Badgers are really great road makers

I WENT for a walk in a wood the other day with a friend of mine.

It was a mixed woodland belonging to Coillte with free public access and I’d never been in it before. There was a reason for our visit. We’re both involved in bringing school children on nature walks and we wanted to see if the place would be suitable and interesting for this sort of activity.

It was supposed to be business, but it was actually very pleasant: a sunny evening with beams of light shooting down from the canopy of new beech and ash leaves and illuminating the woodland floor, which was carpeted with flowering wild garlic and bluebells.

After a while I spotted a narrow pathway snaking off between the trees.

You could tell by the way it occasionally passed under a low branch that it hadn’t been made by humans but by an animal that was less than 50 centimetres tall. “There’s a badger road”, I said.

Badgers are great road makers. They live in clans, or extended families, and each clan holds a territory. In a wood like this where there is rich feeding a territory will be quite small, typically about 50 hectares.

The main badger road will be around the perimeter of the territory and within this area there will be a number of radial roads leading to and from the sett and to feeding grounds or badger latrines.

The whole system can be centuries old with many generations of badgers contributing to the network of passages and chambers underground and the road network on the surface. When the animals emerge from the sett in the evening they typically spend 15 or 20 minutes stretching, scratching and nibbling at anything edible they can find. Irish badgers are very omnivorous (unlike English badgers which live almost entirely on earthworms), but they eat a lot of vegetable food as well as invertebrates and the odd small animal or bird.

But before they start to forage seriously for edible things they trot off to the boundary road and do one complete lap around their territory, pausing every now and again to lay down scent markers of urine or faeces to indicate to other badgers that this is private property.

Sadly badger roads sometimes cross human roads. This is why you often see dead badgers on the road at the same spot, year after year.

I can seldom resist the temptation to follow a badger road to see where it takes me so this is what we did. We picked the right direction to travel in because after 70 metres we reached a large and rambling sett.

There was also evidence that this was a long-established badger headquarters. Some of the burrows were obviously not in use at present, with dead leaves and fallen branches blocking the entrance. But one large burrow in a steep bank had a scree slope of freshly excavated soil and stones below it. Obviously an extension was under construction.

I hunted through the excavated material. Occasionally badgers unearth artefacts of archaeological interest. I found nothing, but suddenly my friend stiffened and pointed. There was another entrance to the sett a few metres away and there, just visible in the shadows, was a small black and white striped face. It stared at us for 20 seconds and then melted into the darkness.

Badger cubs are born in February or March. One curious young animal had crept to the surface to see who was making all the noise up there.

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