Badgers
1st July 2017
Camera-trapping is difficult at the best of times, what with waving vegetation, birds and small rodents triggering cameras as well as cows scratching their bottoms on cam-trap emplacements. To add to this, we now have a Ninja badger who has taken great exception to our equipment at one site and attacks it with great panache! Click here to see Ninja badger going for cam-trap This leads to an aspect of cam-trapping that is often overlooked when monitoring mammal activity; whether the act of putting up/maintaining cam traps, or the cam-traps themselves causes any disturbance to the target mammal. I have […]
17th April 2017
Meet the star of this post, a super-chilled dog otter. I have often wondered what would happen with a head-on encounter between otter and badger. I thought that the larger badger would have the edge if push came to shove. We have had records of both species using one structure for resting and far more recordings of badgers visiting otter holts to scent mark and scratch about, go in for a nosy about and generally leave their scent all over the place. So far, this doesn’t seem to have put off any otters from using holts although we haven’t analysed […]