Footprints in the snow

Badger and fox prints on my way to work.





photos taken with iPhone 4S

All creatures great and small

Tiny froglet

Badger tracks

Leafcutter bee at work

Comma butterfly

Manx Loghtans just after shearing

Looking fleecier... just before leaving The Lodge

photos taken with iPhone 4S

Brock is back!

Appalling photo, exposure of 2.5 seconds and 1600 ISO! But you can see what it is...

After last night's badger-related excitement, tonight we were prepared. Turned the dining room and back bedroom lights on - to illuminate the garden - and stood in the dark kitchen, waiting.

At around 10.40 pm I saw movement in the darkness and a Badger squeezed under the fence and strolled calmly up to the area I'd baited with a few sunflower seeds (since we guessed that's what it had been eating before).

It spent the next two hours feeding in the garden.

The Badger must have been doing this for a while. It looked as cool as a cucumber. It snuffled around, apparently oblivious to our presence in the house. It spent most of its time lying down, stretched out like a dog as it fed among the clover, totally chilled-out.

A few times it had to stand up to scratch itself, and once it did that thing like they do on Springwatch, where they lie on their backs and scratch their tummies. It didn't fall off any logs as we haven't installed any yet.

I'm pretty sure it must have polished off all the seeds I'd put out. Inspection this morning showed it hadn't been digging. So I did a bit of research and it looks likely to have been eating earthworms from the surface.

I can't be staying up til 1 am every night, though...

While researching Badger eating habits, I found the Badger Trust website, and this very-cute-but-also-rather-surreal video. Who could resist them? Enjoy.



photos taken with Canon EOS 30D, EF 300mm f/4L IS USM

Holy... badger!

Well... that's a turn-up for the books.

D was sitting on the back step, smoking and watching a Barn Owl float by, when he suddenly spotted movement in the dark underneath the bird feeders.

Is that a Pheasant? he thought...

'And then I saw it had a black and white face! A badger! I can't believe it!'

This is the first time a Badger has been seen in the garden. A cause for celebration. We've seen them not-too-far-away but never on our premises. I was more than a bit sceptical when I read that one in ten participants in a recent RSPB survey had seen badgers in their gardens, but maybe it is true!

In other news, a Lesser Whitethroat was heard singing distantly this evening, thus adding itself to the number 93 slot on our garden bird list.

What I got up to on Wednesday night

Badger: The Movie, filmed by Dave Badger

We went badger-watching in Hertfordshire again. It was our third visit and we were quite lucky as we didn't have to wait too long for our stripy friends to venture out in search of peanuts and dog biscuits to munch on.

It was slightly disappointing that they didn't fall over or chase each other, like they always seem to on TV.

Visit the Badger Trust and the Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust websites