It’s National Badger Day! 

Badgers are a true living symbol of the British countryside. The earliest traces of badgers in the UK are half a million years old, meaning that they once coexisted alongside brown bears and arctic foxes! These elusive and mysterious creatures can be living right around the corner from us, but most of us have never been lucky enough to see one in its natural habitat. 

We are fortunate to have badgers living on a few of our sites here at The Future Forest Company. They can be spotted by their ‘snuffle holes’, where they feed on grassland looking for earthworms. 

 

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Ecosystem engineers

 

The diet of a badger can consist of up to 60% earthworms. In a single night, an adult badger may eat well over 200 worms, and they can smell land containing earthworms from a mile away! Badgers are also opportunistic omnivores, and when conditions are harsh, they are able to consume other food items such as soft fruit, snails, slugs, and sometimes rodents.

Badgers play a pivotal role in maintaining the natural beauty and balance of our environment – they are functional players without which our ecosystems are destabilised. These fascinating creatures help maintain healthy insect populations and disperse seeds. Their digging activities aerate the soil and create micro-habitats for pollinating insects, including bumble bees.

  

What can we do to help badgers?

 

The badger experts at Scottish Badgers tell us that the best advice is ‘to leave them alone! Badgers will be able to feed themselves, as they are very adaptable. They are a wild animal, and apart from it being illegal to try and keep or tame them, badgers can do great harm with their teeth and claws. Feeding them is a no-no – more harm than good is done by feeding them, as witnessed by badgers left high and dry, when a resident has died, having fed badgers for years, and now there is no food.’

If you would like to try and spot a badger in its natural habitat, look up your local badger group to discover more about what badger groups do, and see how you can get involved.

 

 

Join us to protect badgers and their habitats

 

At The Future Forest Company, we always survey our land for badgers as part of our management planning. We like to know where they are so as to avoid harming them in any way during our work. Thankfully, native woodland planting is usually good for badgers and we aim to make sure we don’t block them from being able to feed on our land. Our forests provide a home to a wide variety of animals from badgers, squirrels and deer to tiny voles. 

This National Badger Day, join us to conserve and restore nature today through our Nature Restoration Bundle and help us to protect precious wildlife and their habitats.

Happy National Badger Day!