After several months of the lawn being peppered with holes, most of which were beyond the ability of the visiting Green Woodpecker, my daughter and I began scattering peanuts outside the conservatory door. I'd caught fleeting glimpses of an animal sprinting across the grass in the darkness but it could just have well as been a cat. It became a regular thing to check the peanuts in the morning and they'd magically disappeared. But without being totally convinced the vigil began and within a week the peanut-eaters had been identified - the badgers were here!
Every night at 21:00 we scatter peanuts on the lawn and put any leftovers in the badger box and then most nights they'll saunter out from the side of the playhouse and begin their snuffling. Sometimes it's just one of them, most of the time it is three, but the record has been six badgers at once. That was the day it all went a little bit crazy, there were badgers everywhere and it's possible they'd even freaked themselves out. One went careening across the grass, jumped the tall grasses around the pond and landed in the middle of the water. Two stumbled around behind the gooseberries whilst the others fought over the peanuts on the conservatory steps. Since then we've not seen more than three badgers in the garden at any one time.
Although they occasionally react to one of us moving in the conservatory there is rarely any real fuss about us. In fact they are generally oblivious to our presence to the point that one of them bumped his head on the glass of the conservatory door as my wife had her nose pressed up against the glass.
Last night we had a wonderful opportunity to observe their behaviour as three of them tucked into a badger box filled with pasta and noodles. They took it in turns at the box, the largest badger going first whilst the other two snuffled around munching peanuts. Once the first feeder had finished he decided it was time for a rest and proceeded to lay flat on the grass like a dog. Each of them did this, as if the pasta had weighed heavily on them and they needed time to process the food. At one point two of them engaged in mutual grooming, before the largest of the badgers rolled onto his back and proceeded to have a hard core scratch, legs splayed in all manner of directions. Whilst this was going on one of the others was obviously not satisfied with the sustenance of the pasta and went in search of worms. He or she (the identification guides don't really make it easy to tell the difference between the them) began a massive excavation, beyond anything they'd done to date and I hope it was worth it because once more the lawn looks like a battlefield.
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