Our Dublin suburban badger-and-fox watcher came across some advice given long ago in an English magazine about rearing a badger. Though who would want to keep such a lively creature in captivity? Anyway, as feeding, it suggested household scraps - bread crusts, boiled potatoes and bits of fat and pastry, together with green foods, cooked or raw. But the finest food of all is milk and raw eggs. For the tame badger, the advice is, one meal only - at night. And water should always be available. So far, so good. Then we look at James Fairley's Irish Beast Book. He tells us that badgers, indeed, usually come out at dusk to feed and, he writes, "their menu is decidedly a la carte". For Irish badgers, according to research, "the single most important item is earthworms. But they also take young rabbits, mice and birds (possibly as carrion), slugs, snails, insects, fruits, seeds, and even fungi are known to be eaten, too." So, our badger man in Dublin, who has been putting out bread scraps and monkey nuts, mostly, for his badgers - though the foxes, just now, frequently get in first - reading about the slugs and snails had an idea. He noticed one night that the overspill of seed from the bird-table had attracted a huge number of snails. Sooner or later they would be picked up by birds, in the morning, for they seemed sated, if not a bit muzzy from the rich diet.
So he scooped them up and added then to the badgers' fare at the other side of the house. About 40 of them. Nature in the raw. He did it more then once, and fancies that more badgers are coming than normal. Maybe not. Foxes are increasing in the area - south Dublin. Even gardens right down in Rathmines have them hopping over their walls. And, just off the Harold's Cross Road, one was seen tripping numbly along the top of the wall, making, it was thought, for overripe pears which had dropped to the ground.
Could foxes become addicts of alcohol? One family, to cope with slugs, put scooped-out grapefruit halves filled with beer here and there. The theory is that slugs love beer, drink it and expire or at least become comatose. One night the couple looked out and saw, lapping away at their beer, Brer Fox. They should carry on the experiment. What does a drunken fox do? Science awaits the answer.