The secret life of Ireland’s badgers

Driving at night, you may glimpse a badger dazzled by the car headlights. Otherwise, this creature of the night is seldom seen, writes Richard Collins. 

‘Broc’ values his privacy and this makes aspects of his life very difficult to study. Nonetheless, researchers were sure they had unlocked most of the badger’s secrets, until a paper published this month showed that they haven’t. New tracking technology has revealed social behaviour far more complex than was previously recorded. According to co-author David Macdonald of Oxford University, “the private lives of badgers turn out to be almost as hard to understand as those of people”.

Although badgers in Scandinavia and southern Europe tend to live in isolated pairs, Irish and British ones prefer extended families. The greater abundance of earthworms and insect larvae here may explain this; our badgers form ‘clans’ to better exploit these resources. There may be ten or more adults, of both sexes, in a network of tunnels and chambers known as a ‘sett’. One British ‘clan’ had 29 members.