Our Dublin suburban badgers seem to be less numerous. One regularly, sometimes with a younger companion. Maybe it's the season and, right enough, the days of four or five animals were spring or summer. What do they eat? What do badger-friendly folk offer them? "Badgers," James Fairley, writes, "emerge at dusk to feed" - and their menu is decidedly a la carte. The single most important item appears to be earth- worms; but young rabbits, mice and birds, possibly as carrion, slugs, snails, insects, fruits, seeds and even fungi, too. In other words, as he has it, "it's foraging rather than hunting".
In the recent dry period, one lawn was, for the first time in memory, dug by badgers. They were not looking for the bulbs they uncovered, for most of them were left at the bottom of the holes (not deep) they dug. Elsewhere there were marks of just one paw-scrape ,or so it seemed. Badgers, to Fairley in his An Irish Beast Book (Blackstaff), "are sadly maligned animals. Many country people slander them without ever having seen one." And certainly one burst of lawn-digging, after God knows how many years of regular visitation, is no great offence.
Fairley quotes from Arthur Stringer's book of 1714 to show how long this prejudice has existed. Stringer, huntsman to Lord Conway on the shores of Lough Neagh, wrote that the greatest use for a badger when dug out "is to kill him with hounds or mastiffs". Fairley doubts if the badger is as culpable for the killing of poultry, for example. It is more likely to be the work of foxes. An English document is quoted: "Badgers are not usually harmful to game interests, though on one occasion we lost eighteen known partridge nests to one rogue animal. The normal badger is an asset to the countryside and should be left in peace."
A Field book of country queries informs us that it is the only animal which can kill and eat a hedgehog. When a badger kills one, it always skins it, leaving just the skin or portions of it, complete with spines. A dog will sometimes kill, but never eat, a hedgehog. And, it might be added, human beings have been known to eat hedgehogs. Coincidentally, David Bellamy, well-known for his appearances on TV, surprisingly calls for the extermination of hedgehogs, of which there has been an explosion in population, apparently because of warm winters. They are, he says, "destroying the birdlife completely in some areas". Well, what next?
Incidentally, the diet fed to the South Dublin badgers is usually peanuts and bread with any tasty scraps left over from the evening meal. In the morning, all is gone. Y