit, is our most familiar mammal. It has adapted so well to the English countryside that one easily forgets that it, like the rabbit, is an introduced species. Whereas the rabbit was brought here by the Romans, though, the grey squirrel has only been with us since 1876, when four were brought from America and released in Cheshire. From then until 1929 there were fifty-two introductions at various places up and down the country, totalling a mere 247 animals in all. From these few the whole of our present stock is descended. By 1971 the grey squirrel was to be found in all but three of the counties of England and Wales.

It is a fairly safe bet that, wherever an introduced animal thrives, it turns out to be a pest. The grey squirrel is no exception. It has plainly found life here to its liking, and a glance at a government report on squirrels tells us why.

The staple diet of nuts, mainly acorns, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and chestnuts, is varied, in autumn, with the pick of the wild fungi, corn from the farmers’ ricks and fields, and the choicest fruits, both wild and in the orchard. By Christmas, bulbs and buds are at their best. In February, swedes, parsnips and turnips are coming into season, and March sees the start of the freshly sown wheat and barley.

Squirrels may be practising vegetarians, but they are not faddists and will not refuse a meal of juicy insect larvae or pupae, or of birds’ eggs or nestlings. In suburban gardens at least, so fond are they of eggs that they will gnaw through a heavy-gauge aluminium plate guarding the entrance hole of a wooden nestbox. The egg season, alas, is soon over, and by late June the squirrels must make do with strawberries, cherries, plums, and, on into July and August, pears, peaches, and whatever they can find in the way of ripening wheat, oats, and barley.

The main fault held against the grey squirrel, though, is its taste for the sweet sap in the cambium layer of tree bark. Young trees between ten and forty years of age are most at risk, especially during the spring and early summer. The tree is usually scarred or distorted to some extent, and if the bark is gnawed off in a ring the tree will die. In some areas the damage is costly and severe.

Although the grey squirrel is popularly believed to have driven out the native red species, the truth is more complicated than that. It seems that the grey squirrel arrived at a time when the red was declining anyway – through disease, perhaps, and certainly through destruction of habitat. The two species will coexist peacefully for many years where they are found together, and in some places the red squirrels died out long before the grey ones arrived. Where grey squirrels are well established, however, they may prevent red squirrels from recolonizing. There is no question of the grey squirrels systematically killing the red, although it is certainly true that, on very rare occasions, individuals of the two species will fight, sometimes with fatal results for the smaller and lighter red squirrel.

The red squirrel is the more attractive animal, but if it had to go then the grey squirrel is an appealing enough replacement. Despite the most strenuous efforts at control, including a bounty scheme, the grey squirrel continues to thrive. If you are not a farmer or fruit-grower or forester, that will not seem such a bad thing after all.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Giants and Pygmies

Not far from the lane is an area of the wood which a Georgian forester must have thought suitable for Norway spruce. He may have dreamed of leaving them to his grandson’s son to sell as masts for sailing ships, or simply as the raw material of the new literacy. He planted well; his trees grew strong and tall, but as they grew the markets changed. Steam replaced sail; cheaper woodpulp came from Scandinavia. The trees matured and were not harvested, and yet lived on.

Now many of these giants are reaching their term. Some are dead already, the bark peeling, the exposed heartwood bleaching grey, the roots and base sprouting telltale brackets of white fungus. A few have already crashed, and where the trunks and branches block the rides they are quickly cleared by men with chainsaws. The timber is good for little by that stage; it is probably burned.

In a quiet part of the spruce grove, a few yards from the nearest path, one of the trees, similar to its neighbours in every outward respect, has been singled out by a tawny owl. To the same broken stub of branch the bird comes time after time to rest and in peace and silence digest its meals. This December morning, in the half light of dawn, it is here again. Its great head turns; it blinks, makes a slight retching motion, and brings up a wet grey mass, a pellet of indigestible fur, bone, earthworm bristles, feathers, claws. The pellet tumbles eleven feet to the ground and comes to rest among a score of others of varying age.

Preserved in these capsules is the history of the owl’s diet. If you know how to read them, the fragments of bone reveal much about the small mammals of the wood. Of course, the owl may have its personal likes and dislikes; it is not an impartial sampler. To get information of scientific value requires the dissection of many pellets from many owls over a great period of time, as was indeed done by one zoologist in a clever and original study. Taking these few home in a plastic bag, though, might tell us something, perhaps, that we do not already know.

With a lens and textbook the tiny bits of bone, cleaned now and dry, can be roughly sorted. Skulls in various stages of destruction, halves of lower jaws with or without teeth, assorted molars and incisors. Vole this side, shrew that. A wood mouse skull, or what’s left of it. This lumpy-looking thing is a mole’s humerus. A flat, fluted wishbone: the lower mandible of some dunnock-sized bird.

Among the shrew jaws there are two, both right-hand halves, which are obviously smaller than the rest. And here, in the as yet unsorted pile, is an upper skull barely half an inch in length. It once belonged to a pygmy shrew, the smallest of all our mammals. Handled like this, turned in stainless steel tweezers under a desk lamp, it seems impossible that a skull so small could once have held a mammal’s brain or housed even such a quick, ferocious and hyperactive soul. Shrews do not live for long. Their existence is all aggression, greed, sex, a headlong madness to cram each minute full.

A year or two ago you found one drowned in the greyish fluid that had gathered in the bottom of a discarded preserving jar. The jar had been inside a sack of rubbish dumped in the ditch by a passing motorist. A fox, smelling chicken bones, perhaps, had torn the sack open and out had spilled the jar, coming to rest among the nettles. There it had lain, waiting for the shrew to find it and stumble inside.

That death was easy enough to understand; but what caused the end, last July, of the shrew you found dead in the middle of the path? The body was cool, but still limp. There was no sign of injury or any other cause of death. The nervous system, already running on maximum, may simply have conked out; or there could have been a failure in some vital valve of the perennially over-revved and overloaded heart. A pygmy shrew is miniaturization taken to extremes.

At that size nature is pushing the very limits of design, just as, at the other end of the scale, it is pushing the limits when the huge crown of a long dead spruce, yielding at last in the lifelong fight with gravity, splits off and falls with a thunder that makes the whole forest quake.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)