AnotherLife: A nature-loving friend to the north of us seemed thrilled beyond measure last autumn to find that badgers had moved in next door, writes Michael Viney
A dense bramble thicket across the fence had long given shelter to his garden, and excavation of the sett went unnoticed until the leaves fell, disclosing the great mound of spoil beneath the briars.
At around the same time, holes began appearing in his lawn, like divots dug out by a clumsy golfer, but he isn't the lawn-proud type. He asked to borrow Ernest Neal's The Badger - still, after almost 60 years, the best little book on its behaviour. There he learned that leatherjackets (cranefly larvae) were a favourite in the badger's omnivorous diet. Glimpsing striped noses at the sett one early morning, he called out a cheery greeting. "I don't need to spy on them," he said. "I'm just glad to know they're there."
When the first trail of spilled grass, leaves and twigs appeared on the lawn one November morning, stretching some 20 metres from a garden hedge to a hole in the fence, this was happily recognised as the badgers collecting bedding for their underground comfort. On some mornings, the debris from an entire hedge-bottom was raked out across the path, and abandoned bundles of straw and leaves spoke for a busy night.
"When bringing in leaves," wrote Ernest Neal, "a badger will gather all it can find within a small circle, using its forepaws to collect them. Having got a good heap, it will cuddle it with its front legs, using its snout to keep it in place, and proceed to shuffle backwards, pausing at intervals. When it reaches the entrance, it disappears backwards down the sett."
When February came, the badgers found the garden pond full of frogs and spawn. While the frogs in the middle were safe enough, the pond's mossy margins were ripped apart for an eager feast. "You'd have to expect that, I suppose," said my friend, "and badgers are as good as frogs for eating slugs and snails." He'd already resigned himself to never having hedgehogs again: badgers kill and eat them.
He was, however, showing signs of strain - not so much at what the badgers had actually done, as concern for what they might do. They climb trees, after all, and eat apples, and he has a little orchard; they love raspberries and strawberries. He had weeded a flower bed, loosening the soil, and next morning found great scoopings and shreddings among the Michaelmas daisies.
It was early last month that the badgers Went Too Far. In this chilly spring, a clump of daffodils made a welcome splash of colour beneath the livingroom window - until one of the animals, finding the foliage so soft, wrenched it away and backed off with it, leaving a trail of yellow blossoms in its wake. "They've trashed my daffs!" cried my friend. "What do I do?" I forebore to fantasise about the flowers as a bouquet for a new mother, now probably nursing a couple of cubs on a cosy bed below.
What does he do, indeed? Badgers are big, powerful animals with claws made for excavation: block one hole and they'll find or make another. The experts are agreed that, short of stalag-strength fencing, with a deeply-buried foot and an overhang, only an electric fence will do. I suggested a download from http://www.defra.gov.uk/rds/publications/technical/TAN_15.pdf.
Britain's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is concerned, of course, with more than garden nuisance: badgers play particular havoc, it seems, with fields of young forage maize. Elsewhere on its website, DEFRA offers its public consultation document on control of badgers in areas of high cattle TB. The responses, to be published later this month, are supposed to help the UK to decide, finally, on its culling policy - this after some 30 years of scientific and public controversy.
Crucial to the current debate have been the results of Ireland's "proactive" culling across 2,000sq km of Cos Monaghan, Cork, Kilkenny and Donegal. There, from 1997 to 2002, some 2,360 badgers were killed on volunteer farms (the scientific report referred to wire snares as "restraints" and the subsequent shooting of the trapped badgers as "euthanasia").
This wholesale removal seemed to work, in that fewer cattle got TB, and the culling continues intensively around farms with fresh outbreaks. The UCD veterinary scientists who ran the Four Areas project acknowledged that, "although feasible, widespread badger removal is not a viable strategy for the long-term control of tuberculosis in the Irish cattle population."
The alternative they look to is a badger vaccine, and one has been on test among isolated badger groups on a number of Irish islands. Trials of an oral vaccine have just begun in Britain, quite amazingly late in the day.
It is all biologically complex, but, even after such long development, a viable vaccine seems forever "five years" away.